Kindle periodicals are tied to a single device serial number in addition to a single Amazon.com account. People with multiple Kindles in the family who share an account cannot share a newspaper subscription, although it's fairly easy to switch which Kindle is the designated device for a subscription.
That said, an iPhone cannot be the designated device. =/
International copyright is sticky business. I do hope Amazon branches out to the world at large, but it will probably be on a country-by-country basis.
I honestly got used to the black flash really quickly. That said, it would be nicer to turn pages faster. The K2 reportedly turns faster than my Kindle 1, so they are making progress.
I do want to point out that if you hit Page Forward 5 times really fast, it flashes once and you're now 5 pages ahead.
-in case the Kindle should be lost/broken or I buy a newer model, then all books are lost, too?
No, book purchases are tied to your Amazon.com account, not to the device. You can redownload any of them on a new device. This includes books that get pulled from the Amazon.com store after the date of purchase! (I have a Kindle, I tested this)
- in case I switch to a different brand of ebook reader, I'm stuck with a load of unreadable books?
Yes. Hopefully Amazon will switch to the ePub format for more openness soon.
- I cannot loan a book to a friend, except by giving him the whole device?
Yep, although you can share with family who have a second or third device on the same account.
- I cannot try to remove the DRM, otherwise Amazon will kill my service?
That's pretty standard, isn't it? However, I haven't seen any cases of service getting cut off, or anyone even trying to break the DRM.
- Amazon is snooping what documents I have on my reader?
Only the documents you bought from them. They back up your annotations and bookmarks for the books you purchased from them, but not from any books you got from other sources or created yourself. You can also turn this feature off, if the idea of Amazon poking its nose in your stuff bothers you. Or you can never turn the wireless on and do all book purchases by USB, just to be completely paranoid.
----
The end of the story is that proprietary formats and DRM suck, but that's the way it is and is going to be until Amazon can break away from it the way Apple did.
For the record: Amazon's.azw format is really just.mobi with the DRM. So if you can break the DRM, you can read the book on any device that can read.mobi, from Palm Pilots to computers. The tricky thing is that some of the books they sell are in.tpz (Topaz, sometimes.azw1) which allows them to imbed fonts in the file. I presume that this is an evolution of.mobi, but we really don't know, and other readers might not be able to handle it.
You don't have to, that's just how Amazon lets you convert stuff.
You can still use MobiPocket Creator (owned by a company that is owned by Amazon) to convert documents (including PDFs) on your computer, and a USB cable to move a document to Kindle friendly format without ever sending emails.
Also, Amazon has never sent me a denial. A few failures, when I was testing it to see exactly how complex a PDF it could handle, but no denials.
The Authors Guild did not actually sue anyone, they just raised a media stink.
I'm not exactly a raving fan of the Authors Guild for this, but I'm happy they didn't sue any grandmas who don't even own the device in question in order to make their point.
Every Mac, and I'm pretty sure every PC, will read aloud any segment of text that you can highlight. Seriously, highlight text, right click, Speak This Text (or something to that effect).
So, if someone sells eBooks that can be read on computers (Say, from mobipocket.com), are they also subject to this copyright violation?
Bonus: Apple touts text-to-speech as a Universal Access feature for the blind. Amazon could pull the "Why does the Author's Guild hate blind people?" defense.
I think the display has to be that expensive. The Kindle isn't the only fish in the pond, and the rest of them are priced comparably to the Kindle. If it were anything but the display, one of them would take a dive to the low-price market.
See:
Sony Reader ($299-399)
iRex Book/iLiad ($599+) eghads!
Note that all of these guys get their screens from the SAME COMPANY:
http://www.eink.com/index.html
Most Kindle books are $10 and under, including new-release hardbacks that are $25 in the store.
