Does anyone have a Kindle? If so, how do you like it? Comments?

I am considering buying one, but they are rather expensive, so I'd like to know what those who have one think, if they recommend it.

Other than for buying and reading books, what other uses does it have?

Can you use it to store and read fanfic stories?

Thanks!

I don't have one myself, but I got to examine/hold one when my boss bought it. They're great--you can read books and periodicals on them, and yes, you can put fanfic on them with a bit of technical finagling, from what I've read about them.

The only reason I haven't got one yet is that the cost is so prohibitive--if I'm going to pay $400 for a Kindle, plus $10 for each book I buy to put on it, I want to at least get credit for 15 free books from the get-go.

Although, I suppose I could just get a lot of older books from Project Gutenberg and do the finagling necessary to put them on the Kindle, but I'd still have to buy any newer books I wanted to put on there.

Ah well. I remember reading somewhere that they've come out with the Kindle II, which (hopefully) means that the cost of the original will be coming down soon.

Pam has one - I'm sure she'll be on here to say something about it at some point...

She's put fic on it and says the funny thing is when it calls a 747 a 'seven hundred and forty seven' and once called Ms. Lane 'Millisecond Lane' when it was reading to her!

Carol

Yep, I got one less than a month ago for my birthday (from my in-laws; if my husband had spent that much money I'd have yelled at him) and I'm really liking it. I've bought a few books on Amazon, for half-off the hardback cover price (my favorite author had a new release, but I ain't paying for a hard cover), and within a few minutes I was settling down to read it. No driving to a store, no waiting for shipments to arrive... that part's cool. You can resize the text easily and there are buttons on both sides to advance a page.

I'm also using it for fanfic, like Carol said. If you have the file as either a .txt or .doc file, all you have to do is email it to an address (yournamehere@kindle.com) they set up for you. I email the file, wait a few minutes, then bam, there it is on my Kindle. (They charge a grand total of 10 cents for this service) It has saved my sanity, these last two weeks, because they've given me something excruciatingly boring to do, but my Kindle reads the story to me <g> Yesterday I listened to Four Days to Nightfall, and right now I'm about halfway through Teamwork (the sequel).

Like Carol said, it pronounces things weird. It does a pretty good job, really, but it's nothing like a real audiobook. Words it doesn't recognize get pronounced with a short vowel sound (it keeps talking about Lex Luffer). "Dr. Klein" was occasionally referred to as "Drive Klein" In the sci-fi stories I uploaded, there are "spass-e-ports" and "eckars" (for spaceports and aircars) but once you get used to it, it's not hard to understand. Just like listening to someone with a foreign accent.

The thing that really annoyed me was the way it handled emphasized words -- you know how we use *stars* around a word to indicate emphasis. Well, Kindle reads that as "asterisk-s-t-a-r-s-asterisk" which just sounds weird. But I've starting taking all those out of the files I want to upload, so it's not a problem on my newer uploads.

My husband's got a Sony reader, and that seems to suit him just fine but he's got more techie weirdness to deal with, especially when uploading files.

I haven't figured out everything yet -- you can subscribe to magazines or newspapers, I think, and maybe even certain blogs. You can web-surf to some limited extent, apparently, but I haven't tried that yet. It's fairly easy to navigate through the Kindle store to get more books, but I find it easier to go to Amazon.com on my real computer, and shop for Kindle versions from there. Some of them are way cheap -- we got a short story collection from H. Beam Piper for 80 cents. So if you like old, obscure authors, you could score big.

PJ

I didn't know Kindle had audio capability. I thought it was just text.

They call it "text to speech." You can pick a male or female voice, and adjust the rate it speaks at. They're also experimenting with letting you play mp3 files, but I haven't messed with that yet. I'd like to try getting podcasts that way.

PJ

BTW, part of the reason the Kindle is so expensive is because you are getting free 3G wireless capacity with it. No looking for hot spots. It's the same capacity that you pay at least $35/mo for on your cell phone. So in 10 months or less, the Kindle has paid for itself in terms of buying something cheaper and having to pay for the 3G wireless connection.

