My Kindle Stuff

Well, it was a few days late, but I finally got my Kindle today.  As I knew I would be, I love the updated screen, the new button placement and smaller form factor.  Looking at the Kindle 2 and Kindle 3 side-by-side shows off my new Kindle to advantage.

There are a plethora of positive reviews, comparison videos and comparison reviews out there so I won’t go into any of those details.  You can google for those, or if you want a really thorough video comparison, Len Edgerly of The Kindle Chronicles has a great one.  Unfortunately, I am going to talk about the features that I don’t feel are an improvement, and a couple of items that I think should be changed right away.

Number Keys

(Edit:  I’ve been advised to hold down the ALT key to do the below, but I’m still not happy with the removal of the numbered row)

At first, I was resigned to accessing numbers via the SYM key.  It would be a little inconvenient, but I was willing to overlook it to have the smaller size. Not any longer.  The lack of a row for the numbers means that if you plan on storing more than a couple of pages of content, you are almost forced to use collections and it is an example of bad design.

Example:

On the Kindle 2, if you have a lot of pages, you can use the number keys to enter the number, and click to go to that page.

On the Kindle 3, you have to enter a letter, click the DEL key to remove it and then use the SYM key to enter the page number.  If Amazon has a UI expert, that one definitely slipped thru the cracks, but I’m pretty sure this can be solved with a software update adding the Go To item to the Home menu.

Wi-Fi/3G

There is no way to turn either off separate from the other.  Turning off wireless means both get turned off.  This is a pretty minor issue, but without an explanation of how/when 3G and/or Wi-Fi are accessed by the device, I’m left wondering how either setting on is affecting battery life.

Headphone/Speaker jack

Why, oh why is this on the bottom of the device?  If my device is on a stand or in my lap, that means that I’m going to have to bend the cord at an angle that will eventually break the wire.  It belongs back on the top or even on the side of the Kindle.

Volume bar

See above reaction.  This too should be moved back to the side of the device or up on top.  My vote is the side, but I’ll be happy with either.

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Okay–done with the griping.  On to the things that I love.

Font Settings

Yay for the sans serif font!  I won’t need to use the font hack any longer. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for those awful topaz formatted books, but we can’t have everything.

Weight

I know that some of the reviews stated that you can’t tell the difference in weight between the Kindle 2 and Kindle 3, but I can.  And I know that anyone with weight sensitive hands and/or wrists will appreciate the marked (to me, anyway) difference in weight.

Top Bar

When you 0pen a book, you can see the Title, Time and wireless status on the top bar, but as soon as you turn the page, they disappear to make more room for the text of the book.  At first, I didn’t like it , but as I’ve been reading, I appreciate the extra text. I wish it worked the same on waking the device up.  If you read more than one book at a time, you won’t know (without skimming the page) which book you are in.

Contrast

This has been said over and over, but it is so improved that it can’t be overstated.  The Kindle 3 screen is very crisp; I can’t get over how good it looks.

All in all, I am very happy and satisfied with the Kindle 3.  Amazon did a lot of small improvements that really add up to a big improvement overall.  Well that’s it for me, its back to reading on Mr. Slate.  He’s naked now, but I’m expecting the Amazon cover tomorrow.

I ordered the Kindle 3 as soon as I saw it was available for purchase.  I was lucky enough to get picked for an Amazon marketing video (which they haven’t used yet) so I’d gotten a early preview of the Kindle 3 and knew prior to the announcement that I had to get one.  I ordered the 3G Graphite model and am eagerly awaiting its arrival although still undecided on covers.  I don’t know whether to get the Amazon cover or wait to see what M-edge puts out as I’ve been using M-edge covers since my Kindle 1 days.

But I digress.  Here is my issue.  I’ll be either selling my Kindle 2 or giving it to my hubby.  I don’t have as much of an issue if I keep it in the family, but if I sell it?  What the heck am I supposed to do with my as-yet-unread Samples?  This may sound trivial, but I have 135 of them.  If only a few, I could just write the names down and call it a day, but with over a 100, I am faced with somewhat of a quandary.