The Washington Post is $40/mo home delivery, $10 Kindle wireless delivery (No ads, classifieds, comics, or crosswords, not as many images), or free with popups online. If you make the jump from home delivery to kindle subscription, the Kindle will pay for itself with JUST NEWSPAPERS in 12 months. Of course, you could just read it on your computer for free, but have fun getting wireless access in the metro tunnels.
You have two of the three (#1 and 3) in the iRex iLiad, which also has a much larger screen. However, you'll pay out the nose for it.
http://www.irextechnologies.com/products/iliad
Color eInk has been developed in the lab, but is not ready for large scale manufacturing.
http://blogs.pcworld.com/digitalworld/archives/2007/08/e_ink_brings_co.html
It's got a pretty basic web browser, and when you search for a term, it displays results for the books on the kindle, a "Search web" and "Search wikipedia" option.
Amazon has reserved the right to charge for internet access (presumably by the kb) in the TOS, although they have not actually charged anyone for it. However, they have specifically exempted their own store and Wikipedia from any wireless access charges for the life of the device.
Just warn your daughter about the dangers of Wikipedia and research. It's definitely the best place to start a research project, but there are a number of profs out there that will fail a paper on the sole basis of using Wikipedia as a citation.
You can opt out of bookmark and notation backups. If you don't want them to ever track anything from you, just never turn the wireless access on. (On Kindle 1 it's a switch on the back, on Kindle 2, it's a menu option, but either way, it can't talk to the server if you don't let it.)
The Washington Post, delivered to my door: $40/mo, and often soggy, late, or just plain missing.
The Washington Post, delivered to my Kindle: $10/mo, never late, no ads, and no crawling under the car to get it. No ink all over my fingers either. Searchable.
$359 Kindle cost / $30 savings per month = 12 months to pay itself off.
That's assuming you buy nothing except that one newspaper.
Honestly, it all depends on your major. If you need big books with large color pictures (anything from Biology to Art) then Kindle is not for you. If you're in Law, History, English, or a major where all your materials are straight up text, then the Kindle is your best. friend. ever.
As far as the cost: It's better to get a Kindle textbook at 20-50% off the list price than to buy a new textbook at 100% list price (because it's a new edition) and then be unable to sell it back at all at the end of the semester (because there's a newer edition).
The Kindle uses Sprint's cell network, not the wifi network you have set up in your house. Amazon foots the bill for each byte you use over the network and (presumably) makes it back out of the large profit margin of a book sale.
There are emails dated months ago, so if it's a hoax, it was set up months before Palin was a VP candidate.
One of the people whose emails are shown has confirmed that she sent that email, according to Wired. Many of the other contacts are actual people Palin would have corresponded with regularly, including her husband's legitimate email.
If it were a hoax, you'd expect something more incriminating than a picture of her making a retard face while holding her Downs baby.
It's not just a couple of doctored screenshots, the password to the account was on/b/. Forging a screenshot, easy. Forging an actual email account, complete with old messages, not so much.
I always figured the best kind of fan mail is the royalty check the author gets each month. For those books I truly love, I buy them again when the old copy wears out/gets left behind on the train/becomes a chew toy for the dog. I've bought the paperback version of Dune four times now (I know, he's beyond getting fan mail or royalty checks now.)
I have, however, sent fan emails in a few specific cases- with specific inquiries. I've asked a couple authors about making their work available for the Kindle (I have one), and gotten positive and detailed responses, mostly "We'd love to, and are currently negotiating digital rights with our old publisher/the estate of the author/etc."
It is common to charge for both outgoing and incoming messages.
T-Mobile used to have a small number of free incoming messages per month to cover the messages they used themselves to send ads or 'you have a voice mail' texts. Don't know if they still do- I have AT&T now and the rates are extremely high. I don't text much, but my brother, on my plan, does, so we ended up getting him the Unlimited texting plan.
