Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

Kindle has excellent potential, and is beginning to meet some of it.  So I's like to start a feature that examines the Cool and Not Cool aspects of Kindle.  Starting with the positive...

Cool:
Numerous compatible files, here is a conversion chart.
Currently, you can use MS Word's old file format (.doc), structured web page formats (.htm and .html) for text.  But Kindle can handle images as well: jpegs, gifs, bitmap (.bmp), and portable network graphic (.png) formats are all supported.  Here's how it works.  You email the file to your Amazon account and then sync the Kindle.  Amazon's file servers convert the various formats into .azw files before the files get transferred to your Kindle. So far this is free service.

Not Cool:
This is a small quibble.  (It's better to start small.)  Acrobat Reader file format (.pdf) is currently supported but not very well.  Amazon notes that pdf's have a fixed aspect and are thus difficult to manage.  I can attest to this.  I sent a pdf to my account and found illegibly small in the coverted format once it got to my Kindle.  I hope this gets resolved because pdf is such a widely used format for text on the Internet.

Cool:
Free texts are widely readily available.
The Gutenberg Project has electronic books (ebooks) by the thousands in numerous formats, including .mobi which, though unmentioned above, is also compatible with the Kindle.  Gutenberg's catalog is constantly growing due to the efforts of volunteer editors and proofreaders.
Many Books.net has a wide selection of texts in at least a dozen formats, including Kindle's native .azw.
Munseys has almost as many books as Many Books.net and has an especially good section on Enlightenment authors like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  Once again Amazon's .azw format is available.
Free Tech Books and  Free Computer Books each have an excellent selection of technology titles available for download.
Google Book Search has a large selection of titles; Google is trying to digitasize nearly every text in the world.  Many, though not all of the titles are free.  And all of the titles are in pdf, so you may end up with a free and perfectly readable text, or you may not.  Generally speaking the more complex the formatting of the page (in pdf) the worse it will appear in the converted .azw format.
Amazon's Kindle Store has plenty of free books themselves.  Most of these titles are already in the public domain, so reporduction is royalty free endeavor.  This makes a free offering easy to accomplish.

Indeed most of the free ebooks you'll find on the 'net are in the public domain.  But this should not keep you from reading them.  And they're all worth a look.  (Much of this info was gleaned from a review on Extremetech)

Not Cool:
Amazon has little to no control of the price of their Kindle editions published outside Amazon, so prices are already exceeding the $9.99 benchmark they tried to establish.  Indeed there are 3 pages worth of titles priced above $1000.00.  But this is an extreme example, most of those books are exceedingly technical works aimed at a very small group of physicists.  What has some Kindle enthusiasts up in arms are the titles that are being priced at $14.29.  A $10.00 discount from the hardback seems paltry and at odds with Amazon's promise to these folks.  Just wait until Amazon starts charging for their wireless access and server space!

Cool:
Downloading material via Amazon's Whispernet wireless 3G network is quick and easy.  Nothing to do except click on Sync from the Home menu.  Everything you want to put on the Kindle can come to you thins way.  Think of the savings in shipping!  :-)

Not Cool:
Whispernet is not available in California's more remote regions, like vast stretches of Tuolumne and Mendocino Counties.  Don't expect to go to Yosemite Park and download Audobon guides to flora and fauna in the field.  Residents of places like Sonora and Fort Bragg are worse off.  They have no access to the wireless network unless they make trips to large, better served locations.

Whispernet coverage map

Fortunately Amazon has a workaround.  Titles in your Kindle account can be downloaded directly to your home computer and then ported over to your Kindle via the USB connection.  This is not bad if you have a high speed connection, but many of the books you'll download will be larger than 500k.  So you'll tie up that modem a long time in Twain Harte, Groveland, Columbia and other places in California where high speed internet access is unavailable or prohibitively expensive.

That's all for today.  More next time.

Daniel


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