Comments on: Preliminary Thoughts from a two Kindle Household

By: juliet

juliet — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:40:58 +0000

How is kindle for people with visual problems. I know I can change the font size but what about the glare; the worst problem for me is the lighting on the screens. I can read read book print but sometime that is diffcult. Getting interesting large print editons can be expensive & diffcutlt. The good thing is books out of copyright is readily avaiable in large print.

By: LTEC

LTEC — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 03:54:14 +0000

Eric — Thanks.

Mike_K — How does Kindle handle the diagrams/photos of a medical text?

By: Mike_K

Mike_K — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 01:02:09 +0000

The Clancy novels, for example, are $6 per copy for the Kindle version. That’s paperback price. I susopect it will be market pricing as the medical textbooks I checked are close to (about 25% less than ) the hard copy price.

By: Bolie Williams IV

Bolie Williams IV — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:25:22 +0000

Firstly, paperbacks are still around, I almost exclusively buy them.

Second, my brief foray into pricing the Kindle & downloads found that the kindle downloads were pretty expensive compared to the paper boook and required the Kindle to utilize. I guess I’m old-fashioned, but I have trouble paying more for digital downloads than I would for a paper book (or even almost as much). It could be that my limited selection of books just happened to be the most expensive ones, though.

By: Roger L Simon

Roger L Simon — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:54:36 +0000

Kindle User, sorry you had to go dead tree, but glad you like the book. Regarding when Blacklisting will finally be on Kindle, that is out of my hands. It went via Encounter Books to Amazon – and the Amazon, as we know, is long.

I’ll certainly note on here the moment I know the schedule.

By: Mike_K

Mike_K — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:43:09 +0000

I meant to add that this novel, and the reason why I am rereading it ten years later, contains two major predictions of Clancy’s. One was flying a passenger jet into a building as a weapon, which is how it ends. The other is a nice description of the follies of programmed trading and how the stock market can be taken down with the derivatives. Clancy is a very good futurist. The story is about a war with Japan and the new George Friedman book, The Next 100 Years, predicts a war with Japan later this century.

By: Mike_K

Mike_K — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:39:30 +0000

I have had mine for a month now. My wife gave it to me a BD present in hopes that I would stop buying books. I love it, to her great satisfaction. I have noticed a couple of things. I’ve been reading Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor this weekend. They must have scanned the text because I notice that I’s and 1′s are interchanged. I’ve also noticed a few other such transpositions. It is very convenient for reading while lying in bed or on the coach; especially with a large book like this one. It usually returns to the same page when you set it aside and then start it up again. Sometimes, but not always, it will regress to the last major division a few pages prior to the page you left it at.

The books are downloaded via the Sprint network and I can buy a KIndle version of a book from my laptop and it will download the next time I turn on the KIndle. There appears to be a function for highlighting and taking notes but I have not used them.

One annoyance is the fact that I cannot loan the book without loaning the KIndle.

By: vb

vb — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:17:59 +0000

Is there a classy way to give a Kindle download as a gift? What will we do for stocking stuffers when Kindle rules the world?

By: Eric

Eric — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:10:52 +0000

I read with amusement your account of buying your wife a Kindle 2 so that you could have her old one, as I did precisely that same thing.

I don’t have an iPhone, but I’ve got the Kindle Reader software on my iPod touch, and it has (I believe) the same functionality, although it needs a wi-fi connection to synch with the online account. Anyway, I’m amazed at how easy it is to read books on what I previously considered to be a too-small screen. I’m on my third Kindle book, and about 90% of my reading has been done on the iPod.

In response to LTEC’s question about footnotes, the two books I’ve read thus far with footnotes have hyperlinks to each footnote. Each footnote then has a “return to text” link. Couldn’t be easier to navigate. However, I suspect it also depends on how the publisher did the conversion from the printed text. I understand that it’s up to the publisher to decide whether text will be left- or fully-justified.

The Kindle software also allows you to electronically bookmark a page that you might want to return to later.

Roger, did you and your wife combine your Kindle accounts? We did, so that we could share all the books in the library.

I agree with the premise that e-book readers, when done properly, increase the amount of reading one does, and that’s got to be a good thing. In my opinion, Amazon has done the Kindle very well. Authors around the world should rejoice!

By: Kindle User

Kindle User — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 23:58:08 +0000

So you are going to put your book “Blacklisting Myself” on the Kindle! I wanted to download your book on my kindle, but I had to buy the hard copy. I have gotten so used to being able to change the type size on the Kindle and reading with my hands free, that it is an adjustment to read the real thing. I am half way through your book and thoroughly enjoying it, but if it became available on Amazon Kindle store I would download it immediately.