I have both a Kindle 1 and a Kindle 2 and I have to say the second version is definitely superior to the first. The most annoying part of the first one was that it would accidentally page flip when I didn't want it to. Amazon changed the buttons so that they require inward pressure rather than outward, so accidental page flipping is pretty much in the past.

The only drawback that version 2 has is that version 1 supported a removable battery and SD cards. Version 2's battery is not user-replaceable and no SD card is possible, though they upped the available flash for storage. Better book management and archiving help around the SD card limitation. More on that later.

As Pam said, you can put your own content onto the Kindle. If you have a computer (and you probably do if you're reading this) you can plug the Kindle into a USB port and copy .azw files onto the Kindle (or off if you want to make a personal backup). There's a free email address: <username>@free.kindle.com that is equivalent to the version that costs 10 cents per document. Instead of downloading directly to your Kindle, though, it sends you back an email when it's done with a link for you to download the resulting .azw file.

Copy that file onto the Kindle and read away. The advantage of that approach is that you can keep a backup of your personal books on your own computer whereas Amazon only backs up your paid books.

PDF support is experimental and can occasionally give you a bad copy. I had one book that had sections in the wrong order. I'd read one paragraph only to have it interrupted by the wrong text, only to pick up later several pages afterwards. I'd then have to flip back to find where that paragraph left off.

I haven't tried HTML support yet, but plain text seems to work fine.

They've improved on the content handling in that you can easily delete your books when you're done and then bring them back just by going to the Archive selection on the Kindle. Before, I always kept all of my books on the Kindle, but sorting through multiple pages can be a pain. Now I can keep only the books I'm currently reading. As long as I have access to the Sprint network, I can retrieve an archived book at any time.

As for reading, I prefer reading off the Kindle to a real book now. It's just more convenient and less bulky. The first Kindle was a bit awkward. As a bit of advice, keep the 3G wireless switch turned off so that the Kindle can last a couple of weeks on a single charge. Leaving it on all the time gives you only about four days or so of charge.

I haven't tested it yet, but I'm told that the wireless will wake up on occasion even if the switch is off to sync up the latest book annotations and page location to Amazon servers so that if you read your book elsewhere, such as on the Kindle app for iPhone/iPod touch, you'll be able to pick up where you left off. This is the Whispersync capability. I've had a few problems with books I'd already read once where the sync seems to take you to the end of the book rather than where you left off.

The Kindle app is free on iPhone but doesn't support periodicals, newspapers, or your own documents. Nor does it support text-to-speech. Perhaps version 2 will especially with Amazon buying out the people who wrote the other major eBook application, Stanza. You don't have to own a Kindle to use the iPhone app.

Kindle book prices seem pretty good, mostly cheaper than if I were to buy a real book. A best seller hard back would go for $25 at the bookstore while I could get a Kindle version for $9 or $10. Most books are even cheaper.

P.S. I should make a disclaimer to say that I work for the company that essentially did all the Whispernet work and supplied the 3G chipset and I even work for the division that did it, but I had no personal involvement in the project.

I'm planning to get one now that our tax refund has arrived, so I tried out the one at the high school library, which is a Kindle 2. This probably won't apply to most of you, but now that I'm having to use progressive lenses, I really appreciate the ability to change font size in an instant, which is a definite advantage over print books. The text itself is as clean and legible as print, not like on a computer screen. I also love the ability to annotate books that I'm reading, and I believe I can insert bookmarks that will let me go straight to a page of interest, even after I've finished the book.

The only thing I didn't like as well was the grayish background. I guess I read too many computer printouts, and I'm used to a higher contrast between print and background.

I told my husband I was getting it to take on our travel trailer, where I don't have a lot of room for books. Instead, in the space of a slimline dayplanner, I can hold the equivalent of my entire library (eventually ).

