Tag: kindle

Annotating Thinking Digital my forthoughts and aftermath

My experiments/hacking with the kindle has lead me to this point.

I’m on my way to thinking digital in Gateshead/Newcastle and with the kindle in my jacket pocket and I’m wondering how this whole thing would work. It seems likely that Amazon never really intended for there software to be used in this way and so there will be a massive delay in sharing notes during a conference. But in actual fact, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

When I though about using the kindle for notes, I didn’t want some sudo realtime thing. There’s already plenty of those type of systems. In actual fact just being able to write my own short notes and then share them was good enough. But if I can make some of those notes sharable then even better. Of course if someone else wants to share there notes with me, then cool beans but when I tend to write notes, they tend to only really make sense to the mind of a dyslexic designer/developer (oh thats me).

I guess part of the experiment is working out if;

  1. Is it possible to share notes in a conference setting
  2. How long are the updates between writing it, etc?
  3. How is the kindle going to separate private notes from public notes?
  4. Does it make sense in a conference like thinking digital?

Continue reading “Annotating Thinking Digital my forthoughts and aftermath“

Thinking Digital conference Kindle test1

Thinking Digital Conference Schedule on a Kindle

For those who have been interested in my kindle hacking/project. I’m happy to say the Thinking Digital conference schedule is now up on the Amazon Kindle store.

I might need to do some tweaking and yes it doesn’t look the best but remember it is a hack test and we can clean up the schedule next time for sure.

The first thing you will notice is the schedule actually costs money to download. £0.70 in the UK. The reason for this was down to Amazon. They charge a minimum fee of £0.99 to store and share the book over Amazon’s Whispernet. Although I think this is a bit of a rip off, specially because thinking digital already have a PDF version which they host on there own site, its not bad if this experiment does actually work. And heck, conference organizers could use it to make a little extra too I guess.

The Tweet URLs now seem to resolve to the book ok, which is a promising sign that my conclusions are actually correct.

So next step is to tell Herb Kim about the ebook and add notes next week at Thinking Digital. Hopefully I can pursued a couple of people to add notes too, so we can test the collaborative feature out. If you want to be part of that test, give me a shout… It should work on any device which runs the Kindle software.

A new/different way to collaborate at conferences

Future Everything notes on my kindle

Been thinking for a while about the way I take notes…

I tend to write down short lines of text which tend to make sense to myself only, but I’ve been thinking for a while do I really need my laptop to take notes? Specially since my main laptop battery fails after about 5mins of use (my own fault for buying it cheap on ebay I guess) and my backup battery lasts 20mins maximum.

Here’s my options I’ve been thinking…

  • Use my laptop, bite the bullet and buy yet another laptop, then use Evernote or Tomboynotes
  • Leave my laptop at home, rely on my Android phone. Maybe even buy a spare battery, so I can run it at full power (wifi, bluetooth, etc) all day
  • Leave my laptop at home, rely on my Android phone and work out how to use my bluetooth keyboard with Android. Still need to think about battery however
  • Use my Kindle, which has pretty much endless battery battery and a physical keyboard

Of course I used my Kindle…

Kindle powered

The thought was Amazon added a feature which allows you to add notes to a ebook and share it with other people using the Kindle or Kindle reader. The notes are accessible on the web but theres a problem. The problem is Amazon notes only really work as expected with documents on the Kindle store. This means although I am able to add notes to a PDF of the Future Everything conference. First its a bit crap because its a PDF and secondarily I can’t share the notes publicly very easily (its worth noting Calibre does allow you to pull the notes off the Kindle).

Generally the keyboard on the Kindle is ok, nothing compared to my bluetooth keyboard but slightly better that the onscreen keyboard on my phone. The symbols option is a pain but because I’m writing rough notes, it doesn’t matter so much.

Future Everything notes on my kindle

I also had a little bit of a panic when it seemed like most of my notes had gone. But it seems to be a way the Kindle shows the notes. In the end I was able to bring them all back (well they hadn’t actually gone anywhere). I was writing one set of notes per speaker but you can do more, making it possible to tweet/share the notes too which I might do more of next time.

In the picture above you can just about see the little numbers which are the different notes. The Kindle software assigns a number but it might do something different

So where from now…?

Well the Thinking Digital Conference is in less that two weeks, so I’m gearing up for doing the same with this wonderful conference but…

  1. I’m going to get the conference schedule in a non-PDF format from Herb Kim
  2. I’m going to try and get the schedule posted on Amazon’s Kindle Store, so when I share the notes. The actual document will be partly available instead of the usual message about it being a personal document.

