Kindle Tips

Seth Godin has some interesting thoughts on what the Kindle is like, and how it’s effective.  Go read the whole piece, it’s worth it!

Here are some of his wishlist items for the Kindle:

4. The Kindle does a fine job of being a book reader, and a horrible job of actually improving the act of reading a book. This is a surprising design choice, I think, and a mistake. Here are three simple examples of how non-fiction books on the Kindle could be better, not just cheaper and thinner:

–Let me see the best parts of the book as highlighted by thousands of other readers.
–Let me see notes in the margin as voted up, Digg-style, by thousands of other readers.
–Let me interact with hyperlinks and smart connections not just within the book but across books

I can think of ten others, and so can you. Instead of making this a dead end (like a book) they could have made it a connector (like the web).

Word processing didn’t work because it was typing but a little cheaper. It worked because it was better than typing. Email didn’t work because it was mail but a little faster. It worked because it was fundamentally better than snail mail…

(full disclosure: Seth Godin is a friend of KindleTips.)

Now that I’ve loaded some of my own images onto my Kindle for a screensaver, my suspicions that the screensaver had a bug has been confirmed. My kindle screensaver rarely flips the images.  I’ve recently spent some time looking at it, and it’s been on the one same image for at least the last five-seven minutes — in fact, I found it staying on one image for 17 minutes, which had me concerned enough to write the fabulous Kindle Support team today!

They responded with a further explanation of how the screensavers actually work:

The screen saver does not normally update constantly.  The screen saver may change images when it is pinged by the wireless service, however, it will not always do so.  If you experienced a lot of image adjustment previously it may be that your wireless connection was on, and the device was always being pinged.  In any case it sounds as if your device is still behaving normally.  On the Kindles that we have available here, the image typically adjusts once every hour or so, sometimes with a longer delay.

Interesting, no?

Does anyone else have this problem?

I can also see white lines from text through the image.

I also asked about this, which they call “ghosting”:

…”ghost” images of previous pages still being viewable on the current screen.  The electronic ink that the Kindle uses can be thought of much like an etch-a-sketch’s screen.  On occasion the ink will not be properly removed and the new image will appear with the ghost of an old image behind it.

To remedy this it is suggested that you rapidly flip through pages, or reset the device.

I wonder what’s going on.  I suppose i should probably time it, to see if it ever flips, but I’m too worried about doing actual damage to it!

I find all this fascinating. (call me a geek.)

I’m answering more questions from our fabulous readers today!

I’ve now had my Kindle long enough to wish that I could put my own images onto the page that is displayed when the machine goes to sleep.  As much as I admire Virginia Woolf and John Steinbeck, it would be nice to be able to put different pictures in their place.  Is there any chance for this to happen at some point?

Absolutely!    I’ve found these instructions from MobileRead’s Kindle forum;  I’ve tested them myself, and they seem to be working just fine.

First:

The maximum size for bookplate screensavers for the Kindle can be 800 pixels high by 600 pixels wide. The maximum size for Kindle images INSIDE books is 550 pixels high by 450 pixels wide.   The image files can’t be larger than 64kb, so aim for below 60kb.

Make the images greyscale and save them as GIF/JPG files (though I’m told .png works too.) color images don’t look so well, again due to low contrast.

High-contrast images look best, due to the Kindle display’s limited dynamic range. Boost the contrast on your images.

Resize, crop, and convert your image to black-and-white on your computer.

Now that you’ve got your files, you have to put them onto the Kindle using your USB cable.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here are the Amazon-authorized Kindle shortcuts**, posted today on Amazon’s Kindle Blog:

As you’re reading your content:
Alt + B = bookmark
Alt + T = spell out time
Alt + Next Page = Jump ahead by 5% go forward to next annotation or “chunk” of text
Alt + Prev Page = Jump back by 5% go back to previous annotation or “chunk” of text

In “Home”:
Alt + T = show time
Number keys = jump to corresponding page in the Home Menu
Alphabet keys = jump to corresponding page from alpha-sorted Home Menu

Search (push the Search bar):
@store = store search shortcut
@web = Web search shortcut (Google)
@wiki = Wikipedia search shortcut
@time = show current date and time

Font (aA options)
J = show/hide justification options

Audio Player:
Alt + F = next song

At any time, you’re able to put your Kindle to sleep and wake it up with Alt + aA.

More shortcuts to come in a little while.
** however — Amazon is wrong! they said “Alt + Next Page = go forward to next annotation or “chunk” of text”, which does NOT WORK: it jumps you forward 5% of the length of the book, but it does NOT jump you to the next annotation!

