Our Kindle Readers

I stick a picture on the Kindle to show which side is front and which way is up

comments on “The Kindle Reader” Hayden coming from you, I take this recommendation seriously. On its own, I rather loathe the entire idea and so have never actually experienced/seen one. So my bias is clearly seen. John Myste I am with Hayden. Thus far, I like the clutter and presence of books. I like to feel the pages, turn them, bookmark them, make notes that I keep between the leaves. I may break down one day, but not yet. When you do publish your final version, of your book, I want to know. I would love to see lots of your thoughts on spirituality and God included. No one can argue with a book, which often makes it better. A brilliant thought can be watered down with mediocre protests, which then demand attention and become part of “the thing.” A book is a good way to circumvent this problem. Bryan M. White Somewhere in the back of my mind I think there’s a lingering fear that owning a Kindle would set off a chain of events beyond my control where I would finally be led to inevitable conclusion that my books are superfluous and then I would have to get rid of them and then fill the empty space on my shelves with ceramic cows. However, the portability of the device is enticing, and the self-publishing possibilities that you mentioned are definitely intriguing. That’s the often unheard other side of the whole “print media is losing to the electronic media” argument. Perhaps, but as you point out, it’s also making the market more accessible to upstarts like us. You mention the “stigma of self-publishing”, but I imagine that if a book enjoys even a moderate success as a Kindle version, then that might open up more possibilities for print publication. Yes, definitely something to keep in mind. Vincent Bryan, I think your stories in the Encyclopedia of Counted Sheep will make perfect fodder for a Kindle book. If you like, I could make the book for you, now that I know how to do it. Vincent John, the book tries to mention God and spirituality as rarely as possible, though in one sense it is about nothing else. I shall however inform you if and when there is ever a “final version”. Perhaps i will compromise and tell you when the next published version appears, but you’d have to act quick because I might take it down 24 hours later, as I usually do. Vincent Hayden, you sound ripe for conversion, like Paul on the road to Damascus. John Myste When I read articles on the web that are any length at all, if I know I am going to read the whole thing, I print them out, which I know is not the most environmentally friendly thing to do, but reading an electronic device is usually pretty painful. Maybe my mind will open later. It took me years to embrace text messaging and blogging, but now I do them. Bryan M. White Really? That doesn’t sound like too bad an idea. I have a few other stories I haven’t posted on there too, as well as a few that are kind of too long to put up there. John, I have done the same, printed things out to read away from the wretched one-eyed monster. And I have felt guilty about it too, using up that paper and ink. Yesterday I broke through that barrier. I downloaded a paper in .pdf format, quite a complex one, a reprint from the MIT Press Journals with inset illustrations, references and footnotes. I sent it to my Kindle and though it was reformatted, it still captured most of it, and readably too. I didn’t have to go through any manual process, either. All I had to do was email it to my kindle as an attachment, with Convert in the subject line. Behind the scenes, Amazon has an automatic conversion. When it’s my own document, I use more controllable methods to convert, using a program called Kindlegen, which Amazon don’t promote, as it’s not a Windows thing. It runs off the command prompt, or as we used to say, runs in DOS only. Vincent OK Bryan, the next steps, and the impetus for this, are up to you gentleeye I’m convinced it’s a lack of consistent readability. I’m not! The absence of feedback is far more likely due to the feebleness/fickleness of your reviewers. Well, this one, anyway. I am not only reading (and thoroughly enjoying, all over again) your book, but also annotating as I go. It’s going slowly, because my life is rather overwhelmed with other stuff! CIngram It’s great to have real books around, the smell of them, the feel, the colours and the names recognizable from long familiarity as you idle gaze at your shelves (or in my case, as often as not, the floor, the coffee table or the top of the rabbit’s cage), and to know that you possess them in a comfortable, physical sense, and that they can surround you and be a presence in that part of the world where you are most at home, but…Mrs Ingram gave me a Kindle for Christmas, and it now has much of my library in it, at least most of what I might conceivably want to look at in the near future. I flick from