The obscene part is that over 75% of his texts, ingoing and outgoing, are from (not to) this one classmate of his. AT&T refuses to block text messages from a certain number, so he's stuck receiving hundreds of texts a month from someone he doesn't want to talk to and paying for them, or disabling text messaging on his phone entirely- which I'm pretty sure AT&T make me pay to do. The Parental Controls feature costs $5/mo/phone.
I've had my Kindle since February, and I never leave the house without it.
I use it primarily for textbooks and the newspaper. The Washington Post downloads automatically to my Kindle every morning, for about 1/4 of having the print edition delivered to my door. If I miss a day (never turn the wireless on), I have seven days to grab it from Amazon's website, which is less than perfect but easier than trying to get an older paper copy.
Many of my assigned readings for class are available for free from ProjectGutenburg or similar websites, so those go on the Kindle via USB. Articles from JSTOR are easily converted to Kindle, as long as they don't have too many funny characters (mine generally do). Class syllabi are often distributed online, so those go on the Kindle as well. The Kindle is a student's best friend.
As pointed out by others, the Kindle's main weakness is PDFs. As some of you well know, the PDF format can be tricky. Some can be converted by Amazon's email service or by MobiPocket Creator, but if you've got a document made up of scans of a book, you're out of luck. It'll display, but at a size far too small to read, and since it's an image, there's no way to increase the size.
Foreign character support would also be awesome, but there's only so much room for OS and drivers on the 256MB of internal space. 180MB are available for use on a fresh unit. (More storage can be added with SD cards, but face it- text is small. There's 20 novels and over 100 newspapers on mine and still about half the space is unused)
The real "Killer App" of the Kindle is the EVDO connectivity. It's not fast and active web surfing will kill a battery in minutes that would otherwise last days, but it can be a lifesaver. I tend to browse the Kindle store on my computer and send a few dozen samples to my Kindle, and only turn on the wireless on the Kindle when I have read the sample and decided to buy it- which I can do anywhere I get cell coverage. Wireless book/newspaper delivery is bundled into the cost of the books, and Amazon is making a healthy enough profit off of that to cover our websurfing as well- while having it there is great, it's clumsy enough that no one is going to use up more than their fair share of bandwidth. When my computer failed for a few days, I was using my Kindle to check my email- and even to register for classes, a very time-sensitive operation. It was slow and clumsy, but bad internet is better than no internet at all.
Book prices have impressed me. Most of them are priced well below their print counterparts, normally around 20% lower than the paperback version. Some books come out priced higher than the hardback versions, and then suddenly drop a week later as the author realizes how the pricing model works. Most books off the bestseller list are 50% or more cheaper than what you'd find in a store.
The battery lasts days, books can be read in full, bright sunlight and doesn't cause eyestrain, and the refresh is fast and doesn't bother me at all. The buttons can be a little too easy to press, but if you keep it in the cover that comes with it (or one of a few aftermarket covers that are already out there) then that's not a problem. The back battery cover has a tendency to slide off, but the Kindle itself has never actually come loose of the cover to float freely in my backpack.
The price of the actual unit is really high, and it's got some of the hallmarks of a v1.0 product, but these will be addressed in the future. Having an imperfect product is part of being an early adopter. And yeah, it's not the most aesthetically designed thing ever, but I've been an Apple fan my whole life. I've got a thing for white plastic.
Registration evils aside, that's a viewpoint I can respect. I was taught to code webpages when my father handed me an HTML manual and taught me how to look up the source code of a webpage that did something I liked (I was probably 10). This was long before CSS, but I learned those the same way.
I can't say my webpages are as elegant or polished as NYTimes.com, but I'm sure they work on every browser. What's important is that I understand how and why they work.
I also recently inadvertently triggered an argument between my parents on the virtues of IDEs in software development. My dad likes them, my mom regards them as the bane of true programmers everywhere. What does/. think?
Slashdot Mirror
It certainly looks that way. Amazon is giving away razors and selling blades- the more devices they can reach, the more books they can sell.