Most of us in this business can take one look at a printed manuscript or proposal, and guess at the page count with remarkable accuracy.   (My funny illustration of that will follow.)    Or when you get a Word attachment, it’s easy to open the file, and look see the page count on the screen.    Either way, you get a manuscript, and you know whether it’s a 600 pager, or a quick read.

Not so on the Kindle.   Have I got a 20 page proposal, or an 80 page proposal?   Is it a subway ride, or a morning’s work?

We’ve found a good fix.   Before my assistant emails the document to my Kindle, she’ll add a line of text to the title page:  40 page book proposal.   Partial ms., 150 pp.    Final manuscript, 380 pages.   Right away, I know what I’ve got.   And when I glance at the Kindle progress bar, I can guess how many pages I have to go.

OK, here my story about knowing the page count just from the thickness.   Years ago, a colleague was giving me the recipe for her baked cheese puff appetizers (they were awesome) and trying to explain how thick to roll the dough.   Needing a visual, she peeled off a few pages of the manuscript she was holding.  “This thick,” she said.   From then on, the recipe instruction was “Roll to the thickness of 30 pages.”

If I can find that recipe, I’ll post it

Wow, this is catching on. I recently went to my agents’ lunch — a monthly gathering of six or eight of us, where we exchange gossip, share suggestions, and talk about kids & parents & real estate – and found four Kindle users among the six of us present that day. Of the remaining two, one was clearly weakening. (You know who you are, Miriam – get with it!) The sixth…well, I am a defender of the printed book myself. We must have spent 15 minutes of our lunch on the subject, and picked up a few tips from each other.

Like these:

Pagination: This is the big one among those of us who read manuscripts — there’s no easy way to convert the Kindle “location” to page number, beyond a rough approximation; page numbers in a Word document do not appear. How do you work with that? Here are some ideas we shared:

• Our friend Jane found a workaround: she adds an occasional page number to the text of the document, i.e. you write “PAGE 25″ at the beginning of p 25, and so on every twenty-five pages thereafter. Or every ten pages if you like… It’s a bit of work, but at least it gives you a rough idea when you need to share your notes with the author.
• Shana has another way we’ve mentioned earlier: she bookmarks the first page of each chapter, so you know later that the note you made is near the beginning of chapter five, for instance.
• Jane also described discussing a manuscript with the author over the phone. She looked at her Notes, and gave the author a keyword (or phrase) from the corresponding paragraph. The author did a search on her Word document, and off they went.
• Joy needed to read a potential client’s book over the weekend, before meeting with him on Monday. She was in the country; the book was in her office, but she was able to buy and download the Kindle edition in seconds. (David, check the next royalty statement!)

Maybe we’ll have a few more after next month’s lunch….

We’ve gotten another question: how does the Kindle handle .pdf files?

Amazon says that

PDF conversion is experimental. The experimental category represents the features we are working on to enhance the Kindle experience even further. You can email your PDFs wirelessly to your Kindle. Due to PDF’s fixed layout format, some complex PDF files might not format correctly on your Kindle.

We here at KindleTips headquarters did some testing to see what this would look like. (the photos are fuzzy, but I hope you can get the idea! iphone camera + kindle is far from perfect.)

here’s a pdf of a book sent to Amazon’s Kindle converters:

as you see, the table of contents didn’t come out quite right — but the text came out just fine. Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Robichaux, a Kindle owner wrote on his blog:

The price is now $359, so I e-mailed them to ask for a price credit– which they promptly issued. That $40 will buy me at least four more books, O happy day.

You too can shoot Amazon customer support an e-mail asking for a price credit, just follow the link and then press the yellow contact us button on the right hand side. Good luck, and let us know if you got your $40 back!

Source: robichaux.net via Blog Kindle

So I saw another agent at the gym today, as I ran on the elliptical machine, and he headed for the other side of the room. After he passed, I thought of grabbing him and saying, “Hey, do you have a Kindle yet?  Because I see you bringing manuscripts to the gym, and really — you ought to get one. You’ll be so pleased with it. You can email manuscripts to yourself, have everything whenever you want it — and save your back and the printing costs at once!!”

But I didn’t want to interrupt his running/reading, and I had my own kindle reading to get back to at home.  (no, Stuart, I haven’t brought it to the gym yet — I don’t think I want to know how it deals with
sweat!)

Dan: I’m talking to you! You won’t regret it!
(handy link to amazon to your right – just click the picture!!)