kindle app for iphone

While not quite the technology convergence of a Roomba getting run over by a Segway, being able to read Kindle books on iPhone is pretty darn close. Amazon just released a new app for iPhone that let's you do just this and it is very slick. You connect it to your Kindle account and all your Amazon book purchases are available, with the last page you're on more-or-less properly synced up.

Very cool.

The reading experience is very good for such a small device, the interface is slick, and downloads quick on even a 1G iPhone.

Downsides? Really the only big problem is that there doesn't appear to be a way to send mobipocket, pdf, or other text files to iPhone the way you can for Kindle. This is a real bummer, as currently 23 out of the 135 books on Kindle are Amazon e-books. The rest are mostly from the Baen library. I hope they decide to fix this, as it makes both devices more valuable to me.

Still, combined with Amazon's new digital publishing platform, Amazon is working hard to create a strong ecosystem around e-books. Great opportunity for authors who can move early, I suspect.

kindle 2 review

I've posted a fair amount -- and quite positively -- about my current Kindle, so it should come as no surprise that I was quick to order Kindle 2. It arrived Wednesday and I broke it in with Daemon, Daniel Suarez's impressive debut novel (more on that in a moment).

If you've seen a picture you know that the Kindle 2 is much thinner and sleeker than the original. This translates to a much more solid feel out of the box, although I've found it to be slightly less comfortable to hold, perhaps due to Kindle 1 muscle memory. To first order, it operates the same as Kindle 1. The boot time is much faster, the inward clicking buttons superior and less prone to accidental clicks, and the page flips enough quicker to be noticeable. The new screen's 16-gray levels make photos look surprisingly good, and being able to charge via USB helps me on the road. Finally, while I miss the sparkle, the multi-way stick does make highlighting a lot easier.

Downsides? Moving content over from my first Kindle was a pain, mostly because Whispernet and/or Amazon were clearly slammed Wednesday night. The leather binder doesn't have the original's elastic to hold it closed.

All-in-all, a great set of incremental improvements and an even better device for my needs.

As for Daemon, I really enjoyed it. It has all of the trappings of a first book -- uneven pacing, limited character development, some typos -- but, wow! I've never seen a book that mixes action; this level of understanding of the god complex all game developers have; the technology around robotics, virtual worlds, and the net; and, wraps it all up in book that is speculative while only leveraging real tech. Very cool and quite recommended.

kindle and recommendations

Yet another nice thing about Kindle is that when a friend mentions they're reading a great book you can have it in seconds. This happened to me last week and since then -- that's to a lot of time in airports -- I've read Stephenie Meyer's wonderful Twilight novels. I really enjoyed them. Equally good, although very different, is her other novel, The Host. She reminds of Elizabeth Moon at her best, with rich characters, consistent worlds, and remarkably human stories.

Yes, Twilight follows the federally mandated sequence for vampire novels

Book 1: Vampires
Book 2: Werewolves
Book 3: Vampires vs. werewolves
Book 4: Vampires vs. shadowy vampire "government"

but Meyer's disregard for many mythical conventions allows her to build the world her way, and the result is very good. Yes, it is a "young adult" novel, but that shouldn't stop you from enjoying it. I look forward to book 5!

kindle reset

I was transferring files to Kindle's SD card via USB when it locked up. Neither power cycle nor hard reboot fixed it. Instead it would start the power-on cycle, put up the happy Amazon Kindle logo but then hang forever. Was about to call Amazon when I tried powering it down, popping out the SD card, and then booting it. Voila! Kindle came up fine. Turned it back off, re-inserted the SD card, and everything is working fine again.

more reasons to <3 kindle

Tor.com has opened. Baen's approach of releasing free books to reach a broader audience continues to generate ripples. Kudos to Tor, and thank you for the introduction to a bunch of new authors.

Separately, I just used Amazon's PDF->Kindle email service to move some reference materials on to Kindle. It didn't handle the code snippets perfectly, but it worked fairly well. Getting PDFs to work perfectly on Kindle will make an already useful device even more important to me.

a good read

As I've mentioned before, I read a lot of Baen books.  Partially this is due to my tastes in travel reading aligning nicely with their catalog, but mostly it's because I spend a lot of time reading on the road, and Jim Baen, Eric Flint and others at Baen were ahead of their time in pushing to release books as non-drm digital downloads.  They've also released tons of books as free downloads, so it's easy to sample new authors.  Now that I am Kindle-enabled, I'm reading even more books this way, and last night plowed through Eric Flint's The Rivers of War, an alternate history that begins during the war of 1812.  Good, fun read.  Doesn't eclipse my current high water mark for historical speculative fiction -- Dan Simmon's The Terror is in a class by itself -- but, like the Belisarius series Flint cowrote with David Drake, Rivers has a wonderful attention to detail, makes one glad to not be on a battlefield, has several laugh-out-loud moments, and was the perfect way to spend a few hours in a hotel far from home.

kindletastic

Something else I like about the Kindle is that it allows me to read multiple books simultaneously, something I used to do prior to having a train commute and lots of travel. I'm liking the Kindle more and more as I use it. The question will be what happens once I can buy a good e-book reader from the iPhone App Store. I suspect I'll end up with as much of my data as possible on both devices and the use the iPhone for short reading sessions, Kindle for longer ones, but we'll see.

missing use case and the hidden media library

[Edit: Comments have pointed out that I almost had found all the pieces, as download delivery is available from the Media Library. Although maybe not from the UK, where I was. Apparently, you order it, then go to the media library for a download.]

