The guts of a new Kindle—plus K popularity stats, the K as a gift, annotations privacy issue, $9.95 10,000 K-book DVD, and sources of free books for K owners and others
One way to show reverence for a new gizmo is to take it apart and better understand how it works—at least if you know what you’re doing.
To the cheers of the Kindle News, an informative new blog, a company called Rapid Repair has done exactly that. Also of interest to Kindle owners:
–Customer reviews after 10 days, in KN. Update: I see the ratings are still in the three-star range. Let’s just hope that the owners will press Amazon for e-book standards and other measures so they can own their books for real. Meanwhile Mike Cane has pointed me to the news that a still-shrinkwrapped Kindle is selling for $999 on eBay. Not bad for a $400 machine. Meanwhile I see XOs also on sale on eBay (ethics issue?), although not commanding the same premium. No refection on the XO. It’s a different machine for a different market even though it, too, is interesting as an e-book reader.
–Want to give someone Kindle as gift?, in KN. You’ll probably want the gift to be associated with the recipient’s Amazon account, not yours.
–How many books are being added on Amazon Kindle Store? As of November 30, KN’s best estimate was an addition of 872 titles between November 27 and 30.
–Amazon on the issue of annotations, via Mike Cane. Yes, you can store them on other machines. That’s great. But I remain concerned about annotations being stored by Amazon itself regardless of people’s wishes. Note the following sentence on another Amazon page: “Deleting the ‘My Clippings’ file will not remove any notes, bookmarks, or highlights you’ve made.” So they linger forever? Potentially for federal snoops to read, either with legally or not (via hacking)? Or is there a way to make annotations and know that Amazon won’t capture them? Just how long do they remain on Amazon’s servers? I hope people will follow up and report the results. This is not a trivial issue.
–10,000-book DVD for Kindle/Mobipocket, from Silk Pagoda, a site owned by David Moynihan, who ran the late, much-missed Blackmask. Cost is $9.95. Titles range from classics to young adult lit. Yes, the Kindle can read nonencrypted Mobipocket. (Thanks, Sara!)
Of interest to new Kindle owners and others: Best Places to Get Free Books - The Ultimate Guide, in Friedbeef’s Tech, via Mike. As I’d expect due to the number of books and the skill with which the mentions are organized, the multiformat Manybooks.net leads the list. Some other top mentions are of BookCrossing (p-books), LibraryElf (p), Scribd and World Public LiIbrary (mainly for PDF fans). I was disappointed not to see any mention of Feedbooks, which has been a leader in making books available in the .epub format.
And a reminder to Kindle owners: Directly or via Mobipocket format, you can get access to freebies in TXT, HTML and some other popular formats. You can use the memory card—and a USB cable, too?—to import these books without being charged by Amazon.
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