Kindle periodicals are tied to a single device serial number in addition to a single Amazon.com account. People with multiple Kindles in the family who share an account cannot share a newspaper subscription, although it's fairly easy to switch which Kindle is the designated device for a subscription.
That said, an iPhone cannot be the designated device. =/
Unfortunately, it is.
International copyright is sticky business. I do hope Amazon branches out to the world at large, but it will probably be on a country-by-country basis.
I honestly got used to the black flash really quickly. That said, it would be nicer to turn pages faster. The K2 reportedly turns faster than my Kindle 1, so they are making progress.
I do want to point out that if you hit Page Forward 5 times really fast, it flashes once and you're now 5 pages ahead.
-in case the Kindle should be lost/broken or I buy a newer model, then all books are lost, too?
No, book purchases are tied to your Amazon.com account, not to the device. You can redownload any of them on a new device. This includes books that get pulled from the Amazon.com store after the date of purchase! (I have a Kindle, I tested this)
- in case I switch to a different brand of ebook reader, I'm stuck with a load of unreadable books?
Yes. Hopefully Amazon will switch to the ePub format for more openness soon.
- I cannot loan a book to a friend, except by giving him the whole device?
Yep, although you can share with family who have a second or third device on the same account.
- I cannot try to remove the DRM, otherwise Amazon will kill my service?
That's pretty standard, isn't it? However, I haven't seen any cases of service getting cut off, or anyone even trying to break the DRM.
- Amazon is snooping what documents I have on my reader?
Only the documents you bought from them. They back up your annotations and bookmarks for the books you purchased from them, but not from any books you got from other sources or created yourself. You can also turn this feature off, if the idea of Amazon poking its nose in your stuff bothers you. Or you can never turn the wireless on and do all book purchases by USB, just to be completely paranoid.
----
The end of the story is that proprietary formats and DRM suck, but that's the way it is and is going to be until Amazon can break away from it the way Apple did.
For the record: Amazon's .azw format is really just .mobi with the DRM. So if you can break the DRM, you can read the book on any device that can read .mobi, from Palm Pilots to computers. The tricky thing is that some of the books they sell are in .tpz (Topaz, sometimes .azw1) which allows them to imbed fonts in the file. I presume that this is an evolution of .mobi, but we really don't know, and other readers might not be able to handle it.
You don't have to, that's just how Amazon lets you convert stuff.
You can still use MobiPocket Creator (owned by a company that is owned by Amazon) to convert documents (including PDFs) on your computer, and a USB cable to move a document to Kindle friendly format without ever sending emails.
Also, Amazon has never sent me a denial. A few failures, when I was testing it to see exactly how complex a PDF it could handle, but no denials.
The Authors Guild did not actually sue anyone, they just raised a media stink.
I'm not exactly a raving fan of the Authors Guild for this, but I'm happy they didn't sue any grandmas who don't even own the device in question in order to make their point.
Every Mac, and I'm pretty sure every PC, will read aloud any segment of text that you can highlight. Seriously, highlight text, right click, Speak This Text (or something to that effect).
So, if someone sells eBooks that can be read on computers (Say, from mobipocket.com), are they also subject to this copyright violation?
Bonus: Apple touts text-to-speech as a Universal Access feature for the blind. Amazon could pull the "Why does the Author's Guild hate blind people?" defense.
Honestly, I wonder if an iPhone wall wart (USB port to two-prong plug) would charge the new Kindle...
Of course, if I'm wrong, you'd end up with a toasty device. Would an electrical engineer type look at the specs and make a more educated guess?
I think the display has to be that expensive. The Kindle isn't the only fish in the pond, and the rest of them are priced comparably to the Kindle. If it were anything but the display, one of them would take a dive to the low-price market.
See:
Sony Reader ($299-399)
iRex Book/iLiad ($599+) eghads!