Several people recommended Clay's new book on this trip. Here Comes Everybody was on my list, but with extra endorsements it moved to the front of the queue. Now that I have my Kindle, I'm trying to minimize my physical book purchases. Amazon's Whispernet -- their wireless delivery mechanism to Kindle -- only functions in the United States, but since Kindle is obviously targeted at travelers, there must be a "download to my computer and copy via USB"-option, right?

Nope.

Now, in this case, I'll wait to get home and purchase the book then, but what if I was out of reading material and just grabbed it here? Lost opportunity for Amazon.

Speaking of Amazon, the link to Clay's book is Amazon Associate enabled, so in theory I get a small payment if you buy via that link. I hadn't used the associate links before and wanted to see their user-experience. Quite nice, although it has some bugs. Attempting to build an associate link to Kindle generated an empty page and the link generator failed to find the Kindle edition of the book. [Edit: the link is to the Kindle edition but I'm not sure why the link generator picked that one]

In clicking around trying to find a download option for the Kindle book, I discovered Amazon's "your media library", which I hadn't seen before. Is anybody using this? Does the web camera bar code reader work? It seems to aggregate your Amazon purchases, as well as any item that you click "I own this" when adjusting the recommendations. Odd to find a feature with a lot of work thrown into it just lurking on Amazon's site.

good reads

I have a confession. I've never read the other Cory's novels. I'm as addicted to Boing Boing as the next person, appreciate his non-fiction work, read his short stories, and generally enjoy the conversations we've had. But "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" never grabbed me, so I've not read his novels.

Oops.

Thoroughly enjoyed "Eastern Standard Tribe" (on the new Kindle, no less) on the flight over to London. Geeky, fast paced, perfect travel consumption for me. Now I'm about half-way through "Little Brother", which so far is heartbreaking and wonderful, despite (or because of) it being such a rant. When my daughter reads it in 4 or 5 years, I wonder if it will resonate because society has self-corrected or because we've gone even deeper into the rathole of fear. I certainly hope it is the former.

I'd write more, but I want to get back to "Little Brother." If you're on this blog, you'll want to go read it, too.

[Edit: Finished "Little Brother" later Sunday, resulting in being fairly tired on Monday. If anything, it got better as it went. Really enjoyed it.]

a new toy: the amazon kindle

I'm a pretty fast reader and spend a lot of time traveling, so I end up in the annoying situation of carrying multiple books to cover me for a complete trip. As a result, I've been keeping an eye on e-ink based portable readers, especially the Amazon Kindle. A friend from Linden recently got one and has been twittering her support, so I decided to take the plunge. Now that I've had it for a few weeks, I thought a review was in order.

First off, the ergonomics and build quality. It's ugly and feels cheap to me, especially when compared to -- say -- Apple products. It's supposed to snap into its book-like case, but mine sometimes pops out or pops the battery cover open instead. On the plus side, it is very light, which matters when you're curled up late at night reading in bed. I suspect this is something Amazon will improve on greatly with their 2.0 version.

The screen, on the other hand, is delightful. If you haven't seen an e-ink screen, it's a little hard to describe how nice it is to read off of. My only minor complaint is that the smallest test size isn't small enough. The screen has to flash to black, then white, between page changes, but I found that I stopped noticing that almost immediately. I've habitually read on both laptops and mobile devices and really do like the Kindle more -- although when iPhone gets an ebook application, I'm curious which one I'll spend more time reading on.

I've only purchased a couple of books from Amazon. The delivery is quick and easy, the selection good, but knowing that I'm getting a DRM-ed book that I can't use anywhere else is really annoying. I have, however, paid Baen books just about every way I could, including a $500 Andromeda membership to Baen's Universe, since between that and Baen's free library, I'm able to get nearly half of the science fiction books I own as bits. Bookmooch will be getting a lot of additional books in the next few months! None of the Baen books have DRM, so I'm much happier to pay to get bits. Plus, since their service tracks what I've purchased, I know that I can always recover the books if I lose them. To Amazon's credit, it's not like they're going to go out of business, so I suspect that the ease of purchasing may overcome some of my concerns. We'll see.

Kindle has great tools for annotating and highlighting material in books, which I've really enjoyed for books that I'm studying. In most situations, when you pull up your notes, there is a shortcut to then take you to the section in context.

One problem that's been really bugging me so far is that you can't organize books. Especially with series I'm rereading, I never remember which order the books are in and Kindle doesn't do anything to help me. I suspect this will be a software upgrade at some point. Another minor quirk is that if you drain the battery to zero, the Kindle does nothing, so it's easy to end up a little stumped the first time it happens. Most control inputs are incredibly high latency, so its easy to enter multiple commands before any get executed. Finally, annoying to not do charging via USB. It means I have an extra cable to carry around.

All-in-all, despite the quirks, I'm pleased with the purchase. I get to have hundreds of books with me all the time in a format that is very comfortable to read on. I'd much rather buy books as bits, so this should continue driving the ecosystem in that direction.

(Edit: almost forgot to mention Feedbooks. Great FAQ for getting piles of free books onto Kindle!)