Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

'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

like it's basic 'h1, h2, p, b, i' markup.

I guess I could play around with formatting a sample chapter before diving in to the whole book. Then view it on Kindle for PC, tweaking anything that didn't come across ok.

Yeah, if you have a normally formatted Word document, they'll ask you to save it as a particular file type, and it'll preserve your italics/bolding/hard page breaks. I didn't create a Table of Contents, so I can't speak to the difficulty of that, but it looked no more difficult than doing basic HTML.

they also have a downloadable viewer so you can see what your book will look like on various types of Kindles/screen sizes. I ended up using that on my final editing pass to make sure it all came out okay

there's also a previewer on the tools page, which could help with the test-and-tweak process.

(xp!)

(not the kindle but i've been fiddling with epubs lately and those are pretty much just zipped up html files, complete with css support and a few files containing metadata for the chapters and toc. gutenberg seems to use a plain as day .txt file as the master source, runs a script over it to get the html and then epubs that html)

cool info

btw my last post re ordering through US now appears defunct as i bought a kindle from amazon.co.uk this week without troubles. went for the basic model, i've seen the paperwhite and the evenness of the light was not great imo, aside from that there's nothing made me feel like paying extra.

UK folks: nooks are £29 at the mo. That seems insanely cheap..

Yeah, I saw that ... are they any good?

They got decent reviews in the US. Not sure whether the content is up to scratch given lack of B&N here, but I think I'm going to take the plunge. Will report back!

godspeed

I have had a nook simple touch for about 18 months and am very happy with it.

curiosity just got the better of me and i've just ordered one (from official nook site, didn't have to register, and could specify separate shipping and billing addresses - handy as my bank uses parents' address). am happy with my kobo mini and this looks v similar, but £15 cheaper.

(spoke too soon, payment rejected)

That exact same thing happened to me last night! I got an email saying the card issuer wouldn't accept the transaction. I'd put the order through without registering and the email said if you wanted to check on your order you had to log in (which obviously I couldn't do). I tried to do the online chat thing to sort it out this morning, but after entering my details it went to a 404 error. Starting to see why they've knocked the price off.

Anyway, gave up on that and ordered through John Lewis (b/c 2year warranty) instead. Picking it up from local waitrose tomorrow.

hey so I bought one of these the other day. I have two questions:

1) is it possible to tweak the metadata in Calibre so that my Kindle will display an author's work or a series in chronological order, or am I going to have to brutally stick years/months into the head of the title of every novel?

2) can the Send To Kindle plugin for Firefox be set up to send articles to other ppl's kindles or only your own?

it said i could use Visa but only have Visa Debit card, so maybe that was the problem. also, the Verified By Visa thing didn't pop up so maybe it was that. the link in the error email didn't work (not registered...) and the support email address (b&n) bounced.

tried argos, they had nothing in stock locally but would let me order one for pickup locally in 5 days time. the 1 ended up as 2, somehow and then i got an 'out of stock' email.

will try john lewis, or might just pop to blackwells (or john lewis i guess), see if they have any there.

as for charli's questions, i doubt the first one is possible unless kindle has a sort-by-artist-then-date option. i had the same problem with a 13 volume set and ended up putting the volume number in the title, clumsy as that was (but less clumsy than adding the date).

the second one might use the email to kindle interface in which case it might be possible to specify another email address. letting people send random things to random kindles sounds like a disaster waiting to happen though.

"You will be prompted to register with your Amazon.com account after installation is complete by entering your Amazon.com account e-mail address and password." oh, i guess not then, unless you know those details.

just ordered one from blackwells via paypal. will see if it arrives.

then, checked email to find a message from NOOK

"Dear Valued Customer,

We are writing to you about your recent nook.co.uk order.

Recently you may have received an email from us stating that we had some difficulty
charging your credit card. We are pleased to tell you that the problem has been
resolved. We experienced some system issues due to the widespread interest in our
limited time offer on NOOK Simple Touch. We hope that you will return to nook.co.uk
to place your order again.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused."

ah, ok, reading that seems to suggest that the original order didn't go through. thought i'd end up with two then (which wouldn't be the end of the world but...)

Haha I got the same email. I think you're right - eiher related to visa debit or lack of online password thingumy.

This statement in wikipedia has been enough to make me hesitate over getting a Nook Simple Touch:

it has 2 GB of internal memory of which only half is available for content. Of the 1 GB of content, 750 MB is reserved for content from Barnes & Noble's e-book store, which leaves approximately 250 MB for other files

I know why they do this, but I hate them for it already.

I have 70 books on it. I can manage to find something to read whatever my mood. And there's an SD slot if for some reason I wanted it to be my library. That division of memory is entirely irrelevant in practical use.

yeah you need a micro SD card. Then you're golden.

So, it doesn't enforce this 3:1 split on your micro SD? That's good to know. I suppose I could swap books into the internal memory, too. I expect I'll take the ebook reader plunge this year, then.

My rule of thumb is anything bigger than 1 mb goes on the sd card; the rest goes on the internal memory. Like the man said, when you're actually using us there is no distinction between what's sd and what's internal anyway.

Last question: when the sd card is inside its slot, does it tuck in flush with the edge of the reader, or does it stick out at all?

There's a little rubbery door-plug thing that hides the micro sd slot. I haven't had it open up unintentionally at all.

thx

do any of you use overdrive?

the app, the service, the ebook library whatever it is

yeah chicago public library does their e-book stuff through overdrive. probably most public libraries do (though there is more competition now)

uh, oh, another email from nook (who said they'd rejected my card, so i ordered another one from blackwells)

"Dear Valued Customer,

Thank you for your purchase. We want to provide an update on your order.
You should expect to receive your NOOK® Simple Touch within the next 4-5
business days."

and, of course, they send the email with a 'chat to one of our experts' 20 minutes after the helpline closes.

lol me too!

"Dear Valued Customer,

You recently received an email from NOOK customer service indicating that
your NOOK Simple Touch would be shipped shortly.

We apologize for this error but your credit card was not charged as NOOK
Simple Touch is temporarily out of stock..."

THIS IS A SAGA NOW

for charli's questions, i doubt the first one is possible unless kindle has a sort-by-artist-then-date option.

I was using Calibre to get things ready for purchase of Kindle, and it has all sorts of "date sort" and "author sort" fields that I was diligently filling out in advance, but seems the Kindle doesn't give the slightest fuck about them ;_;

i had the same problem with a 13 volume set and ended up putting the volume number in the title, clumsy as that was (but less clumsy than adding the date).

Yeah, I'm doing it with four-five decades each of two prolific authors' work, plus whittling down 280 Doctor Who novels across five different series into a select hundred-odd I want to read in publication order

Nook simple touch has a nice 'shelves' function which is basically playlists of books. One way to address that.

I never understand why anyone shelves things any way other than alphabetical by subject matter irl

Though obviously I have sympathies for shelving autobiographically.

is it still impossible to put pdfs on these

no, i haven't put one on there in forever but i just rightclicked a pdf file and 'send to kindle' was an option (which it isn't for epub files). i'd probably still use calibre or something to format it to mobi though, reading pdfs on kindle was a pain ime.

calibre to convert pdf to a format like epub or mobi works well?

it works. generally not too well, in my experience. Often loses formatting, so page and lie breaks can be a bit odd. still readable, but sure not pretty.