[clue-talk] Kindle 2

Fri Mar 13 16:27:03 MDT 2009

I don't really like having someone else back up my books. If I need to restore a book and I can't get on line for some reason, then I'm out of luck. (This is why I have no interest in cloud computing either.) And if the company goes out of business, there go my books. If the company decides it doesn't want to back up books any longer, then what? 

As long as the page update doesn't take long, I don't consider it a problem. It didn't seem bad when I played with his Kindle. 

I know you can email PDFs to Amazon for conversion. I would like to be able to do it myself. But can I buy ebooks from someone other than Amazon? This might become a real issue as ebooks become more popular. What if a publisher and Amazon don't come to an agreement? And this could be a real monopoly issue if everyone must go to Amazon. 

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Nate Duehr" <nate at natetech.com> 
To: "CLUE talk" <clue-talk at cluedenver.org> 
Sent: Friday, March 13, 2009 2:22:20 PM GMT -07:00 US/Canada Mountain 
Subject: RE: [clue-talk] Kindle 2 

Wasn’t the person you saw at the meeting, but ANDY IHNATKO (sp?)’s article at the Sun-Times covers all your questions and more… 

http://www.suntimes.com/business/1451062,ihnatko-kindle-2-review-022609.article 

He also has some screenshots and other things at his website,”The Celestial Waste of Bandwidth”, which has always been a favorite read… 

http://ihnatko.com/ 

And there’s plenty of links on the Sun-Times site to other blogs, etc. 

To directly answer your questions as best as I can tell from reading websites: 

- No, the battery in the Kindle 2 is non-replaceable. 

- Yes (you send them to an e-mail address at Amazon that dumps them into the reader, from what I understand, but you may want to confirm that, as I don’t have one… dead tree books are still free at my County library and it’s two blocks from my house… so… I haven’t gone digital yet. Friends tell me that Denver Public Library is now doing DRM’ed PDF’s that “expire” on many books, and they dump those into their Sony E-Reader… no idea if the Kindle will handle PDF) 

- Books on Amazon’s setup are “stored” on their website in your Library and you choose which device(s) to copy them into from your “library” as best as I can tell. (Amazon released a reader app for the iPhone this week or last week… so you’re not “locked” into the Kindle, and supposedly if you read on the phone, it’ll keep track roughly of your page number and the next time you open the book on the Kindle, you’re “close” to where you left off. 

- Everything I’ve read about the display says it’s readable in virtually all light – but of course, no backlighting so no reading in the dark. There’s also comments about the technology itself… since it’s “e-ink” the pixels are “painted” and then no power is really required to keep them active. What this means, for those of us who remember 80’s graphic work on computers, is that the device has to “paint” a blank screen and then “paint” the next page each time you hit the page-forward/backward buttons. How this works out in reality is that it looks like it “flashes”, and some people can’t get used to it. Ihnatko points out that you have to wait a second after turning a REAL dead-tree page too, so it’s just a different mindset to ignore the little “flash” at each page turn, and you adapt rapidly unless you get hung up on such things, or expected a Laptop LCD screen type display. He also talks about that there was a real (but small) LCD along the right side on the Kindle 1 that was “instantaneous” for marking your scroll position on a page, and the newer Kindle runs a tad faster, so Amazon removed the LCD… meaning you MIGHT feel a little more “lost” if you can’t count how many times you hit page-down, etc… but really, everyone seems to say this is all minor stuff. 

- As far as I know, you can’t back up anything to your own devices. It’s all stored at Amazon. 

- Final notes… Inhatko points out that the original Kindle had a standard mini-USB connector for charging. They changed the plug to some micro-USB thing that’s SUPPOSED to become a standard with the cell phone industry, but the Kindle 2 is out ahead of the pack on this one… so you have to remember to bring their custom cable with you to charge. With a week of charge under most scenarios, it probably doesn’t matter – but it’s an annoyance for some for now. 

Personally, like I said, I’m watching with interest, but I have such easy access to dead-trees, that I’m not willing to buy… yet. It’s certainly tempting, but maybe something like a used Kindle 1 would be “fine” for my purposes, if someone were selling it at a reasonable discount. Maybe not even then. 

Oh forgot one… I * THINK * you can also read things in your Amazon library on a regular PC/Mac… but not sure. That’d be a key thing for me, since I almost always have a laptop with me. “Off-line” reading of those on regular machines (no Internet connection required) would also be a “must have” for me. Not web-browser based. I haven’t investigated. 

Nate 

From: clue-talk-bounces at cluedenver.org [mailto:clue-talk-bounces at cluedenver.org] On Behalf Of dennisjperkins at comcast.net 
Sent: Friday, March 13, 2009 1:29 PM 
To: Clue-Talk 
Subject: [clue-talk] Kindle 2 

I looked at someone's Kindle 2 (sorry, I don't remember your name) after the meeting this week. I have a few questions about it. Can you replace the battery? Can you download books from someone other than Amazon? How readable is the display when you are outside? Can you back up your books to a computer or USB device, or only to Amazon? 

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