After calling and a bit of back and forth with Kindle Customer Service, it’s been explained to me that while my collection of Samples (the name anyway) can be synched from one device to the other, the sample books themselves won’t be.  Heavy sigh…..Do I go thru them one by one and add to my wish list? Do I transfer them to the new device? Do I just forget them and rebuild a new list?  Frankly, I don’t want to just forget about them; I find books via Twitter links, Twitter and GoodReads recommendations, Amazon recommendations and just browsing. I don’t think that I’d ‘re-find’ many of the books in my Samples and I wouldn’t have added them if I didn’t think they’d be worth my time.

I hope you don’t have the same problem, but if you do, I have a couple of recommendations. Neither is fun, both are time-consuming, but I don’t believe there’s any other way to do it.  If you start now, you have a few days to get it done.

Add the books to a Wish List. This is the least techie way to transfer Samples.

• Go to your Amazon account and  create a new Wish List called Samples, if you don’t have one already. This is the only step that will require your computer
• On your Kindle, turn on the Wireless
• Highlight your Sample book and click right on the 5-way
• On the next page, use the 5-way and highlight Book Description

• On the Book Decription page, use the 5-way to highlight Add to Wish List

• Click Enter on the 5-way and the next page shown will allow you to choose a Wish List
• Highlight the Wish List that you want to add the Sample to and press enter on the 5-way

• Click to confirm
• If successful you’ll get a box that states the book was added

• Click to close the confirmation box
• Click the Back button 4 times to get back to your Sample collection or if you haven’t created a collection, just click the Home button.
• Rinse and repeat for all of your Samples

If you want a quicker way and feel comfortable when navigating around your Kindle files and directory structure, you can screenshot each page of your Samples, pull the screenshots onto your computer and then review and add to your next Kindle as needed.  This is made easier if you have your Samples in a single collection, but if they are mixed in with your books, the Sample lable next to each one make them easily identifiable.

Create a Screenshot Book list/Transfer Sample files to your New Kindle

You can copy the Sample files from your Kindle to your computer and then to the new Kindle.

• Connect your Kindle to your PC via the USB
• Navigate to the documents folder on the device
• Do a search for EBSP in the documents folder
• Copy all files to a location on your computer
• Connect the 2nd Kindle and copy all the EBSP files into the documents folder

If you don’t need to bring over all your samples, you can create a screenshot list and transfer at your leisure or save for future uploading

• Open your Sample collection (or go to the first page that lists a Sample)
• Hold down Shift+ALT+G to take a screenshot of the page (Shift is the up arrow)
• Go to each of the pages in succession that contain Samples and take a screenshot
• Transfer the screenshots to your computer (Instructions for Windows)
• Connect the Kindle to your computer
• In Windows Explorer, open the Kindle documents directory and copy all .GIF files to your computer
• The files are given random names similar to screen_shot-<numbers>.gif

• The screenshot will list all the books and Samples as shown on your Kindle.  You can transfer the books listed in the screenshot to your Kindle either via the above method (easiest) or the Amazon site from your computer or search for them from your Kindle

I hope this helps if you’re like me and have a lot of Samples.  The above methods will work on all Kindle devices, Kindle 1 thru 3 and including the DX models.  As of now, unfortunately, you cannot organize your content into collections on the Kindle Anywhere applications for your iPhone/iPad, PC/Mac, Blackberry and other smartphones.  The Kindle for PC app notes that library organization is being worked on–perhaps in the future, we’ll have an easier way to deal with Sample from device to device.

(Update: This method does not work since the 2.5 update. Hopefully there will be a manual way to do this in the future)

I have written a couple of times on how Amazon needed to have some way for customers to update their ‘Furthest Page Read’ settings without going thru the hassle of a phone call or email to Customer Service. Thanks to dyingc from the MobileReads forum, there is a way to do it yourself although somewhat clunky.

Here’s the issue -

When using Whispersync, staying on the correct page across multiple devices works great–until you decide to re-read your content.

