Where do you find epub files that are cheaper than the same book for the kindle?
I considered the other readers based on the fact a kindle is locked. I found that Amazon would have the same book at half of the price as other online ebook sites.
What? People on here will not consider a Kindle because it has drm in it but they will consider the iPad.
At least with my kindle, all i need to do to add third party books is hook the device to my computer and start copying, or surf to numerous sites on the net with the device.
Yes it has DRM, to protect their content. So fraking what. The ability to get new media ( in particular periodicals) from anywhere without a pc, sets the kindle apart from the others.
Did you know that the ipod also has even more intrusive DRM, but yet it is considered to be the best device out there.
Unlike an ipod, all you need to do to add third party content to a kindle is hook it up to a computer and it becomes a usb storage device, or surf the kindle to the numerous sites out there like feedbooks to get content.
The kindle was designed for book junkies, and for people who like to read newspapers/periodicals. Does it have limitations, yes, but it does do its key functions well, deliver text content anywhere there is a cell signal with a very long battery life.
There are several key markets for books.
Premium customers - new books in hardback
technical customers - technical books.
children books
paperback customers
bargain hunters
periodicals -
The kindle is aimed at the premium, paperback, periodical, and bargain hunters.
Amazon has realized that only their premium customers will even pay for the 9.99 price for new books. If I pay that kind of price for a book, I want the dead tree trophied on my book shelf with the thousands of other dead trees in my house, so I can re read them later in life.
Personally I use my kindle for disposable media, like news papers ( the oklahoman and St. Louis Post dispatch) and magazines ( reason, mit tech review and reader digest.) All those combined equals a little over $20 a month, that before the kindle, I never would subscribe to.
When I am in the mood I usualy do the following to get free and cheap books, usually classics.
1. Every day or so amazon will offer a free book on the kindle, to lure you into a series ( it works, i usually end up buying the free book and the others in paper form)
2. type "-domain" in the kindle search bar. It will return all of the current free and cheap books. Usually around 20,000 or so.
3. Go to http://www.feedbooks.com/kindleguide with the browser on the kindle. That will download a "book" that will allow you access to most of the guttenberg and other free book repositories on the intertubes.
Due to the ease of free content, amazon has been posting low cost collections of authors for usually a $1.00 that has excellent indexing and tables of contents.
I think the ipad will have its market but until they can make a device that I only have to charge once a week is useable any time during that period to allow me to read ( usually 2-3 hours a day) in addition to all of it computer usage, I will stick with my netbook and kindle in my backpack.
There will be several modes that you will have use. As with anything else a fulltimer faces, no single solution will work all of the time.
Stick with 12volt hardware. This should be obvious. You will not need to run your genny to have internet access.
Pending where you are going to be this is what I have found to be the most flexible.
Buy a cradlepoint or something similar that can take multiple brands of 3g cards/dongles, with a secondary ethernet wan port. Make sure the 3g cards/dongles have external antenna connectors.
Buy an outdoor directional wifi CPE that has power over ethernet. Try to make sure it is 12v.
Buy a wilson outdoor antenna, extension cable ( if needed) and connector dongle for each 3g card. I prefer makeing a custom mount that attached to the ladder, than penetrating the roof, but that is your choice.
Buy a wilson amplifier, this is critical.
Buy a motorola cable modem, and a at&t wired dsl modem.
Locate a spot in the cabin that can wall mount the router, amp, and router the cables. I installed a separate lighted power switch for each of the 12v supplies, to make sure that the system had power and that I could cut it off and make it wife proof.
Install the wifi CPE on a pole and make a mount that will mount to the ladder or other strong point. I would not bother will any fancy ethernet jacks on the outside, just have the cable go through the basement into the cabin.
The problem with 3g is their 5gig limit. I would have a sprint and AT&T card. This should give you 3g over most of the US.
The reason for the WIFI, is that almost all decent parks have some form of either pay wifi or free wifi. Turn it on, turn off the 3g and you win.
All major truck stops have wifi, traditionally I always spent the night at flying J. I think their yearly price is not that bad.
