Kindle admission
I have a Kindle DX, which I have not been using. I don’t know why exactly: the screen had lost some rows and columns of pixels, and had gradually gotten darker, and ultimately I couldn’t even read the thing.
I called Amazon, but it’s a couple of years old (out of warranty). However, they sold me a replacement at $90, which I went for, and I must admit that the new one’s display is wonderfully crisp.
When I got it, I had to reload books from the archive—and I think at some point Amazon is going to have to give us better tools to organize our ebooks so that we can efficiently find and retrieve them (and I hope that they get some good librarians involved: those people know plenty about organizing and retrieving information collected in books). At any rate, I started rediscovering things about getting documents sent to my Kindle (via Instapaper.com, for example), and I got organized enough to enter my Kindle’s email address in my address book (under the name “Kinny”, which I rather like) and try sending a document to that address so I could read a long article on my Kindle instead of my laptop. (There’s a small fee for this.)
It worked like a charm: I copied the long Wikipedia article on “Loyalty”, pasted it into a MS Word document, cleaned it up just a little, saved it, and emailed it to Kinny (Amazon’s Manage Your Kindle pages gives all the specifics), and lo! there it is.
This is going to be quite useful now that I’m into it again. Instapaper.com can handle most of the articles I encounter on the Web (magazine and newspaper articles, for example), and the other stuff I can just email to Kinny.
I’m sort of excited to get into it again.
This sort of drifting away and then rediscovering an old interest and becoming enthusiastic again has happened over and over again in my life. It’s why I keep most of my Esperanto library around, for example—I’ve gotten reinvolved in that three or four times. Go is the same way. Indeed all my interests seem to go through (and, who knows?, perhaps require) a fallow period before I am up for re-engaging.
Consider the Kindle re-engaged.
There is only a fee if you email yourself the article via 3G. If you do it via wifi, there is no charge. If you want to make sure that it is delivered free/via wifi, change your kindle email addres to @free.kindle.com
TYD
13 November 2011 at 5:41 am
Unfortunately, mine is the Kindle DX: no wi-fi capability. Wi-fi would be very nice.
LeisureGuy
13 November 2011 at 5:59 am
Wow, I never realized that about the DX — I knew it had 3G and just assumed it had WiFi as well. I have a WiFi only kindle and it has generally worked just hunkydorey (the only exception is the non-syncing with other devices when I am not on wifi, but that is small potatoes).
TYD
13 November 2011 at 6:04 am
I agree. At the time, there was no wi-fi for any of the Kindles (at time of original purchase, a couple of years ago—when the DX was first released). Were I getting one today, I would go with WiFi-only.
LeisureGuy
13 November 2011 at 6:11 am
I am just surprised that they have never added it given the price point of the DX. Now that some books come with audio/video add ons that can only be downloaded via wifi (or hooking up to your computer) it seems a natural progression for the model.
TYD
13 November 2011 at 7:46 am
Have you tried Calibre, http://calibre-ebook.com/? it’s not bad at organizing a library it also has the capability of converting different formats and importing files directly to the Kindle.
If you are on a Mac, you can also use Pages, just create the document and then use file > export > ePub format. After that, import the file to Calibre and sync.
Lucas
15 November 2011 at 1:06 pm