Note that all of these guys get their screens from the SAME COMPANY:
http://www.eink.com/index.html
Most Kindle books are $10 and under, including new-release hardbacks that are $25 in the store.
The Washington Post is $40/mo home delivery, $10 Kindle wireless delivery (No ads, classifieds, comics, or crosswords, not as many images), or free with popups online. If you make the jump from home delivery to kindle subscription, the Kindle will pay for itself with JUST NEWSPAPERS in 12 months. Of course, you could just read it on your computer for free, but have fun getting wireless access in the metro tunnels.
You have two of the three (#1 and 3) in the iRex iLiad, which also has a much larger screen. However, you'll pay out the nose for it.
http://www.irextechnologies.com/products/iliad
Color eInk has been developed in the lab, but is not ready for large scale manufacturing.
http://blogs.pcworld.com/digitalworld/archives/2007/08/e_ink_brings_co.html
It's got a pretty basic web browser, and when you search for a term, it displays results for the books on the kindle, a "Search web" and "Search wikipedia" option.
Amazon has reserved the right to charge for internet access (presumably by the kb) in the TOS, although they have not actually charged anyone for it. However, they have specifically exempted their own store and Wikipedia from any wireless access charges for the life of the device.
Just warn your daughter about the dangers of Wikipedia and research. It's definitely the best place to start a research project, but there are a number of profs out there that will fail a paper on the sole basis of using Wikipedia as a citation.
You can opt out of bookmark and notation backups. If you don't want them to ever track anything from you, just never turn the wireless access on. (On Kindle 1 it's a switch on the back, on Kindle 2, it's a menu option, but either way, it can't talk to the server if you don't let it.)
Primary competitor to the Kindle has no wireless at all and ranges from $300-400, the same price range.
The Washington Post, delivered to my door: $40/mo, and often soggy, late, or just plain missing.
The Washington Post, delivered to my Kindle: $10/mo, never late, no ads, and no crawling under the car to get it. No ink all over my fingers either. Searchable.
$359 Kindle cost / $30 savings per month = 12 months to pay itself off.
That's assuming you buy nothing except that one newspaper.
Honestly, it all depends on your major. If you need big books with large color pictures (anything from Biology to Art) then Kindle is not for you. If you're in Law, History, English, or a major where all your materials are straight up text, then the Kindle is your best. friend. ever.
As far as the cost: It's better to get a Kindle textbook at 20-50% off the list price than to buy a new textbook at 100% list price (because it's a new edition) and then be unable to sell it back at all at the end of the semester (because there's a newer edition).
The Kindle uses Sprint's cell network, not the wifi network you have set up in your house. Amazon foots the bill for each byte you use over the network and (presumably) makes it back out of the large profit margin of a book sale.
Why it's real:
Why it's a hoax:
I always figured the best kind of fan mail is the royalty check the author gets each month. For those books I truly love, I buy them again when the old copy wears out/gets left behind on the train/becomes a chew toy for the dog. I've bought the paperback version of Dune four times now (I know, he's beyond getting fan mail or royalty checks now.)
I have, however, sent fan emails in a few specific cases- with specific inquiries. I've asked a couple authors about making their work available for the Kindle (I have one), and gotten positive and detailed responses, mostly "We'd love to, and are currently negotiating digital rights with our old publisher/the estate of the author/etc."
It's only REALLY irritating when you get a early fraud warning for a $8 charge made at a Panda Express... in your home town.
AT&T refused to disable SMS messaging on one phone on my family plan unless I paid $5/mo for the Parental Controls feature pack.
I'd jump ship when my contract is up, but I honestly don't think the other carriers are any better.
It is common to charge for both outgoing and incoming messages.
T-Mobile used to have a small number of free incoming messages per month to cover the messages they used themselves to send ads or 'you have a voice mail' texts. Don't know if they still do- I have AT&T now and the rates are extremely high. I don't text much, but my brother, on my plan, does, so we ended up getting him the Unlimited texting plan.