There are problems with the Kindle outside the USA - currently Whispernet only works with one carrier in the USA, for example.

I've been looking at alternatives - tried a couple of small tablet PCs but while they were both pretty good as etext readers, they were both too heavy and bulky to carry around casually. Ditto all of the netbooks I've seen. So what I've ended up going back to is my elderly HP Jornada pocket PC, which has quite a nice letterbox screen, a 2/3rds size keyboard, and a 2gb flash card. No comms (you can use a WiFi card but it doesn't work very well) but it'll run Mobibook reader and some other eBook formats, so I can just download what I want and put it onto the flash card, read it at my leisure. Not as nice a screen format as the Kindle, but it works.

Hopefully something more like a cross between an ebook reader and a netbook will be coming along soon - something pocket sized, e.g. about the size of a DVD case, but hopefully including a keyboard and say Linux plus Open Office and some other programs, would suit me VERY nicely. There are some encouraging things around, such as low energy electronic "ink" screens, flexible plastic screens, etc., but nobody seems to have quite got round to putting everything together to make a really good pocket PC for the modern user.

I've been reading all these wonderful comments praising the Kindle and I have only one thing to say: I bet a Kindle doesn't smell like a book.

ML (who thinks she has now proven conclusively which is superior )

What puzzles me is why e-books cost so much when they are nothing but a bunch of text being transferred from a website to a hand-held device. An average price of between £10 and £26 seems awfully steep for what you're getting. Surely the production costs can't be that high?

Me, I'm with ML. I can't get over the fact that if I'm going to spend that amount of money on a book I want something that LOOKS as though I spent that amount of money on it. Something solid and tangible.

LabRat

It's not about production costs, though, is it? If it were, music CDs would cost less than £1.50


Wendy

There's something very strange about Amazon's pricing - by comparison, I publish role playing games on PDF; I earn more selling a PDF for $4.99 than I would if it I was selling the same game as a book for say $25. Charging nearly as much as for the paper version makes no sense.

Right now, I think Kindle is just about the only kid on the block, so they are pretty much charging the highest price the market will bear.

For me, though, it might be worth it. Where I live there are no public libraries. The price of books (not to mention shipping costs and taxes!) is getting prohibitive. $9 for a new release sounds pretty good in comparison. Plus there are apparently many free or nearly free books available. On ebay there are CDs for sale for under $10 with entire libraries of up to 1,000 books or more.

Thanks for the responses. I do think I might bite the bullet and pay the $400 or whatever it is to buy a Kindle.

ML, you are correct. It does not smell like a book. Mine has a leather cover (which apparently they're making a killing on) so it does smell of leather. And it's a different shape and texture in the hands than books.

On the other hand, it's a lot less awkward than fanfic print-outs. And most books don't read themselves to me

PJ

Which is exactly my point, Wendy. And DVDs. We're being ripped off with all of them. There's no way that production costs and a reasonable profit margin add up to what we get fleeced for.

But e-books in particular seem to me to be a bit of a rip-off, as there's really no 'physical' entity there that could justify charging upwards of £10.

This surprises me. I've always thought we were living in an era of cheap books. I can get most of the paperbacks I'm looking for new on Amazon from an average price of £5-£7 and you can get cheaper still if you go second-hand - average price around £3 (including P&P).

Amazon is increasingly introducing free P&P for books even as low as £5, so if you don't mind waiting a few days longer for delivery it seems pretty cheap to me.

I tend not to buy many hardbacks, but the average new price on Amazon is about level with an e-book at £9 or so. Again, second-hand much cheaper. I've ordered second-hand from Amazon sellers at that £3 all inclusive price and had a hardback delivered, now and then, when I was expecting a paperback.

These days I tend to get most of my books at charity shops, so my average price paid is about 50p. Which is definitely a good deal. <G> But I increasingly go for the second-hand option on Amazon, too, because I've never really been let down and most of my purchases look brand new anyway.

