Kindle Tips

Publishers Marketplace reports that this Wednesday, May 6th, Amazon is holding a press conference – presumably to announce a new Kindle

Amazon will hold a press conference on Wednesday morning at a Pace University building (on the site of old NYT offices), presumably to debut a version of Kindle with a larger screen. At one point the media had decided the rumored bigger Kindle would be aimed at the educational/textbook market, but now they’ve decided it’s focused on displaying magazines and newspapers, trying to beat Plastic Logic and other devices in development to market. “People briefed on the plans” tell the NYT that the New York Times is “expected to be involved in the introduction of the device,” but a spokesperson for the New York Times declines to comment.

(however,  Pub Marketplace links to an NYT page which doesn’t mention the news conference at all — so your guess of its accuracy is as good as mine.)

Here’s hoping for some much-needed improvements to the Kindle, including:

1. Notes organization:
   1. All notes, bookmarks, and clippings are mixed together in the text file called “My Clippings” by the date entered;  I’d like to see them sorted by book and book page (or even chapter heading!).
   2. All notes are cited only by location in the text.
   3. I’d like to email my notes on one document to myself – or otherwise retrieve them without jumping through the hoops of importing my clippings
2. Book organization:  I have 14 pages of books right now.  I’d like to put them in folders:  new submissions, client books, pleasure reading.
3. Page numbers:  My colleague would very much like to be able to tell how long a book or proposal is – while within the document as well as looking at the Home screen.    Book page numbering is not yet obsolete, when we as readers go from kindle to book to computer screen every day!
4. Chapter headings on our own documents would also be useful. Particularly if page numbering isn’t possible.
5. Faster text entry.  The keyboard has a painfully pronounced delay, which makes making notes difficult.
6. Gifts: I’d like to be able to send a gift to another Kindle user
7. I’d like it to be easier to switch credit cards for Kindle purchases – even to be able to on the device itself.

and an anti-wishlist:

1. Do NOT increase the cost for sending your own documents — particularly if none of the above innovations for working on our own documents are made available.

Addendum:  news of the announcement can be found here, at All Things D.

Welcome, new Kindletips readers!    If you’re a new Kindle user, here’s some helpful posts that you may want to see:

Kindle Shortcuts

Importing My Clippings (obtaining your own notes is a rather unwieldy task)

Putting your own pictures on the Kindle :

Adding pdfs to your Kindle:

And my personal wishlist of tips and tweaks:

1. Notes organization:
   1. All notes, bookmarks, and clippings are mixed together in the text file called “My Clippings” by the date entered;  I’d like to see them sorted by book and book page (or even chapter heading!).
   2. All notes are cited only by location in the text.
   3. I’d like to email my notes on one document to myself – or otherwise retrieve them without jumping through the hoops of importing my clippings
2. Book organization:  I have 14 pages of books right now.  I’d like to put them in folders:  new submissions, client books, pleasure reading.
3. Page numbers:  My colleague would very much like to be able to tell how long a book or proposal is – while within the document as well as looking at the Home screen.    Book page numbering is not yet obsolete, when we as readers go from kindle to book to computer screen every day!
4. Chapter headings on our own documents would also be useful. Particularly if page numbering isn’t possible.
5. Faster text entry.  The keyboard has a pronounced delay, which makes making notes difficult.
6. Gifts: I’d like to be able to send a gift to another Kindle user
7. I’d like it to be easier to switch credit cards for Kindle purchases – even to be able to on the device itself.
8. Add Conde Nast magazines - including the New Yorker.  Newspapers are well represented in their availability on the Kindle, but magazines are not, yet.

Please feel free to add your own wishlist items or shortcuts to this list — and if you have any questions, our “research team” is happy to pursue new problems!

The New York Times blog reports a conversation with Craig Berman,

I wish i could organize my books into folders on my Kindle!  If it truly can hold 200 books, I’d think we could organize them in a better way than just “date added to kindle/date last looked at” or by title.

Ideally, what I’d LIKE to do is file them in folders:  pleasure reading, work reading — or two or three separate work folders, proposals and full manuscripts, and current clients’ new material.

Since I do show my Kindle off, I like to turn to something that a friend (or random stranger in the doctor’s office, like last night) might have heard of;  i don’t want to show them my manuscripts, or submissions that I’m considering … or that don’t think much of.   But if I’ve handed it to them, they can flip around my books all they want — which is fine, of course, but it changes the order I’ve been looking at all these books or proposals, so my material gets lost in page 3 or 4.

So when will I be able to keep my submissions and already published books in different folders?

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.)

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!

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.

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 the Kindle team to update their file conversion service to include chapter headings.

It would be wonderfully useful if, when I send a word or rtf file to my kindle address, and it includes a table of contents or just Chapter markings (Chapter 1, Chapter 10, at the beginning of pages) it arrived on my kindle with a built-in table of contents, or bookmarks made at each page beginning with “Chapter XX” page.