Kindle Tips

Amazon has announced that they will increase the fee for sending your personal documents to your Kindle — and apparently they’ll start charging for it at all!

Starting May 4, in addition to the existing list of supported file types (DOC, HTML, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TXT, AZW, MOBI, PRC), you can send RTF files to your Kindle email address for convenient wireless delivery. In addition to the existing experimental support of PDF, you can also send DOCX files for conversion. Some complex PDF and DOCX files might not format correctly on your Kindle.

We have also modified the fee associated with sending personal documents wirelessly to your Kindle. This fee is now based on the size of your file. The fee for Personal Document Service (via Whispernet) is 15 cents per megabyte rounded up to the next whole megabyte.

Until this point, Amazon’s official policy was to charge 10 cents — but formally and in practical terms, Amazon did not apply any charge.    In a meeting with agents, Dan Slater at Amazon announced that they didn’t charge for sending documents, and they expected never to do so.

Personally, I’m quite disappointed in this policy – and that they announced this over their (largely book publicity) blog, with no email sent to Kindle owners.

If Amazon does put this into place, I would expect at minimum these files to be converted in better formats — the metadata changed to reflect the author and title, chapter headings and a table of contents indicated, and other functionality edits available.   I would also hope that Amazon makes a better home converter for personal documents available – not just unofficially relying on Mobipocket’s PC only document creator (or Calibre for Macs).

From Gear Diary via Publishers Lunch

Lots of interesting chatter about the Kindle these last weeks.

First, TechCrunch says “240,000 Kindles have been shipped since November, according to a source close to Amazon with direct knowledge of the numbers.”

However — this is also the blog that says that a second version of the Kindle is due in October 2008 … in multiple colors.   Honestly, I’m skeptical of these claims — also of a third model coming next year, or possibly for the holiday season, in an 8.5×11″ size.

This October projection has been quoted widely over the internet, but there seems to be only the one source – “an undentified insider.”  However, Jeff Bezos said in May that the next version wasn’t that near.

I’ve been asked a number of times in the last few weeks what I know of the new version of the Kindle.   Don’t get me wrong, I’d LOVE to see a new version, and particularly one with an improved interface and refresh rate.  (particularly with improvements for making and exporting notes, sorting files in folders, and better page counts)

Is Bezos pulling a Steve Jobs, not saying that there’ll be a new version until it’s ready to hit the market? possibly — since a statement that a new version will be released three months from now will likely cut the sale during the next three months by quite a bit.

It’s hard to know.  I’d advise that anyone who has a reader already should hang onto it for the next few months, and see what happens in October.  However, if you’re considering getting a Kindle as your first ebook reader — it truly is an amazing device, and I can’t recommend it enough.

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There’s also an interesting article in the Financial Times about the Kindle’s supremecy – and Sony’s major stumble with their ereader, in terms of marketing and getting a jump on their rival’s technology:

The danger for Sony is that it is already too late. Amazon has grabbed the market-leading position from Sony and established a stronger brand, which is what happened with the iPod and the Walkman. Sony never managed to recover, despite trying repeatedly to match Apple.

What do you think?

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.”