You read thru a book on either your Kindle and your iPhone (or another Kindle).  First time thru, you stay in sync on any device.  Later you decide to either re-read or restart the book. Unfortunately, the ‘Sync to Furthest Page Read’ will always be the furthest page you got to, so your furthest read page remains at either the end of the book or the furthest page you got to and Whispersync will be let you know when you open that book on the device.  You can tell it not to go to the furthest page and continue reading.  Go to the other device and try to sync, and you will be taken to the furthest page read, not the place you were at when you stopped reading on the other device.

This is a problem in a couple of ways.  The simplest is that it makes it hard to re-read or restart any book and use Whispersync to keep your place on more than one device.

Solution – Reset the Furthest Page Read
Use the same device for all of the steps below before opening the book on a different one, the below example is using a single Kindle

1. Set the Synchronization off  on your Amazon Account (Go to Amazon -> Your Account -> Manage Your Kindle -> Manage Kindle Device Synchronization -> click the “Turn the Synchronization off” button to turn off the synchronization)
2. Wait about a minute, then exit & re-enter your book
3. Go to the beginning of your book on the Kindle
4. Sync to the furthest  page. If it tells you that you’re on the furthest location, you’re good to go. You must get this exact message “Already at furthest read location”, If not, see 4.1. 
   1. Select Cancel on the sync message that is displayed, exit and re-enter the book to attempt the reset again.  (I think that the Amazon databases have to get reset-thus the delay; in any case, it always works for me on the 2nd attempt). Proceed to Step #5 if you get a message “Already at furthest read location”
5. Turn on the synchronization setting on your Account – your Furthest Page read will be reset to your new location.
6. On your other devices–if further along in the book, you will have to go to the beginning of the book, but once done the Furthest Page Read location will sync with your Kindle.

Like I said, its not the most elegant solution, but it works.

A lot of excitement has generated around the announcement of a Kindle 2.5 update that will bring long awaited features to our Kindles, but it seems like the update for the Kindle for PC app has gone unnoticed.

Amazon announced 4/30/2010 that an update for Kindle for PC is available.  It includes:

• Full screen reading
• Background color and brightness controls
• The ability to create and edit notes and highlights in your books

They also have a Future Improvements page that lists upcoming features that they are ‘thinking’ about:

• Search
• Two page reading mode
• Zoom and rotate images
• Collections

The newly added features for Kindle for PC will soon be available for the Mac as well.

Amazon was busy last night adding pages on how to use the new features in the Kindle 2.5 update.  For a synopsis of those features, see the post here.  Although the Amazon Kindle Help pages have been updated, as of this post, the downloadable Kindle Guide has not.

Edit: Right now a few lucky ‘beta’ users are getting the upgrade.  Who knows, turn on your wireless and maybe you be able to join the crowd

Organizing your Kindle

After creation, you can add items, rename or delete a collection without changing your document or book.  Collections seem to only apply to Books and documents and it looks like periodicals and blogs can’t be added to them, however books can be added to multiple collections..  Similar to your clippings and notes, collections will be available on other Kindles, but it doesn’t look like they will be available yet on other devices unless Amazon is using the word ‘Kindles’ to mean Kindle devices like the PC/MAC, iPhone/iPad or BlackBerry. Importing a collection will NOT add the book to your device at the same time.

Popular Highlights

Amazon will let you opt-in to their Annotate Backup feature and your highlights will be added to the list of highlights for that book if two other customers have overlapped the same passage.  Other users will see those highlights with a grey dashed underline when reading the book or on the kindle.amazon.com page.  You can also share your highlights and notes on Facebook and Twitter after you link those accounts to your Amazon account.

Fonts and Text Sizes

The Kindle will have a total of 8 fonts sizes compared to the current 6.  You’ll also be able to zoom any images and the zoom will utilize the portrait or landscape orientation as needed when increasing the image.  PDFs can now be increased based upon set percentages and a ‘fit to screen’ option.

Kindle Password

Along with setting a password, you’ll be able to add a password hint.  Should you forget the password, Customer Support can help you reset it.  Self reset of the password will wipe the device.

You can see all the details on any of the new features on the Amazon website.