If this works well, I’ll try collaborate editing with someone else in future but also if this does actually work, it will be a really nice way to collaboratively edit notes at a conference and I can certainly see it taking off in the future. Specially if as I suspect you can annotate and collaborate on notes on many different platforms and devices together.

I’m surprised no one else has thought about doing the same really, or maybe its just not possible?

My Kindle Ecosystem

Chrome to Kindle

I pretty much take my Kindle most places and people keep asking me what I feel about it? I always say its great and of course I carry it around everywhere… (in actual fact it would be great if Amazon recognized the fans/ambassadors like myself)

Then they usually ask about the books… What book are you reading?

This is where I tend to divert from the normal kindle owner.

So how do I get news on to the Kindle? Well there seems to be a whole bunch of ways.

  1. Calibre is your long lost friend
    No matter what you do this is the first point of call for any ebook reader, even the ipad. It converts ebooks and with the recipes you can point it at almost any website and it will turn it into a ebook for reading on the device. One of my favorite recipes is the Google Reader recipe, turns my unread RSS subscriptions into a nice ebook. And to top it all off, Calibre can be setup to automatically send the ebook to the kindle. Of course I have this setup, so I never have to sync my kindle anymore. In actual fact I only need to plug it in once a month when the battery is low.
  2. Instapaper is simply great
    Instapaper most people know about but one of the new features is the ability to send to a Kindle as a kindle compatible .mobi file. No need to wait for Calibre. Plus it also has the option of sending only when there’s a certain amount of clipped content, so you don’t get lots of empty or single page ebooks. On top of that the Kindle treats them as periodicals so, it automatically archives old ones instead of clogging it up with old instapapers.
  3. Klip me with chrome and soon others
    Send to Kindle with Klip.me works exactly how you expect. The only thing is it currently only works on Chrome and Safari. They are working on a Firefox version but till then you can use the beta bookmarklet service which does the same thing but not so elegantly.
  4. Email for Free
    One of the things which Amazon don’t make very clear is the ability to send emails with attachments to Amazon and have them delivered for free over wifi. This of course totally displaces Amazon’s own conversion service, whispernet and if your like me, don’t really trust Amazon enough to give them access to everything on my kindle (see the whole 1984 issue), then you bought a wifi only kindle.
    Your email address is what ever your kindle email is but with @free.kindle.com instead of @kindle.com. This is very handy for example I have sent things from my Evernote to the Kindle for further reading. Of course you have tell amazon which email address are valid, so you don’t get spam on your kindle.
  5. Send to Kindle from Android
    Nice little tool if you happen to for example get a tweet to a very interesting but lengthy post but can’t be bothered to read it on the small android screen. Usually I bookmark it using delicious, instapaper or readitlater but now I can go direct to the kindle which is handy.

The biggest problem with the kindle for me is simply once you read something in the google reader ebook its hard to find out who exactly wrote it. I keep meaning to modify the recipe include the blog titles. If I happen to be in a place with wifi, I can link to the kindle webbrowser but then I’m stuck again.

Ideally I would be able to send it to readitlater, instapaper or whatever. I though about using the tweet function but as I’ve discovered the tweets well pretty much useless. Don’t get me wrong it does what it says and its great if your reading a book but its no good for self published stuff.

Finally I don’t understand why but I can’t get my kindle to work with my HTC Desire mobile wifi hotspot (myfi). If I did I might be able to sort out some kind of solution but I can’t work out why…

Saying all this… I still love my kindle

The ebook dilemma

My sister and I spoke on Skype the other day and I said to her I finally got around to reading What the Dog saw by Malcolm Gladwell which she bought for me about 2 years ago at Christmas. Yes about 2 years to read a book (of course it didn’t take that long in reality) but it did take a while in between all the other stuff I was doing. I guess I should have read it while I was in hospital last year.

She said she had watched a programme on BBC Three called Kara Tointon: Don’t Call Me Stupid. It was all about Dyslexia. And she had kind of got it. I had watched the same programme a while ago on demand and to be fair I did think it was going to be crap but actually it was pretty good, even though I had never ever heard of Kara Tointon, and to be slight blunt don’t really care.