LabRat

If cost of production were the only concern, software would be practically free, especially for downloads as the marginal cost is almost zero.

What you're paying for is intellectual property, the time the author spent writing the book, and the incentive for people to produce things you're willing to buy. If books were free, authors wouldn't write very much and nobody would have anything new to read.

As someone who writes software for a living, I can easily understand. No one would fund a project if there wasn't any money in it. No publisher would advance any money to an author for a title that would sell for next to nothing. So part of the cost of a book (or software) is the money it took to produce it in the first place, i.e the advance (or R&D monies).

Considering the effort that goes into writing a book, I don't begrudge an author his/her $10 for a new offering or the $6 for a paperback, even if it is electronic. I consider it a bargain.

I agree. But from what I've heard the author only gets about ten cents from the sale of a book. The rest goes to agents and publishers, etc. (At least, that's my impression)

I can't imagine anyone putting that much effort into writing a story with so little compensation. I certainly wouldn't. Nope, not me. I'd never sell my tallents for so little. I'd insist on email feeback instead .

ML

I don't begrudge the producers or the author a reasonable profit. Nor did I suggest at any point in my previous posts that books should be given away free. That would be quite ridiculous.

Of course not. That goes without saying. But don't forget that with most e-books the author and publisher has already gotten a very nice reward with the publication of the hardback and paperback, which offsets the production costs. And then some.

It seems just a little greedy to expect the same return yet again when the book is released as an e-book. Especially considering that there's very little product for the money.

LabRat

Actually publishing has reasonable royality rates. Authors get about 10% on paperbacks, and 12-15% on hardbacks. At least in most catagories. I understand that the genre romances pay less and have much worse terms on right reversions. IIRC SF books the rights revert to the author when the book is out of print for 6 months, the romances it's more like 10 years.

For a breakdown of costs see http://journal.bookfinder.com/2009/03/breakdown-of-book-costs.html

While you have a point, I find it ironic that you're saying this on a fanfic forum. Clearly some people would still write for free.

Julie

Actually, ebooks are being released at the same time as their physical versions these days, so each ebook sale is one less hardback or original paperback sale. I think Amazon is beginning at these prices because the idea is that Kindle books will eventually replace physical books, so that will be where publishers have to make their money. And that money pays for editors, layout people, cover artists, etc., not just the physical cost of producing the book. I know that in post-secondary ed, we're looking toward entirely ebooks in place of textbooks within the next 10 years. That's what high school librarians in my area are anticipating, too.

And as someone who is responsible for providing books-on-tape for students who have visual or reading problems, I'm looking forward to the day when all textbooks are ebooks, available to be read by a text reader.

P.S. I ordered my Kindle 2 yesterday.

That's awful! I can't concentrate on ebooks as well as on actual paper. Converting textbooks to completely electronic format would seriously crimp my education!

There are other reasons to dislike the idea - someone doing research isn't going to be very happy about having to access (and presumably pay for) dozens of books just for a line or two in an essay or whatever.

If the Kindle does become the primary distribution channel for books there are also real concerns about government, business, etc. monitoring or controlling access to books, and possibly censoring them - e.g. someone looks at a significant sample of books on explosives then gets added to a no-fly list; someone writes a book on Amazon's business practices that could impact the company's profitability, and it doesn't show up in the list of books available for download; blocking for sexual, religious, or violent content; and so forth.

Before that can ever work, some sort of lending library process would have to be developed, where people can check out books on their ebook readers for a 2 week period through their local library, and at the end of that time, the text vanishes. The discussions I've been in on weren't about it replacing libraries so much as taking the place of the piles and piles of books students have to buy for class.

Another reason to be very wary of replacing paper with something as proprietory as the Kindle is that file formats keep changing - there would be problems if thousands of books only existed as the etext equivalent of Betamax, with DRM controls in place that made it impossible to transfer them to more recent formats, and no way to get them unlocked because the company that owned the technology had gone out of business.

