Should we be able to print books from the Kindle for our personal use?
Can you print an e-book from Kindle when it’s connected to your desktop machine with USB? In general, no, you can’t—but you can do so by copying text in “My Clippings.” Here’s how:
- First, you need to highlight the text you want to copy while reading a book on the Kindle. You’ll see a box around the highlighted text. This will copy the text to a file on the Kindle in My Clippings.
- Now connect your Kindle to your computer through the USB, and copy the My Clippings file to your computer.
- Open the file and print it.
Of course, this way you can’t print the whole book. You have to do it page by page. And for sure, this isn’t convenient. So what can you do? You can’t do anything unless there is some hack by someone. Now the question is, Do you really want to print an e-book that you read on Kindle? Should we have the privilege to do so?
When we didn’t have any dedicated e-book devices, we could print an e-book in PDF or in other formats, if not the whole book. Now, with dedicated devices, we have been restricted to do a lot of things. With Sony reader, you can, at least, read your purchased e-book on desktop; and with Kindle you lose that. Why should we give up so much freedom? Shouldn’t we raise our voice?
February 3rd, 2008 at 9:44 am
I don’t think I’d ever print a whole book, but what I would really like is to be able to ‘lend’ the book by giving up the license to someone. With print books, I lend them all the time. (Right now, if there’s a book I think I’ll want to lend someone, I buy it in hard copy.)
February 3rd, 2008 at 6:50 pm
What if you’re camping and you fear running out of, or losing, batteries and you know you wont be near electricity? What if the book is essential for research, and you need to be sure you have a hard copy? What if you’re a writer and you want to do some serious annotation in the margins? What if the e-book is a textbook and as crunch time comes, you know you want to yellow-highlight? What do you do if you go up to your lake cottage and like to read on the dock under the full sun, and don’t want to risk dropping it in the drink? What if you’re the type that falls asleep reading in the tub?
Anyone heard anything about the iRiver e-reader?