Kindle Tips

When I first got my Kindle, I expected that any of my friends or family would be able to buy me a book on Amazon – and it would magically show up on my Kindle, just like the books I buy or the manuscripts I email. I was more concerned about whether I’d be able to set up a wish list of books — so my family could get me the books I really wanted.

I wrote Amazon to ask why I couldn’t seem to add Kindle books to a wish list. They responded with the following:

The purchase and download of digital content from Amazon.com, including content from the Kindle Store, is associated with the Amazon.com account used to make the original purchase. Because digital content cannot be transferred to a different Amazon.com account after purchase, digital products cannot be given as gifts or added to a Wish List.

I was quite disappointed — it seems a logical extension of an electronic reader, to send a gift to a friend. I believe it was extremely successful for iTunes – but it seems even more a natural extension for the Kindle.

Today, we received an email asking about the same thing (our first question from a reader – thanks!) — which included a fascinating tidbit: it USED to be possible to buy gifts for other Kindle users, before Amazon upgraded the interface!

I cannot find a way to buy for you! Maddening! They changed the interface – for the worse. One thing that’s always impressed me about Amazon is how easy they make it to buy.

Particularly ridiculous in that I was able to send a gift this way 5 mos. ago, before the “upgraded” interface.

We can all hope that Amazon will come to its senses and make it as smooth and easy to buy Kindle books as gifts as it is to buy almost everything else on the site.

Meanwhile, I’ll encourage anyone who’s interested to email Amazon’s Kindle Team – kindle-feedback (at) amazon.com (replace “at” with the @ symbol) — and encourage them to bring this ability into the next version of software!

Mike Elgan has done a wonderful thing! He’s composed a page as a start page for kindle users.

If you use your Kindle for internet or email, (how-to below), Bookmark this page on your kindle: www.elgan.com/k .

it’s tremendously useful. He’s linked directly to Google’s Mobile Gmail, Google Reader (RSS reader), and Google calendar — and also to two of his useful Kindle articles in Computerworld (a portion of which I’ve quoted below) and his kindle blog.

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I’m thrilled to have you join us in this brave new world of kindling! (and blogging!)

I can proudly say that I use my Kindle every day. What’s more, I have completely decimated my reading pile — going from a several month lag time on longer submissions to being almost completely caught up. It’s a tremendous tool.

It’s also ever so much fun to show off to all and sundry — friends, editors, agents, neighbors, people on the street … Yes, I am a proud early adopter.

And I’m a tinkerer; I’m convinced that there’s probably a way to do That Thing that I want to do, and with enough messing around, and enough googling, I’ll find it. And if I don’t, I’ll make it up.

The post Importing “My Clippings” is a case in point — I knew there had to be a way to get my notes on a personal document into readable and usable shape. So when Amazon’s help staff responded to my questions with a “not yet,” I figured it out myself. And because it was such a pain to do it all myself — and I know three people who’ve just bought Kindles to read and edit manuscripts — I wanted to share it.

So — welcome! I hope these are helpful to you. If there’s anything you want to know how to do, ask me or Stuart! We’ll try to find a way to do it, or at least let you know that there are others out there who are struggling with the same thing … and we’ll let all our readers know, so we can all submit questions to Amazon’s Kindle Feedback team, so they know there’s a demand for that particular tool.

My one-click settings are for my business account, but I want to buy books for my kindle on my personal credit card.  I’m happy to do it through Amazon’s website – but all I see is “buy books using one-click”.

Why can’t I buy using another (commonly used) credit card on Amazon.com?  I’d prefer not to have to change my one-click settings (which takes five steps) every time I buy a book.. and then switch it back, going through the whole rigmarole again.

I hope this is going to change as the Kindle develops — in particular, I’d like to be able to use the kindle for business and personal use, and be able to buy myself books on amazon’s website, at least, without having to change my one click settings back and forth each time!

It makes me much less likely to purchase books for pleasure, since there’s no easy way to switch back and forth.

Here’s the real reason I bought my Kindle. My manuscript pile is two feet high — not including the infamous slush pile. I mean a two foot high stack of manuscripts by clients, that I want to read as soon as I can. And then there are new submissions.

I do a lot of my reading on the train, at home, in coffee shops, wherever and whenever I have a few minutes to kill. So I seldom leave home (or the office) without throwing a manuscript in my bag.

But then:

• A project becomes my top reading priority, and I haven’t got it with me;
• I’m still carrying three pounds worth of some other manuscript;
• I read a few pages of a submission and decide to pass. I’ve still got 200 pages in my bag.

In other words: my bag weighs a ton. I keep adding stuff, but seldom clean it out.

Now, I’ve now got the entire two-foot high stack with me all the time. And it weighs – what? Half a pound?

Like any good revolution, it began on May Day: I ordered a Kindle. Or maybe it began a few weeks earlier, when a friend picked up my briefcase (full of manuscripts) and was stunned at how heavy it was. “Stuart,” he said, “E-books.”  Maybe it was my colleague Shana (who posts most of the tech tips you’ll read here) who’d been over the moon about hers for the past three weeks, and the smile on her face when she told me someone on the subway had approached her, asking “Wow! Is that a Kindle?”

But the tipping point came on the 1^st of May, when my friend Joy showed me hers at breakfast. So I ran back to the office and one-clicked myself a Kindle. “My God,” said the first client who came to see me that day, clearly feeling as though the earth had shifted beneath his feet. “And I was here on the day it happened.”  So here I am: a literary agent who has forsaken paper to read his manuscripts electronically. Have I become the capitalist who sold the rope?

Connect your kindle to your PC or Mac, using the USB cable.

Look in Kindle/Documents for the file “My Clippings.txt” as shown here.
Copy this file to your computer — somewhere that you know you’ll find it later.
Open this file:

Copy all the text in the file (in notepad, use Control-A and then Control-C).

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I would think the Kindle almost perfect if I could email my notes on a particular manuscript (and ONLY that manuscript) TO myself from the kindle.

I love being able to leave my Kindle at home and email manuscripts to it from work, and I wish I could return those notes to myself without bringing the machine into the office and exporting them.

All notes, bookmarks, and clipped pages are stored in a file on your kindle, found by plugging the USB cord of your kindle into your computer; browse to the Kindle/Documents/My Clippings.txt file.

It’s a pain to not know where those notes are within the text — it’d be good to have the first line on that page included in the clipping.

Better still would be to have the chapter heading and first line.

- Presently, all notes are cited only by location in the text
“Emma (Jane Austen) – Bookmark Loc. 11 | Added on Tuesday, April 29, 2008, 10:18 PM”

That “location” is not a hard and fast page number – i.e. you can’t estimate by the usual number of words displayed on the screen and page that many words forward in a document on your PC or a printed document. If you’ve changed the text size at all, it counts the page views from that point on as viewed on the new text size.

I want to be able to save my notes on one book (or manuscript) separately from the rest of ‘my clippings’. whether i can email them or export them via the usb cable — this is essential.
Presently, all notes, bookmarks, and clippings are mixed together in the text file called “My Clippings” by the date entered.

You can find this file (only?) when you plug your kindle into your computer and browse to the Kindle/Documents — the file is called “My Clippings.txt.”