I’m a hard person to buy presents for and of course I want to make it as easy as possible for loved ones to buy stuff for me if they would like to. Books are a regular choice but they usually end up on my book shelf and read by myself sometimes up to a year or so later. In actual fact I have a fantastic book which Si Lumb lent me a while ago around late Summer. called Last night a Dj saved my life. Its right by my bedside but I’ve never read more that 5 pages of it so far.

We talked about the possibility of ordering a ebook and sending it to me via Amazon’s Wispernet but it worries me. So far I’ve never bought a kindle book, just uploaded ebooks from elsewhere. My problem with ebooks is simply the DRM. Yes I have a kindle right now and there’s readers on most devices and platforms (no linux client by the way, but there is a web client now) but what happens when I don’t? What happens when Sony bring out a decent ebook reader which is colour and half the weight of the kindle (aka the weight of a feather) or maybe someone develops a foldable eink display… How am I going to move my books from the Kindle to what ever? On top of that, don’t even get me started on the sharing aspect….

So in light of this, I suggested to my sister that she should in future just get me Amazon gift tokens and I can use them for books or ebooks. Its not as personal/nice as buying a book but it also works and theres much more chance of me actually reading it.

A kindle review by a art direction student

Anna Frew is doing a masters in Art and Design and is majoring in the conflict of ebooks and books. I met her at a Manchester Social Media Cafe in January and found her very intriguing.

So after chatting for a while we got on to the topic of the kindle and ebooks. This was just after BBC Backstage ebook went live. So I had lots of tips how we did the ebooks and how I generally do most of my ebook stuff. Anyway, she wrote up some of the conversation on her blog while reviewing her new Kindle.

I also like how I can alter the line length on the screen. Reading from line to line is something I struggle with in large bodies of text. Often I find myself lost within a text so being able to narrow the text made it much easier to read longer passages. This is problem common for dyslexic people so I think the kindle has great scope as a tool for dyslexic students with long texts to read. I know I would have appreciated being able to do that with some of my readings. Also being able to have all of the texts you need in one place in light weight form will also increase its selling points for students.

The fact that you can very easily put your own work onto the Kindle is also a great plus. Something which is much more difficult with apple products. This is very useful for presenting my work for assessment. Using the hack ‘Calibre’ also has great potential. This is a programme which allows you to turn any online content into an e-book. For example a blog. This means I can put these blog entries straight onto my Kindle for assessment in an organised way, without time consuming reformatting.

Its also very interesting to see her list of positives and negatives for ebooks.

One person to watch in the future I think… (more of this to come soon)

Swap your kindle for a ton of books?

Do you love books?

Do you love books so much that you’d buy a kindle and sell your kindle for a stack of books? Yeah I thought not…

But just in-case your thinking about giving up on your kindle. Microcosm Publishing will take your bet.

I think its all stupid but to be fair Microcosm must have knew it was going to get there name in almost every news site and blog. So to be fair to them, good on them. I wonder how many people have taken up there offer. Although I think the swap is for new books, so its hardly cost effective but then again a 2nd hand kindle can’t be worth that much, can it?

Its also worth noting that Amazon ebooks outsold Hardbooks…

E-books have hit a significant milestone. In each of the last three months, Amazon reports that sales of books for Kindle have outpaced the sale of hardcover books, and that growth is only accelerating.

…and Paperbacks just recently

The ebook revolution has swept past two more milestones in its ferocious advance upon the bastions of literary culture. As the Man Booker prize embraces the digital era, the online retail giant Amazon has announced that sales of Kindle editions have overtaken paperbacks in the US.

Instapaper’s wireless delivery

I didn’t notice Instapaper now supports wireless delivery of epub’s.

Reading on the Kindle’s non-reflective, e-ink screen is easy on the eyes and great for longer content.

Instapaper provides Kindle-compatible files, easily transferred at no charge via USB, containing the Text versions of your saved pages in any folder.

Additionally, you can set up wireless delivery to automatically send your most recent Instapaper stories every day or week. Note: Amazon assesses a surcharge for each wireless delivery, and wireless delivery is not available in all countries.

Instapaper also provides ePub files for other electronic reading devices that support ePub, including most Sony Readers and the Barnes & Noble Nook.

Ok besides the Amazon surcharge (which doesn’t seem to apply if you have a wifi only kindle it seems), this is fantastic. I use to use Instapaper but switched over to using Readitlater. I might have to switch back? At least till readitlater enables the same feature (i and others have already suggested it)

The future of publishing is writable

Newsweek book are not dead bezos

Imran posted a link on his facebook wall.