If you plan on spending more the two weeks at a single spot. Look for parks that advertise cable television. So far all but one of them, I found that I could get my cable modem working. None of the parks will be aware of this. All you do is plug the modem up and if it gets sync, try to surf. Usually there will be a redirect to the cable companies customer disservice line. If not call the customer service line. Usually you give them the mac and you will be online in minutes. Make sure that there is no contract since they are not supplying a modem. Cancel service when you leave.
You can do this also with DSL on site supplied phone lines, but it takes days to weeks for the line to get turned up. I usually use dsl as a last hope.
While on the road use 3g, for the parks, plan ahead and call the parks office. They usually will know if they have wifi and sometimes will know if their cable supports cable modems. Always have 2-3 parks ready, and pay the daily rate until you have verified which park is the best for a fulltimer.
In St. Louis, broadband is availble and works well in the newer western burbs.
I live in South City.
Until last summer, I could get broadband from the cable company and SBC(ATT) and the varous clecs.
Then the storm hit last summer and destroyed much of the infrstructure in my area.
At that time I had a business connection from Charter 1M up / 5m down/29 static for $350 a month. The storm ripped all of the telco/electric/cable wires from the house. Three weeks later, the cable was still down. I was told by Charter that they do not intend to rebuild this area thus they discontinued the circuit.
DSL was not an option, I have tried several times and it does not work. The lines in my area predate WW2. I am 5580 feet out on path 1 and 9500 feet out on path 2. Officially ATT will not install dsl in my area even though the CO is dsl capable.
So I ordered a T1 from Speakeasy. Here is the fun... ATT at first refused to install it. After it was finally installed, it was turned up without a class a inspection and failed miserably. ATT refused to support it because they used hxdsl for the circuit and they are only required to provide best effort support on it. They tnf the circuit. TNF = technically not feasable. This means that the telco is off the hook from supporting the install.
ATT installed a second T1 and also TNF it.
So speakeasy installed a Third T1. This one worked but the rj45 on the smartjack was bad. ATT refused to fix it because they could not find any errors when they looped from the co. I put a hard loop on my inside wiring and there was no errors from pattern testing.
An att tech came out and did find that the jack was bad but refused to fixit because ATT had already determined that this t1 was in TNF status.
I am now in the process of getting a third t1 ( traditional 4wire point to point t1) from XO installed. Right now, ATT is placing the ticket in jeopordy status becasue there are too many pairs of copper going to a residence.
My only other option is a local wireless company who seems to not want customers.
If I lived in a rural area, I expect problems installing a T1. In fact I have a friend who lives in Hopedale Illinois (BFE) and he has had a T1 running for about six months with no problems after the initial install.
I have been running some form of voip for at least seven years.
The service started with net2phone with a soft phone to asterisk (trixbox) with an adtran TA 750.
Here is what I learned.
1. VOIP is not cheap. There are cheap ways to implement it, but it is not cheap.
2. VOIP provides flexibility at costs, that were once unheard of.
3. It does not matter if your install is a business or a home, reliability is the key. Reliability costs money.
Knowing this... Keep the system as traditional pots to the perimiter of the pbx.
Softphones are not reliable. They can be handy, but they have many issues. PSTN Hardphones as we know them have been around since the 1960's ( I live in St. Louis, we were the first to have touch tone.) It is a proven technology with a simple interface.
Use an T1 phone channel bank (Adtran etc.) and the pbx will be rock solid reliable within the house/business. Next in reliability is an ATA, they usually work fine, but you introduce tcpip issues into the mix. On an internal network this is usually not a problem as long as you have a good switch on the network.
Voip Phones - again they work fine, IFF you buy the models intended for business use. Note - for home use, the costs of three or four of these phones, will easily match the costs of a T1 card and a TA750 off of ebay with 24 channels, and a couple of multiline pots busness phones.