book to book, from article to article, look things up, jot things down, switch to PG Wodehouse when the eyes start to close and the mind can’t manage anything more taxing, and now I can do all this anywhere I want, in bed, on a train, on a park bench, when I should be working, above the Atlantic, in meetings etc, with ease and convenience. I don’t have to agonise about which books to take and which to leave behind whenever I go anywhere, which to me makes a huge difference. Guiltily remembering I still owe you a review of the first version of your book, I note that I have it on the Kindle, and I am getting there. Bryan M. White I’m going to do some looking into it on the Amazon site, and think about how I’d want to approach it. Definitely sounds like a good idea. I didn’t even know someone could publish their own Kindle books. I truly appreciate you bringing this to my attention. I’ll let you know what kind of progress I’m making, and if I’m completely confused by the whole thing and need help. Thanks Vincent Gentleeye, thanks for this. I have been very dissatisfied with the book lately, and realize it needs some loving care from its author. One of the main inputs now must be a completely new Preface, which will more simply relate where the material comes from, why it is presented the way that it is. Not telling the reader how to interpret, but offering a series of pointers to some of the intermingled themes Vincent CIngram, I agree with you everything you say about the books. Everyone I meet goes on as if buying an e-reader is like committing adultery behind a real book’s back, destroying a faithful marriage & throwing away a thousand-year heritage. There is another thing which I miss about real books, and that is the spread of two pages in front of you and the sense you get of knowing where to look when you’re searching for a passage—that it’s 2/3 of the way down the right-hand page. Which page, though? With Kindle you can bookmark, highlight, annotate, search for a given text fragment, and look up any word in the dictionary, just by putting the cursor against it. Or hyperlink, if the links have been put in the text.Yes we miss the old ways. But we still have the old books, too! Vincent Bryan, I’m still working on “the book of the blog”, but am now so enamoured of Kindle’s features, that I’m now planning to publish on this medium alone; especially because it can link to the Web, and thus back to the original blog, i.e. this place. Such arguments could work the same for you, if for example you did decide to anthologize The Encyclopedia of Counted Sheep. Rebb Vincent, I have been going back and forth about purchasing the Kindle. I know that if I buy any e-reader, it will be this one. I’m glad to hear that you are enjoying it. It makes me feel better about taking that step. I have come to realize that owning a Kindle does not mean I have to get rid of all of my books, but perhaps there are some that I no longer need; and then of course there will always be the special books that have a permanent home here, even in this land of impermanence. Vincent Rebb, I know one has this sense of betrayal, when considering buying the Kindle. But of course one will continue to cherish books, and buy them too. You can’t get everything you want in an e-book. Cost is always a consideration with me. I use the public library, not by browsing its shelves but logging on to the county library’s website, which also links to a wider source of borrowable books. I use Amazon and Alibris for their second-hand offerings, which are often absurdly cheap.there may be books I no longer need, but I mourn the ones which I sold off to a second-hand shop, and often want to consult them again, even to the point where I would consider buying one or two of them back! Then there are the precious books which mysteriously disappeared. I probably lent or gave them, and forgot all about it. Or perhaps a visitor quietly “borrowed” one. Kindle is peculiar. There is one standard font, with few variations, and all books therefore appear in a similar format, so that you have the opportunity to delve deeper into the actual words, for words are all you have. (Actually when you are writing your own book for Kindle you can embed links and pictures too!)Having a kindle makes you read more, books and e-books both Rebb Vincent, I hadn’t considered the library, but now that you’ve jogged my memory, yes, that option is available at our public libraries too. I appreciate your follow up comments. It seemed to give me the extra spark to move forward, so I placed my order and am now eagerly awaiting my new kindle! I might even finish a few of the unfinished books I have to read on my new e-reader. “Having a kindle makes you read more, books and e-books both.” I think this last kernel from you is what spoke to me. I am so excited. I have already found some free books on the Amazon Kindle store that I will be ready to download when it arrives