The future of publishing is writable, Trends of smaller, easier, and more personal content signal a shift away from read-only publishing.

There are three convergence trends in publishing that are already apparent.

One clear long-term trend is that smaller pieces of information are being published. Considering just modern digital forms of publishing, there is a roughly chronological progression toward smaller publications: emails, Usenet postings, web pages, blog posts, blog comments, tweets, tags.

A second trend is a reduction in friction. As access to easy-to-use and inexpensive publishing technology increases, it becomes economically feasible to publish smaller and less valuable pieces of content. We have reached the point where anyone with access to the Internet can easily and cheaply publish trivial, tiny pieces of information — even single words.

The third trend is the rise of publishing personal information. Our inescapable sociability is driving us to shape the Internet into a mechanism for publishing information about ourselves.

These three trends — smaller, easier, more personal — provide a framework to examine the development of online information publishing.

Absolutely…

In a session at BarCampManchester4 titled Ebooks, I was invited to talk about my Kindle ebook reader. I said I have never bought a book from the Amazon Kindle store and may never do.

So the obvious thing people thought was that I download ebooks from questionable sources. But in actual fact most of my ebook collection is either creative commons licensed ebooks such as cory doctorow’s books or there self published content formed from scraping websites using the much loved calibre and its scripts. Its scripts work with everything from standard sites, google reader, instapaper, readitlater, etc, etc.

I’m not saying I’m a self publisher but if you do look at the percentage of ebooks I’ve made/republished compared to the ones I’ve bought or downloaded. Its clear going by my own habits is we going towards a writable, self publishing future.

Kindle everywhere your ebooks everywhere…

Kindle everywhere

Amazon are really cornering the reader market. Not only do they have one of the best ebook readers, but its also one of the cheapest (using there ability to ship many of them). But what really smashed it for them has to be the app which pretty much runs on everything. From PC’s to Android phones. Windows phone 7 to the ipad. Now there launching a kindle for the web. This will optimise any browser into a ebook reader. Impressive stuff.

But I’m worried…

This all seems to be out of the same play book as Apple and there itunes music ecosystem. I can already imagine the special links being sent around social networks pointing into the kindle ecosystem. The only saving grace is the kindle for the web.

Hopefully Amazon will follow the Google approach with these things and leverage the web not fight against it.

If Amazon screw up, Google seem to be right behind with there own ebook store.

What does this mean for the Kindle device, well this is all good news for the Kindle. Kindle is a fantastic eink device but shouldn’t be the only place to see ebooks. Hopefully more people will make there way through ebooks on devices like their phones then make there way towards reading on a eink device. I use to read my ebooks on my PDA (compaq ipaq) and it was painful but I found myself getting use to it. Now I can’t imagine using a phone or anything LCD like to read large amounts of text. But thats just me…

Its great Kindle is everywhere, and people can choose how they want to view the ebooks, period. Choice is good!

Now if they can just sort out the ability to buy a book and ebook version at the same time that would be great.

A few things I’d like to see on my kindle

My Kindle

So I’ve gotten into this lovely routine where I have Calibre automatically turns my subscriptions into ebooks for me and then I connect my Kindle to the USB to automatically sync the items. Then I sit in a nice coffee/tea shop reading my google reader unread subscriptions, readitlater, instapaper, etc. With the experimental webkit browser any links I want to check out, I can check them out using the cafe’s public wifi. The only issue is I really want some way of bookmarking with delicious or even readitlater the important stuff that I read.

I don’t know if you can add bookmarklets to the experimental webkit browser but that would be ideal.

My other alternative is some kind of note taking app on the kindle its self. I know you can add annotations to books but it seems getting them off isn’t as straight forward as it should be. Although I love just being able to read stuff on the kindle screen, I wouldn’t mind some blogging app. The keyboard is not bad and being able to draft up a blog entry would be great, specially when you google reader on the device its self. I’m also wondering if I can make use of Conduit again to do some transferring of notes, like I had planned for my Sony Ereader.

So in ideally I’d like to see a full blogging app, a browser with bookmarklets and Ideally a evernote client.

Come on say it with me, Evernote on a wireless kindle would be amazing and dare I say a killer app for the kindle3.

My Kindle is here, and I love it!