Once you have a working system you can work on the issue of Faxing. My current setup has a HP Fax laser printer hooked to the channel bank. It is on extension 1111. It is for sending faxes only. For incoming faxes, I have hyla fax running with iaxmodem on extension 1100. Hylafax is configured to email each rax received from the outside to me and my wife and then store the tiff file on my server as a timestamped file. The cool part is that my fax machine can be used to call extension 1100 and I can scan bills and documents. Hylafax just sends these files to the fileserver in a directory for bills.
The problem is that this works MOST of the time. My DIDs for teliax is set at ULAW. If the internet conditions are ok, then the incoming fax comes in. I will be trying t.38 soon. Outgoing faxes are configured as ulaw with voicepulse teliax.
Now part about alarm systems. I use Alarm.com. Their system works with the 2way pager networks and works very well. They use the ge concord panel.
Although they do not advertise it, you can self install the professional system instead of the comsumer system. If you already have a hard wired system, just make sure that your control panels are 4 wires. Order the system ($300), then go on ebay and look for superbus 2000 parts and ge concord parts. I bought an extra firealarm, two adt control panels, and 15 wireless window sensors for $220. That added to my existing 6 zones, is quite nice. The costs for alarm.com are comparable to a conventional alarm company and if you install it yourself, there is no contract.
The AM MW mode should be left alone. The band that it is used in the US is not that reliable for digital modes, but it is very reliable for AM transmision to local areas.
This band/mode is essential for emergencies. Everyone in the US has an "AM" radio somewhere in the house or their car. It will just work.
Has the FCC rated this HD radio as an actual mode?
I have started to experiment with drm on my HF equipment and in fact i am upgrading to a SDR-1000 in a month or so.
With my existing equipment, I have heard a few of the DRM broadcasts on HF Shortwave and they are impressive. I have heard that you can broadcast it with a SDR-1000.
DRM is an open standard based on mpeg4. In fact this is the standard for european countries. There is GPL code for both listening and transmitting it.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree.
I was a skeptic of e-readers in general until a coworker got one and was reading the local newspaper. I went and bought one that day.
Where do you find epub files that are cheaper than the same book for the kindle? I considered the other readers based on the fact a kindle is locked. I found that Amazon would have the same book at half of the price as other online ebook sites.
E-ink is the critical difference.
I was reminded of this a few days ago when I left my kindle at work.
So I installed the kindle app on a windows vm at home, and synced it to the current book that I was reading.
30 minutes later, I had one hell of a headache. No thanks.
What? People on here will not consider a Kindle because it has drm in it but they will consider the iPad.
At least with my kindle, all i need to do to add third party books is hook the device to my computer and start copying, or surf to numerous sites on the net with the device.
Yes it has DRM, to protect their content. So fraking what. The ability to get new media ( in particular periodicals) from anywhere without a pc, sets the kindle apart from the others.
Did you know that the ipod also has even more intrusive DRM, but yet it is considered to be the best device out there.
Unlike an ipod, all you need to do to add third party content to a kindle is hook it up to a computer and it becomes a usb storage device, or surf the kindle to the numerous sites out there like feedbooks to get content.
The kindle was designed for book junkies, and for people who like to read newspapers/periodicals. Does it have limitations, yes, but it does do its key functions well, deliver text content anywhere there is a cell signal with a very long battery life.
There are several key markets for books.
Premium customers - new books in hardback
technical customers - technical books.
children books
paperback customers
bargain hunters
periodicals -
The kindle is aimed at the premium, paperback, periodical, and bargain hunters.
Amazon has realized that only their premium customers will even pay for the 9.99 price for new books. If I pay that kind of price for a book, I want the dead tree trophied on my book shelf with the thousands of other dead trees in my house, so I can re read them later in life.
Personally I use my kindle for disposable media, like news papers ( the oklahoman and St. Louis Post dispatch) and magazines ( reason, mit tech review and reader digest.) All those combined equals a little over $20 a month, that before the kindle, I never would subscribe to.
When I am in the mood I usualy do the following to get free and cheap books, usually classics.
1. Every day or so amazon will offer a free book on the kindle, to lure you into a series ( it works, i usually end up buying the free book and the others in paper form)
2. type "-domain" in the kindle search bar. It will return all of the current free and cheap books. Usually around 20,000 or so.
