So, I finally get to write a blog post about my Kindle. I’ve managed to restrain myself pretty well, I think – there was the temptation on the very first day of ownership to sit down and immediately dash off an ‘I LOVE IT!!!!1!!11!!!!1’ post. But I resisted. I’ve made it all the way to nearly 3 weeks of ownership and tried out a variety of features before sitting down to write a sensible, measured evaluation. So here we go:
I LOVE IT!!!!1!!11!!!!1
*ahem*
Ok, excitement over. Let’s try again:
The Kindle is magic.
Really magic, I mean. In a way that my smartphone isn’t. Now, don’t get me wrong – I love my smartphone too. Very much. I don’t think I’ve been more than 20 feet from it for the past two years. And yes, it does things that I could never imagine. But it’s not magic – it’s science-fiction.
The Kindle, however, is magic. The enchanted book which is a different story every time you read it; the magic box filled with 1001 stories: these are primal, fairy-tale magic. It’s the sort of thing you can understand at a gut, rather than intellectual, level.
Someone on twitter today (and apologies for forgetting who) linked to this flowchart: Explain the internet, to a 19th century British street urchin. You might have a hard time (and your boots nicked) explaining the internet, but I’ll bet you could explain an ereader…
Part of this magic is the ease with which you can download new books onto the Kindle. I have a hundred books or so on my phone, and thought that was pretty awesome. But that required hooking your reading device up to your computer, transferring files, and then being limited to just reading those until the next time you hook back up, and it really can’t compare to the amazing feeling of having all these books at your fingertips. I can read (just about) anything I want, (just about) anywhere, and (just about) instantly. Until you’ve experienced it, it’s very difficult to comprehend what an amazing sensation this actually is.
This is helped by how extremely easy it is to buy things from the Kindle store. Just as easy – and even more magical! – is this: the magic catalogue of Project Gutenberg ebooks. It’s just about the greatest thing ever!
Step 1: download the document onto your Kindle (use the shortcut http://bit.ly/gutmagic to save typing in the whole url)
Step 2: open it up as a book
Step 3: search it for the author/title/keyword you’re looking for
Step 4: chose search result. Click on desired title. Book will download
According to this article (HT @inthesoup) this doc covers over 30,000 books. 30,000! free! instant! books! (yes, it is more exciting on a Kindle than a computer. I don’t know why. It just is.)
The document isn’t totally up-to-date – I don’t know what the cut-off is, but I’ve already found a book posted to PG on May 8th, 2009 that isn’t in this catalogue. So, not perfect, but still an enormously wonderful thing! As the above article points out, you can also go to http://m.gutenberg.org/ to download Kindle-format PG books that didn’t make it into the magic catalogue.
Another fantastic application (thanks to @MancLibraries) is http://sendtoreader.com/, which will send a webpage to your Kindle. Much easier than relying on the Kindle’s own browser (I have the 3G Kindle, and loading times can sometimes feel like I’m back with a 56k modem), or copying/pasting the content you want into a doc and sending it to your Kindle yourself. I successfully sent myself an Ariadne article and the front page of http://awfullibrarybooks.net/ (complete with images!). The only slight fail was when I tried for Go To Hellman – both attempts sent me only the oldest post from the page. Again. not perfect, but still something I can see myself using often.
I bought my Kindle on a whim, when I realised that I had enough points to get £110 in Amazon vouchers – leaving me able to buy a wifi Kindle for £1. I’ve been waiting and waiting for a decent and affordable Android tablet, and when it didn’t look like the current crop were going to meet my needs, I started looking for alternatives. I decided that I could probably do enough with a 3G Kindle (combined with my phone) to justify this instead of a tablet.
I knew that I wouldn’t be able to create new documents on the Kindle, but I thought that – especially with web access – there must be some way around that. Well, I’ve found a few ways I can use my Kindle to take notes on the move:
Online:
Evernote: I can connect to the Evernote website, create and edit notes. The Evernote website doesn’t get on brilliantly with the Kindle browser (the first time I tried, the pointer wouldn’t snap to button, so I had a *very* frustrating few minutes trying to login), but it does work.
Google docs: I’m still slightly undecided whether google docs actually works with the Kindle. One thing I know you can’t do is to go to your google docs homepage and open up docs from there: they open in a new tab/window, and the Kindle doesn’t support multiple browser windows. What you can do is get the link to the individual document, and load it directly. I’ve been able to view (but not edit) a spreadsheet, and edit (but clumsily) a text document. I haven’t done too much experimenting, but for just plain typing it does seem to work – and it autosaves, too.
