Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

one of the great things about the entry level kindle is that it doesn't do five billion things

<3 my Paperwhite
I had a previous version with the cover w/ a built-in light at the corner and there's no comparison in evenness of light and ease of reading.
Also finding that being able to read comfortably in my pitch black bedroom helps my concentration immensely.

only thing that would improve the Paperwhite are physical page turning buttons

Also, the ability to shoot bullets.

Sorry, Milo, cheap shot, I concede. :)

it doesn;t have the buttons?!!

tho they have a pleasingly solid tiny click that drives a person mad at night

I thought I'd really miss the buttons (I still have my version 2 Kindle keyboard), but was surprised how natural it was to turn pages on a Touch when I picked up my daughter's.

ditto my kobo mini. also seems pretty resistant to fingerprints, which i thought would be a problem.

the one problem is picking it up without page turning - the bezel is quite small and the slightest touch on the screen is enough. and it's hard to tell which direction the page has turned (there's no animation) so you have to guess how to undo it. i've taken to bookmarking every 2 or 3 pages rather than let it remember my place.

out of the loop on actually *buying* books for these things (or equivalent). is paying hardback price for a new novel the norm? will it come down when the paperback is out?

no the norm is for the kindle version to be cheaper, hardbacks often in the $25-$30 range while the kindle version is usually in the $12-$15 range

but since the publisher sets the price, there is variation

ok fuck bloomsbury then.

ledge, they are often in the same order of magnitude in the uk. think hydrogen sonata, say, is £9.49 digital and £20rrp physical but the physical is available for £12 or so (amazon)

Never found much difference except in the ease of thieving it. Over to you mr pubisher.

classic typo

player of games, is £6.29 paperback, £4.99 digital so it appears that the digital price does come down with the release of the paperback. which i find slightly illogical.

over in Kobo world, they appear to be selling bundles. there's an alastair reynolds bundle of all 7 of the revelation space universe books for, oh, it was £15 last time i looked, now £28. less of a bargain...

Fuckin android

there's an alastair reynolds bundle of all 7 of the revelation space universe books for, oh, it was £15 last time i looked, now £28. less of a bargain...

*now* you tell me

does a kindle handle kobo drmed epubs?

no, kindle only takes mobi and pdf. there are easy ways to convert epubs to mobis but i don't know if the drm would get in the way.

Pretty sure mine takes epubs...

But thats likely wrong tbh i dont pay .much notice

"Download options: Adobe DRM EPUB"

that it's adobe gives me hope that it's more widely supported than kobo proprietary drm would be but...

i don't intend on ever paying for any ebook - my kobo is full of gutenberg classics and anything newer than that i want i'll buy as a physical copy.

I've got a sony reader but this is the default ereader thread so

There's a program called Calibre that will strip DRM and convert formats for any e-reader.

Kindle fire owners- yes or no?

Calibre is awesome, but pretty sure it doesn't strip DRM. In fact, I want to say the Calibre site even has an awesome anti-DRM screed, but says it's up to you to do the deed.

Ebooks can be converted from a number of formats into whatever format your ebook reader prefers. Many ebooks available for purchase will be protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology. calibre will not convert these ebooks. It is easy to remove the DRM from many formats, but as this may be illegal, you will have to find tools to liberate your books yourself and then use calibre to convert them.

There's an easy to find plug in for Calibre that strips drm. Works like a charm.

Yeah, I have definitely used it to strip DRM.

http://gen.lib.rus.ec/

Have only recently discovered this place. Not earning atm, so this site is manna from heaven. Finally found a reasonable English copy of The Dice Man. I'm yet to find a more comprehensive database on the net. I only wish I'd known about this site during my degree, could've saved me pots of money.

I'm reluct to click while at my workplace, but is this something along the lines of library.nu? (I hope)?

Never used library.nu so I can't comment there really. But this is a Russian site (in English, primarily) where you download the books direct from the site. It's not infallible but it's found most of the things I've thrown at it, including a number of fairly obscure history books.

Not had any nasty warnings about malware or anything and my early virus scans haven't shown anything either, as yet. Seems alreet.

So apparently you can't buy someone an Amazon Kindle ebook as a gift in the UK, even though you can in the US. Is this right? Too bad if so.

Generally I would still rather give a paper book than an ebook as a gift as I'd feel a bit cheap about giving "virtual" presents, but I was going to buy a book which isn't available in large print for my Gran, whose eyesight isn't what it was but who apparently loves the Kindle she got for Christmas.

Just tut-tutting into the void really.

i think i'm gonna get one. i made fun of them for a long time but i changed my mind. i was thinking about ipad mini but i think i'd be too distracted by the internet like i am by iphone.

I use Amazon vouchers for the exact amount of the book, and put in the notes what it's for.

They could go out and buy anything with it, but people just buy the book.

unless they're dicks, then you shouldn't be buying them presents anyway.....

Thanks Hamildan. I probably will do that, but letting them see the price and making them go and click "buy" etc somehow seems less present-y, and also my Gran is pretty tech-savvy for someone in her late 80s but I'm still worried she'll be confused. "The button says 'buy', but I thought you'd already bought it for me, so I don't want that, do I?" etc.

really just shrugging my shoulders and going "Americans have this, why can't we?" but there is probably some tedious reason involving publishers' legal smallprint or something

Fyi we have to go through .com for ireland too, dollars and US selection and everything.

so do we, although at least amazon shows me au$ (and geoblocks half its stuff because morons)

it's funny b/c Amazon has employees in DUB and SYD but doesn't sell things there, apart from Web Services.

'DUB and SYD' sounds like a triphop duo

Best amazon employee quote I read today was that as long as people think they're a bookstore, they're winning on everything else

same people think things like VMware are screwed in the presence of cloud hosting

Anyone published for Kindle? There are some slightly out-of-the-way public domain things that I wanted to put on my kindle-for-ipad thing, & I thought about grabbing texts from archive.org & cleaning them up. & then I thought that if I'm doing that, maybe I should publish them. Amazon have their annotated, illustrated or translated policy for public domain stuff, so maybe it would end up being too much of a pita. But then fuck it, why not produce dirt cheap annotated editions of stuff as a hobby?

I can't speak to the public domain aspect, but I helped my mom Kindle-publish a romance novella she wrote, and the process of formatting and uploading is dead easy. It took about 48 hours from submission to it being live on the site.

yr mom wrote 50 Shades?

i wish! then she could buy me health insurance with all that sweet buttplug money.

the process of formatting and uploading is dead easy

I've got a book that I'd like to toss up onto Kindle someday, if it isn't too hard. Is the formatting automated, or is there a spec sheet that you follow while hand-editing in the correct formatting codes?

I'm sure reddening can answer properly, but it looks pretty easy to me - you just have to get it to something resembling html (via Word export or whatever - I'm planning to use markdown + a script), then run that through a bit of Amazon software that'll turn it into a kindle file (.mobi).

by 'resembling html' I mean a limited subset of html