3. Go to http://www.feedbooks.com/kindleguide with the browser on the kindle. That will download a "book" that will allow you access to most of the guttenberg and other free book repositories on the intertubes.
Due to the ease of free content, amazon has been posting low cost collections of authors for usually a $1.00 that has excellent indexing and tables of contents.
I think the ipad will have its market but until they can make a device that I only have to charge once a week is useable any time during that period to allow me to read ( usually 2-3 hours a day) in addition to all of it computer usage, I will stick with my netbook and kindle in my backpack.
dhh
There will be several modes that you will have use. As with anything else a fulltimer faces, no single solution will work all of the time.
Stick with 12volt hardware. This should be obvious. You will not need to run your genny to have internet access.
Pending where you are going to be this is what I have found to be the most flexible.
Buy a cradlepoint or something similar that can take multiple brands of 3g cards/dongles, with a secondary ethernet wan port. Make sure the 3g cards/dongles have external antenna connectors.
Buy an outdoor directional wifi CPE that has power over ethernet. Try to make sure it is 12v.
Buy a wilson outdoor antenna, extension cable ( if needed) and connector dongle for each 3g card. I prefer makeing a custom mount that attached to the ladder, than penetrating the roof, but that is your choice.
Buy a wilson amplifier, this is critical.
Buy a motorola cable modem, and a at&t wired dsl modem.
Locate a spot in the cabin that can wall mount the router, amp, and router the cables. I installed a separate lighted power switch for each of the 12v supplies, to make sure that the system had power and that I could cut it off and make it wife proof.
Install the wifi CPE on a pole and make a mount that will mount to the ladder or other strong point. I would not bother will any fancy ethernet jacks on the outside, just have the cable go through the basement into the cabin.
The problem with 3g is their 5gig limit. I would have a sprint and AT&T card. This should give you 3g over most of the US.
The reason for the WIFI, is that almost all decent parks have some form of either pay wifi or free wifi. Turn it on, turn off the 3g and you win.
All major truck stops have wifi, traditionally I always spent the night at flying J. I think their yearly price is not that bad.
If you plan on spending more the two weeks at a single spot. Look for parks that advertise cable television. So far all but one of them, I found that I could get my cable modem working. None of the parks will be aware of this. All you do is plug the modem up and if it gets sync, try to surf. Usually there will be a redirect to the cable companies customer disservice line. If not call the customer service line. Usually you give them the mac and you will be online in minutes. Make sure that there is no contract since they are not supplying a modem. Cancel service when you leave.
You can do this also with DSL on site supplied phone lines, but it takes days to weeks for the line to get turned up. I usually use dsl as a last hope.
While on the road use 3g, for the parks, plan ahead and call the parks office. They usually will know if they have wifi and sometimes will know if their cable supports cable modems. Always have 2-3 parks ready, and pay the daily rate until you have verified which park is the best for a fulltimer.
Good luck.
dhh
All of this comes down to money.
/29 static for $350 a month.
In St. Louis, broadband is availble and works well in the newer western burbs.
I live in South City.
Until last summer, I could get broadband from the cable company and SBC(ATT) and the varous clecs.
Then the storm hit last summer and destroyed much of the infrstructure in my area.
At that time I had a business connection from Charter 1M up / 5m down
The storm ripped all of the telco/electric/cable wires from the house. Three weeks later, the cable was still down.
I was told by Charter that they do not intend to rebuild this area thus they discontinued the circuit.
DSL was not an option, I have tried several times and it does not work.
The lines in my area predate WW2. I am 5580 feet out on path 1 and 9500 feet out on path 2.
Officially ATT will not install dsl in my area even though the CO is dsl capable.
So I ordered a T1 from Speakeasy.
Here is the fun... ATT at first refused to install it.
After it was finally installed, it was turned up without a class a inspection and failed miserably.
ATT refused to support it because they used hxdsl for the circuit and they are only required to provide best effort support on it.
They tnf the circuit. TNF = technically not feasable.
This means that the telco is off the hook from supporting the install.