Offline:
While you can’t create a new document on your Kindle, you can annotate existing documents. I’ve done this with a few case studies for my book – put them on Kindle, read through and annotated on train journey. These notes end up in your ‘my clippings’ document, and once back at your computer you can hook up your Kindle, copy this doc off, and voila! Your notes 🙂 I decided to try this for the CILIP course I went on last week (which I’ve written about here), and while I ended up taking notes with pen and paper and didn’t actually get to try it, I’m fairly sure my reasoning is sound:
Step 1) Create text/word document containing the programme for the day/headings of things you might want to write about (you could, of course, just annotate any existing document, but creating one will help you manage your notes)
Step 2) Transfer/send to your Kindle
Step 3) Navigate within the doc to the bit you want to make notes about. Start annotating. Repeat as required.
I’ve written some fairly long notes, and haven’t hit a word limit yet, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t one! If you do hit a limit, just move onto the next word or line, and start another note. Again, I know this isn’t ideal, but this really makes the difference for me: it turns the Kindle from a passive-consumption device (which I couldn’t really justify buying) into a really useful tool, that could potentially save me having to lug a laptop around…
Oh, and it’s not too shabby for reading on, either 😉
**edit**
A couple of resources people have linked to in the comments:
Instapaper allows you to send articles/webpages marked as ‘read later’ to your Kindle
Calibre ebook management – allows you to convert to various formats, including Kindle.
Thanks Rob and Alison!
(yes, I apologise for the title. But at least it’s not a pun on ‘Kindle’ eh?)
13 comments
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March 31, 2011 at 12:52 pm
SimonXIX
Wow! You have discovered so much cool stuff to do with the Kindle. I’ve only used mine for reading.
Tonight I’ll be checking those programs out 🙂
March 31, 2011 at 2:59 pm
bethan
ahh, I had to see what it could do! Sure there’s loads more stuff I haven’t found yet – such as Instapaper! (see Rob’s comment)
March 31, 2011 at 1:08 pm
Richard Hawkins
Interesting post Bethan, one that I will bear in mind when the inevitable happens and I have to finally decide which e-reader I should invest in.
Oh and the person that linked to flowchart was @CILIPinfo by the way 🙂
March 31, 2011 at 3:01 pm
bethan
Thanks! I’d done that trick of opening links, then not looking at them for ages – by which time twitter’s moved on, and I’ve lost the sources…
March 31, 2011 at 1:16 pm
Rob
I really like the Kindle service offered by Instapaper: every Friday I get a digest of the articles i’ve marked as ‘Read Later’ in my browser from the previous week. It’s like getting an exceptionally good weekend newspaper supplement and makes reading long articles a pleasure.
March 31, 2011 at 3:01 pm
bethan
Excellent! I shall try that out – thanks for the tip!
March 31, 2011 at 5:24 pm
Alison
My colleague Marie introduced me to Calibre (“a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books”) http://calibre-ebook.com/ which works well with Kindle.
March 31, 2011 at 5:40 pm
Kindle tips and tricks | Alison's Eclectic E-stuff
[…] indebted to Bethan Ruddock for her blog post How do I love thee? Let me tell the whys…. Not only has she saved me having to blog about using Kindle as more than just an e-reader, but […]
April 1, 2011 at 12:03 pm
Sian
This post is very timely – my Kindle arrived yesterday and I LOVE IT. Thanks for sharing all these tips, the Gutenberg catalogue is indeed magic!
April 1, 2011 at 2:15 pm
bethan
Great! enjoy your Kindle 🙂
April 6, 2011 at 10:03 am
Phil Jones
It sounds great – it’s just a shame Amazon don’t make their e-books available to lend through libraries.
April 6, 2011 at 11:58 am
bethan
oh, completely agree! I’d love to be able to read library books on my Kindle.
Librarian in Black has written about this topic, and ends up sharing some hints about how you may be able to get .mobi library ebooks onto your kindle http://librarianinblack.net/librarianinblack/2010/12/kindle.html
Sarah says:
‘This does clearly violate Kindle’s terms of service, the library eBook vendor’s terms of service, and even copyright law. But you know what? All you’re doing is accessing an eBook your library owns and wants to check out to you on a device of your choosing. Goddess forbid we can actually provide content that isn’t device-exclusionary! So you know what? Go for it.’
(read the comments on the linked blog post for a discussion about the ethics of Sarah posting that link)
December 11, 2011 at 10:13 pm
5 things you didn’t know you could do on your Kindle #kindletips « Joeyanne Libraryanne
[…] hope you find these tips useful – there are also some useful posts from Simon and Bethan. Do you have any other tips to share? Let me know in the comments or share on Twitter using the […]