Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

then you buy the somewhat more expensive version

the Kindle 3 ads are easily ignored imo - screensaver graphics when you shut it off and a banner ad at the bottom of the home screen only. No ads while reading books, playing games, etc. Most are for special offers from amazon, though they were pushing that ABC show Revenge hard for a few weeks. I was wary before we bought one but it was worth saving the $50.

I also found that if you load up your Kindle and don't go online for 3-4 days, the ads disappear and are replaced with a generic "Please go online to receive special offers" graphic.

yeah the ads are only when the kindle is "off." i don't have ads but i can't see how it would be much more annoying than seeing the same 20 pictures of boring authors over and over again. there's apparently an easy way to hack the kindle and put your own pictures in, but i haven't tried it and it probably wouldn't work on the ad-based version.

You can jailbreak the cheap ad-supported Kindle to make it ad-free.

yeah i've got the ad-supported kindle and the ads really don't intrude at all--they're only there when it's off, and funny thing is i don't really look at the thing while it's off

cool. it just seems like an odd feature in the first place?

it really is, when it first came out i remember people saying it sounded like a joke the dev people came up with that the finance department thought was a real idea

i just emailed myself 4 books-in-pdf, testing out the "convert to kindle format" thing for the first time. we'll see how it goes. also lol at the idea that i'm gonna read all of these books.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm92Tnp953c

I've read a few pdf books on my Kindle. Had to monkey with the text size to make it a good fit for the screen, but eventually they worked out fine.

Yeah I've loaded a couple wire-loaded PDFs on it before, but never gone through the whole "email to myself with 'convert' in the subject line" bit.

At US$200 I'm tempted to buy one just for the hell of it. Amazon won't even stop people rooting it.

huh!

i might finally get myself a kindle...thinking about getting the 3g keyboard instead of the new touch version, because apparently the new one only allows web browsing via wifi. since i don't have a smartphone or anything like that, it would be kinda nice to be email to check gmail or occasionally look up directions while i'm on the road. anyone use it for this now?

It's really really slow to use the browser, but does work okay. I've used it occasionally for ilxing and gmail.

Mine's the 2nd gen btw, don't know if things are different for the 3g keyboard newest ones.

Have the 3G and have used it for same in a pinch but yes it is hella slow

yeah i've been ilxing from home on it all week

just seen the new kindle, was i swindled in getting the old one for twice the price?

Pretty sure they'll be giving these away free in a few years.

new or old ones or both

i pulled the trigger on this. really like it so far...one of the weirdest things to get used to is looking at a percentage rather than page numbers, since i have a compulsive need to know how far i am in a book.

yah and the percentage can be deceptive--at one point i was really puzzled reading a history book because i was only at 57% and very near the historical present. as it turned out the book was about 40% index & notes!

so it just automatically saves where you are? it must be strange to read something really long and have the % not change at all over a bunch of pages. it would be nice if it could calculate how many kindle "pages" are left based on text size etc, even if they don't correlate to the paper version.

holding out for the Touch version but there's still no indication this version is coming to Europe (not sure really why I'm so fixated on having a touch screen e-reader but whatever)

it's the top featured item, and available for immediate dispatch, on UK amazon so i dare say it's coming soon everywhere. where are you?

I think that's just the basic model, no?

so it just automatically saves where you are? it must be strange to read something really long and have the % not change at all over a bunch of pages. it would be nice if it could calculate how many kindle "pages" are left based on text size etc, even if they don't correlate to the paper version.

― hardcore oatmeal (Jordan), Thursday, October 13, 2011 3:38 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark

it seems weird that there isn't a 'page' bit of metadata associated with it -! like wtf do you do if you want to cite one of those books

it would be nice if it could calculate how many kindle "pages" are left based on text size etc, even if they don't correlate to the paper version.

Admittedly I am only using a Kindle app on my iPhone but it tells me I am, for example, 50% through and then says 5,000/10,000 or similar (I don't have it open).

like wtf do you do if you want to cite one of those books

― thomp, Thursday, October 13, 2011 4:06 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

they have "location numbers" which none of the manuals explain the correspondence of

like some random spot in your book will be "location 2974," but there's no indication of its number anywhere at all?

Some books seem to have page info, presumably corresponding to some print edition, but most don't.

At one point I was trying to get that location number exactly right- I think I was trying to put a lot of bookmarks in a reference book that was underindexed- and it was driving me a little crazy. But just started using highlights instead and it was all good.

yeah the page number/location thing is one of the weird inexplicably backward aspects of e-books, the other being the inability to deal with footnotes - seems like this wouldn't be that hard to figure out.

i "acquired" a book that was corrupted somehow on one specific page and i had to keep entering random location numbers to try to get past, but not too far past, that location.

I've had that with books that I acquired in the normal way where somehow the search index was corrupted causing me to get into strange little wrinkles in the text that I had to emerge from in the manner you have described.

i've had my kindle for a few weeks now, and while i'll still use real books when i can, it already feels like an essential. when you're working on something that requires you to have 5,000 odd pages of books at hand it's nice to be able to do that without having a back-breaking pile of paper to be dealing with. the one thing that's a pain is the time it takes to highlight things, i assume that's a lot easier in this new touchscreen generation?

just today i found myself wishing i had real copies of the books i was reading to really highlight because i'll miss the smart-guy cache of having a highlighted copy of "the myth of the rational market" lying around

for half a second even entertained buying a hard copy just to duplicate my highlights in the ebook

I will never pick up a highlighter again.

this is pretty much only for library nerds, but i revived my library blog to talk about technical issues with the overdrive system for checking out e-books:
http://infinitemonkeys.tumblr.com/post/11994755397/kindle-e-books-at-chicago-public-library

I'd like to try getting the kindle books from the CPL, but my card is expired. I'm annoying that I have to go to a library location to get it renewed. In the modern world there should be no need for that. I don't even need a physical card, save the plastic for some person that like carrying more things than me.

Queues for ebooks is an eye-roller.

Nick, you can check the books back in at Amazon when you are done. But in general you are otm

Ha typo. But it's true, I am both annoyed and annoying.

I've been trying to remote tech support my 70+ year old mother through the Kindle checkout/download/copy file (3g only no wi-fi) and am so ready to just buy her a goddamn new one so it will just be automatic. She can't get her mind around the fact that she has a Kindle folder on her PC C: drive (she installed Kindle for PC for some reason) and that she keeps copying the files to the wrong place. </ whine>

Nick, you can check the books back in at Amazon when you are done. But in general you are otm

― An Outcast From Time's Feast (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, October 27, 2011 12:43 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark

hmm didn't think about that. but then again, no one else is going to either.

I've checked my back in before the 21 days - especially the ones I realize I'm just not going to get to. I've also gotten notification on 2 different books when I was 3rd or 4th on the list - both within 3 weeks of putting them on the list. But I'm also checking out books that SPL has multiple copies of. I will say I felt especially lucky to be the first person to check out one of the copies of REAMDE, just happened to spot it the instant it went online.

jaq, did you have to go to amazon or did you do it through your city's library system? maybe CPL just doesn't have it set up.

I haven't seen any page on the NYPL website or the QBPL website where you can return an ebook or even tell anything about the ebooks you have out, other than the number.

When you do the checkout from SPL, Overdrive kicks you over to the Amazon system to finalize the checkout. You can turn the books back in by either removing them from your Kindle (and being online) or you can go to the Manage Your Kindle link on your Amazon account and choose "Return to the Library" on the title.