The obscene part is that over 75% of his texts, ingoing and outgoing, are from (not to) this one classmate of his. AT&T refuses to block text messages from a certain number, so he's stuck receiving hundreds of texts a month from someone he doesn't want to talk to and paying for them, or disabling text messaging on his phone entirely- which I'm pretty sure AT&T make me pay to do. The Parental Controls feature costs $5/mo/phone.
I've had my Kindle since February, and I never leave the house without it.
I use it primarily for textbooks and the newspaper. The Washington Post downloads automatically to my Kindle every morning, for about 1/4 of having the print edition delivered to my door. If I miss a day (never turn the wireless on), I have seven days to grab it from Amazon's website, which is less than perfect but easier than trying to get an older paper copy.
Many of my assigned readings for class are available for free from ProjectGutenburg or similar websites, so those go on the Kindle via USB. Articles from JSTOR are easily converted to Kindle, as long as they don't have too many funny characters (mine generally do). Class syllabi are often distributed online, so those go on the Kindle as well. The Kindle is a student's best friend.
As pointed out by others, the Kindle's main weakness is PDFs. As some of you well know, the PDF format can be tricky. Some can be converted by Amazon's email service or by MobiPocket Creator, but if you've got a document made up of scans of a book, you're out of luck. It'll display, but at a size far too small to read, and since it's an image, there's no way to increase the size.
Foreign character support would also be awesome, but there's only so much room for OS and drivers on the 256MB of internal space. 180MB are available for use on a fresh unit. (More storage can be added with SD cards, but face it- text is small. There's 20 novels and over 100 newspapers on mine and still about half the space is unused)
The real "Killer App" of the Kindle is the EVDO connectivity. It's not fast and active web surfing will kill a battery in minutes that would otherwise last days, but it can be a lifesaver. I tend to browse the Kindle store on my computer and send a few dozen samples to my Kindle, and only turn on the wireless on the Kindle when I have read the sample and decided to buy it- which I can do anywhere I get cell coverage. Wireless book/newspaper delivery is bundled into the cost of the books, and Amazon is making a healthy enough profit off of that to cover our websurfing as well- while having it there is great, it's clumsy enough that no one is going to use up more than their fair share of bandwidth. When my computer failed for a few days, I was using my Kindle to check my email- and even to register for classes, a very time-sensitive operation. It was slow and clumsy, but bad internet is better than no internet at all.
Book prices have impressed me. Most of them are priced well below their print counterparts, normally around 20% lower than the paperback version. Some books come out priced higher than the hardback versions, and then suddenly drop a week later as the author realizes how the pricing model works. Most books off the bestseller list are 50% or more cheaper than what you'd find in a store.
The battery lasts days, books can be read in full, bright sunlight and doesn't cause eyestrain, and the refresh is fast and doesn't bother me at all. The buttons can be a little too easy to press, but if you keep it in the cover that comes with it (or one of a few aftermarket covers that are already out there) then that's not a problem. The back battery cover has a tendency to slide off, but the Kindle itself has never actually come loose of the cover to float freely in my backpack.
The price of the actual unit is really high, and it's got some of the hallmarks of a v1.0 product, but these will be addressed in the future. Having an imperfect product is part of being an early adopter. And yeah, it's not the most aesthetically designed thing ever, but I've been an Apple fan my whole life. I've got a thing for white plastic.
Registration evils aside, that's a viewpoint I can respect. I was taught to code webpages when my father handed me an HTML manual and taught me how to look up the source code of a webpage that did something I liked (I was probably 10). This was long before CSS, but I learned those the same way.
I can't say my webpages are as elegant or polished as NYTimes.com, but I'm sure they work on every browser. What's important is that I understand how and why they work.
I also recently inadvertently triggered an argument between my parents on the virtues of IDEs in software development. My dad likes them, my mom regards them as the bane of true programmers everywhere. What does /. think?