I'm not saying that this is likely for Amazon, but I really doubt that anyone has got the technology completely right, or will do any time soon. It's all going to go obsolete, probably sooner rather than later. It's happened with Betamax, laserdiscs, and probably in the near future ordinary DVDs; anyone who bought HD DVDs or players in 2006-8 is facing that problem now. It happens with all computer games sooner or later; and will undoubtedly happen with the current e-text formats.

A quote that I probably haven't got completely right: "This little baby is going to replace CDs soon. That means I'm going to have to buy the White Album again." - Men in Black

I agree that proprietary formats can be very limiting. But "ebook" doesn't necessarily mean the Kindle. You can get PDF-format ebooks on your computer now, and the Sony Reader can display PDF files. At the moment, it doesn't format them real well, but there's a converter program for the Sony. I can buy e-book versions of textbooks now, I think, actually.

Couple that with cheap printers and printer connections, and you can print out anything important. Last quarter, I had a math textbook that was 4-5 inches thick, with 4-5 pages of practice problems for every page of useful information. It made it very difficult to go back and find specific formulas. Something more editable/selectively printable would have been very useful.

PJ

No argument there - I'm in the eBook business myself, and PDF and HTML aren't going to go away any time soon. But I don't put any DRM limitations on my files, anyone who buys them is free to make copies and use them on any platform that supports them. Unless I've misunderstood badly, the Kindle format by default is DRM locked so you can only use files on the machine that originally downloaded them.

There are also authors how publish their own ebooks without a publishing company and/or Amazon in the middle, so they get close to 100% of the books.

And there's software to turn PC, mobiles, PDA, etc into ebook readers, although those may not read Amazon's format.

I have recently experimented with the .epub and the .mobi format, it's quite interesting what one can do and how the outcome of a conversion to those formats is very dependent on the source used. PDF did rather badly, but the original file format worked quite well.

Depends on what you're trying to do - if you need illustrations, tables, etc. there aren't any good alternatives to PDF.

And as if by magic something more interesting appears - the Kindle DX is looking a very different ball game - bigger, only slightly thicker, and includes native handling of PDFs.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0015TCML0

Unfortunately a lot more expensive at $489 and still has the same limitations outside the USA, but a lot closer to the sort of thing I want.

Thanks for the link, Marcus. I'm not interested in something that big; however, the auto-rotate feature and the installed PDF reader would be extremely useful.

I recommend taking a look at the e-Slick, from Foxit. e-Slick link

It's about half the price of a Kindle, and they've got educational discounts if you're a teacher or student. It's got txt and pdf capability (and just about everything else can be MADE one or the other), support for SD cards . . . no wireless or subscription or DRM capability though, but I don't want any of that. I'm very against DRM on the whole. If you buy something, you shouldn't get it hobbled as if you were already assumed to be a criminal. So you probably won't be able to use it with some purchased books, like anything from Amazon, but for fanfic and anything from Project Gutenberg, or other free pdfs and stuff out there, you'd be great. The e-Slick doesn't do text-to-speech, but it lets you listen to your music while you read, with a headphone plugin and mp3 capability. So it would also let you do audiobooks that way.

Anyway, I did some research recently on e-book readers. Wikipedia's list has about 10 total, though some are found only in other countries. You can see the specs, what they offer, how much they cost, etc. I know if I ever get one, it'll be an e-Slick, 'cause that suits me best.

Remember my worries about Amazon controlling the texts on the Kindle? I missed one- Amazon can delete them remotely.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html?_r=1

Apparently it has now happened several times, usually over copyright issues, but I can easily imagine other circumstances in which Amazon, or even a disgruntled employee, might choose to delete books that were sold legitimately.

Wow! Talk about an Orwellian future! (The irony is sickening.)

The Kindle sounds like a good idea - get loads of books in a small package - but stuff like this makes me deeply suspicious.

Signed: Technological Luddite.