ATT installed a second T1 and also TNF it.
So speakeasy installed a Third T1.
This one worked but the rj45 on the smartjack was bad.
ATT refused to fix it because they could not find any errors when they looped from the co.
I put a hard loop on my inside wiring and there was no errors from pattern testing.
An att tech came out and did find that the jack was bad but refused to fixit because ATT had already determined that this t1 was in TNF status.
I am now in the process of getting a third t1 ( traditional 4wire point to point t1) from XO installed.
Right now, ATT is placing the ticket in jeopordy status becasue there are too many pairs of copper going to a residence.
My only other option is a local wireless company who seems to not want customers.
If I lived in a rural area, I expect problems installing a T1.
In fact I have a friend who lives in Hopedale Illinois (BFE) and he has had a T1 running for about six months with no problems after the initial install.
I have been running some form of voip for at least seven years.
The service started with net2phone with a soft phone to asterisk (trixbox) with an adtran TA 750.
Here is what I learned.
1. VOIP is not cheap. There are cheap ways to implement it, but it is not cheap.
2. VOIP provides flexibility at costs, that were once unheard of.
3. It does not matter if your install is a business or a home, reliability is the key. Reliability costs money.
Knowing this... Keep the system as traditional pots to the perimiter of the pbx.
Softphones are not reliable. They can be handy, but they have many issues.
PSTN Hardphones as we know them have been around since the 1960's ( I live in St. Louis, we were the first to have touch tone.) It is a proven technology with a simple interface.
Use an T1 phone channel bank (Adtran etc.) and the pbx will be rock solid reliable within the house/business.
Next in reliability is an ATA, they usually work fine, but you introduce tcpip issues into the mix. On an internal network this is usually not a problem as long as you have a good switch on the network.
Voip Phones - again they work fine, IFF you buy the models intended for business use. Note - for home use, the costs of three or four of these phones, will easily match the costs of a T1 card and a TA750 off of ebay with 24 channels, and a couple of multiline pots busness phones.
Once you have a working system you can work on the issue of Faxing. My current setup has a HP Fax laser printer hooked to the channel bank. It is on extension 1111. It is for sending faxes only. For incoming faxes, I have hyla fax running with iaxmodem on extension 1100. Hylafax is configured to email each rax received from the outside to me and my wife and then store the tiff file on my server as a timestamped file. The cool part is that my fax machine can be used to call extension 1100 and I can scan bills and documents. Hylafax just sends these files to the fileserver in a directory for bills.
The problem is that this works MOST of the time. My DIDs for teliax is set at ULAW. If the internet conditions are ok, then the incoming fax comes in. I will be trying t.38 soon. Outgoing faxes are configured as ulaw with voicepulse teliax.
Now part about alarm systems. I use Alarm.com. Their system works with the 2way pager networks and works very well. They use the ge concord panel.
Although they do not advertise it, you can self install the professional system instead of the comsumer system.
If you already have a hard wired system, just make sure that your control panels are 4 wires.
Order the system ($300), then go on ebay and look for superbus 2000 parts and ge concord parts. I bought an extra firealarm, two adt control panels, and 15 wireless window sensors for $220. That added to my existing 6 zones, is quite nice.
The costs for alarm.com are comparable to a conventional alarm company and if you install it yourself, there is no contract.
I love it, another untested closed standard.
l e
The AM MW mode should be left alone. The band that it is used in the US is not that reliable for digital modes, but it is very reliable for AM transmision to local areas.
This band/mode is essential for emergencies. Everyone in the US has an "AM" radio somewhere in the house or their car. It will just work.
Has the FCC rated this HD radio as an actual mode?
I have started to experiment with drm on my HF equipment and in fact i am upgrading to a SDR-1000 in a month or so.
With my existing equipment, I have heard a few of the DRM broadcasts on HF Shortwave and they are impressive. I have heard that you can broadcast it with a SDR-1000.
DRM is an open standard based on mpeg4. In fact this is the standard for european countries. There is GPL code for both listening and transmitting it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Radio_Mondia
KB0FHF