I got a delivery notification in my letter box today saying I missed a deliver and the caretaker took it in. Wondering what it could it be, I looked in my inbox and found…

Dear Customer,
Greetings from Amazon.co.uk,
We are writing to let you know that the following item has been sent
to:

Ian Forrester
APARTMENT ****
** *********** ********* *****
MANCHESTER, LANCS M** ***
United Kingdom

using Royal Mail.

For more information about delivery estimates and any open orders,
please visit: http://www.amazon.co.uk/your-account

Your order #*************************** (received September 07, 2010)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Qty                           Item    Price        Delivery Subtotal

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Amazon.co.uk items (Sold by Amazon EU S.a.r.L.):

1  Kindle Wireless Reading De...  £109.00               1  £109.00

Dispatched via Royal Mail (estimated arrival date: September 24, 2010).

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This completes your order.

Yeah!!!! I got my Kindle3, so expect tomorrow a unboxing using my new camera. Its been ages since I ordered the Kindle and I’m so glad its came.

So now’s a really good time to sell my Sony e-ink PRS600 reader, although its got a slight scratch which means CEX won’t buy it off me. Its well used and served me very well in its short time.

I got the device in my hands now and yes there is a nice series of unboxing photos on flickr.com if your interested.

What really got me was the amazing difference between my old Sony PRS600 and the Amazon Kindle 3. I know the Sony PRS505 vs Sony PRS600 was always a challenge because the PRS600 had the touch screen over the top of it. But boy oh boy, the PRS600 vs the Kindle3 is shocking… I can’t believe how clear and crisp the screen is. Then there’s the weight of the device! Its almost too light, I feel like I’m lifting a paperback book! Just like the Sony, when you plug it into a computer (yes even Linux) it comes up as a mass storage device, allowing you to just shift stuff back an forth easily. Of course Calibre allows you to easily convert between ebook formats and sync with the kindle directly.

My own complaint so far is the wifi won’t connect to my wireless network, but actually I think what’s going on is my local network isn’t actually connected to the internet yet and its failing to touch the internet and giving up. But over all this device is amazing! They have done so much, even down to the screen saver (as such, because of course with a eink screen you don’t need one) which is displayed when your charging the device. I can’t wait to get the experimental browser working (actually going to the northern quarter later to try it out) and try out some of the kindle apps. I’ve not looked into the Kindle hacking yet but this is certainly one of the massive advantages over the Sony.

This has to be the first break through e-reader… Just over 100 quid for a amazing device! Can’t wait to sit out in the shared garden reading on this device.

The Kindle3 has everything I asked for…

Sony PRS600 vs Amazon Kindle 3

I’m going to sell my old Sony PRS-600 Ebook Reader for the Amazon Kindle 3. But why?

Well it kind of centres on a blog post I wrote a while ago when the iPad was unveiled to the world. In the blog post I touch on points which would make my perfect ereader. 2 of the main points are,

  • Add Bluetooth for file transfer, dialup, networking, etc.
  • Run an open operating system like a cleverly crafted Andriod on it
  • Add accelerometers, proximity sensors and some haptic feedback
  • Wireless 802.11b/g

Well although not all my requirements are met, the Kindle3 does have wireless and a operating system to support (as such) 3rd party apps.

Android would be great to have on there with a open marketplace so people can really develop for it. I don’t know if Android would work on a e-ink screen but you could imagine it wouldn’t take much to build a custom build just for E-ink screens. Bluetooth, Wifi and Accelerometers would open up a whole bunch of applications which the ipad has demonstrated. But the smaller screen would be much more mobile and friendly.

I assumed slightly wrongly that you would need android to have the ability to add apps, but actually Amazon have decided to go with there own OS and App platform. This might be a good idea because you don’t want apps made for a Lcd mixed up with the eink ones. Its also a good idea if developers are thinking about eink instead of building for Lcd and just converting down to eink. Battery life under ink is amazing, but I’d hate to see that going because some app took liberties with the eink technology. Kindle apps are certainly a new area with a fruitful future. I can think of some clever apps you could build with the eink screen.

I thought good and hard about swapping to the Kindle, specially with the 1984 uproar. But to be frank, I’ve never bought a ebook and won’t really be affected by this thing. I would have also perfected a open market place like Android but its the start, so who knows what may happen…

I also downloaded the kindle app on my android phone in preparation for my new Kindle (which has been ordered but I’m still waiting for stock). In the meantime I’m selling my lovely Sony PRS-600, so if anyone is interested drop me a message.