And just to add a decorative layer of irony... the books that Amazon remotely deleted? 1984 and Animal Farm. Orwellian treatment of Orwell's books.

Double-plus ungood.

Since I have a Kindle, I'm keeping it... but I might back up to my hard drive a little more frequently. (It's way easy; just hook up a USB cable and it's treated like an external drive)

PJ

One of the people who lost 1984 was a student reading it for class. So he lost not just the book but all the annotations he'd done.

Hi Vicki:
I don't have a Kindle, but the way I understand it, you can send files to Amazon and they will encode it and send it to your Kindle.
I do see a danger of a lack of privacy there, as Amazon now possesses the fic you dl.

Hi Doranwen:
Thanks for the word on the e-slick. That looks interesting.

What I've been using is a HP iPAQ 211. I just bought it for $379 at Frys. I had a 111 before and just upgraded. It does .jpg, Powerpoint, Excel and Word (i.e. Office Mobile) and videos. It has stuff I don't use, but I can dl stories directly from my desktop to my mobile. The screen is smaller than a Kindle, but it fits in my hand.
It is not good for writing, though because it is a video keyboard and a stylus. It's possible, just not fun.

Artemis

I'm not even really a lurker around here anymore, but I'll poke my head out of the woodwork to say that I have a Kindle1 and adore it. I read books on it, but I've also been reading fanfic on it from day one. I used to print reams and reams of fanfic (in ridiculously small fonts to save paper). Now I couldn't even tell you the last time I printed any sort of fiction at all. (Before the Kindle I had an eBookwise, which was also really good for saving paper and carrying lots of text around with me everywhere I went, but the Kindle's screen is so much nicer.)

You can email documents to Amazon, as Pam suggested, for 15 cents. Or, if you're cheap like me or if you're concerned about privacy, you can download a free program called Mobipocket Reader 6.0 and convert files yourself. I have only used the email conversion system a handful of times, usually when I'm in a big hurry. 99% of the time I just download the story I want, import it into Mobi, and then sync it to my Kindle via USB. Easy, private, and free.

Two caveats: This only works with Mobi Reader 6.0; I'm told 6.2 doesn't support Kindle. And although I think it works with Kindle2, I haven't tested it myself or done a lot of research on the subject, since I don't have one.

It's also worth noting that you can backup your books via USB, including books you have purchased from Amazon.

There's a lot of information on Kindle and other ebook devices at MobileRead . I'd recommend their forums to anyone who's thinking of buying one; there's a lot of really helpful info there.

Interesting article about the Kindle deletions here:
http://www.slate.com/id/2223214

I was showing my Kindle to a friend at the mini-Seff a couple of weeks ago, and I was playing with the web-browser function (use Search and go to Google or type in the addy you want). I went to the fanfic archive and was going to show her how I could read one of the fics. But when I clicked on the story, it asked if I wanted to download it or view it. I selected download, and in a few seconds, ML Thompson's ifatfirs.text (If at First You Don't Succeed) was in the table of contents on my Kindle, and I didn't have to send to have it converted or convert it myself.

Now, the formatting isn't as good as the fic I just sent to my free Kindle address to have it converted. The converted fic reads like a professional ebook: instead of double spacing between paragraphs, the double-spaces have been converted to tabs and the *** breaks between scenes have become a 1/2 point line centered on the page. In addition, the fic is almost perfectly full-justified, like you would read in a book. The one I downloaded directly from the archive still has double spaces between paragraphs, and the line breaks are still there and appear in oddly alternating line lengths depending on what size font I'm reading it with. However, it was easy; it was fast; and it was free. And with a storage capacity of 1500 books on the K2, I can download a lot of favorite fic.

And regarding the remote deletion capability of Amazon, I'm planning to do what Pam recommended: make sure I have a copy on my hard drive. I may not be able to read the Kindle files on my computer, but I can certainly archive them there.

Update on the Kindle pulling files from today's LA Times:

Artemis