Amazon has dropped the price of the 3G Kindle to $139, and the WiFi Kindle to $114, if you’re willing to tolerate ads on the home page of the device. I like my Kindle, and for those of you who have one or are considering one, I wanted to share a couple of tips for reading long-form magazine articles.
The Kindle is good for one thing, reading text, but for that it’s excellent. I prefer the Kindle’s screen over any backlit LCD, no matter how high the resolution. With battery life measured in weeks, and weight measured in ounces, it’s great to take on trips even though I’m the kind of person who always travels with a laptop. Even though Amazon would like you to use Kindle to buy books and subscribe to periodicals via their store, every Kindle includes an email address which allows you to email content to the device. In the past few months, I’ve used that address to read hundreds of magazine articles on my Kindle.
Kindle comes in have WiFi and 3G versions. The 3G version connects using the AT&T cell phone network or wireless Internet, and the WiFi version can only use WiFi. Both versions will let you email content to the device, but since the 3G version costs Amazon money, Amazon charges you a few cents to get content when the device is on 3G. To avoid those charges, 3G owners have a regular Kindle email address and a free one. Use the free one unless you don’t mind spending a buck or two to get articles on your Kindle. Both of these email addresses are managed on your “Manage your Kindle” page on Amazon. To avoid spam, Amazon will only let email addresses that you authorize communicate with your Kindle. For any of the following to work, you need to set up your email address and allow a couple of email addresses to communicate with your Kindle on the “Manage your Kindle” page.
The first service that I find useful is a site called Delivereads. The owner of the site sends out a weekly “newsletter” that has around 4 long-form magazine articles. He’s got pretty good taste, and the service is totally free. If you’re at all intrigued about reading magazine content on your Kindle, I’d give this a shot to see if it’s worth the trouble.
The second service is Klip.me. It’s delivered as a browser extension in Chrome and Safari, and a bookmarklet in Firefox and IE. What that means is that users of Chrome, for example, will get a little button in their toolbar after installing Klip.me. When you press the button, the contents of the page you’re viewing will be sent to your Kindle’s email address. Usually, articles sent that way show up in under a minute. I’ve tried a couple of other, similar services, and this one is by far the best.
When I see a long article that I want to read later, I go to the “print” or “single page” version, and hit the Klip.me button. Because the Kindle’s formatting is much simpler than a web page, and because a lot of publishers are trying to maximize page views, this doesn’t always work, but I’ve found that it’s fairly reliable, and after a few tries, you can usually judge which pages aren’t going to be sent correctly.
Finally, a site that’s worth a visit for more long-form magazine writing is Byliner. This site allows you to search for online magazine articles by authors you like, and it also has a section called “Byliner Originals”. These are “Kindle singles”, which usually cost about 99 cents, that are commissioned specifically for the site.
When I first got my Kindle, I subscribed to a couple of magazines, but I found that they really weren’t worth the money. I’d rather pay a la carte, but that market is still in its infancy. I’d like to see more curated content like Delivereads, and I’d be willing to pay for it. Since Google is going to create a Kindle-like reader, and Amazon is probably going to break the $100 price point with its next Kindle, I think there’s a market here.
MikeJ
Calibre has recipes for downloading newspapers and magazines which makes it a handy addition for these tasks.
And of course it’s actually a library manager, which is nice if you have a fair number of books. Also very handy for format conversions.
stuckinred
I have a kindle app on my ipad.
Natasha
I adore my Kindle for reading plain text — I vastly prefer it to paper. I’d love to get every scrap of non-graphics dependent print media I currently consume onto it — newspapers, magazines, journals, you name it.
Calibre’s news service is terrific. If you happen to be a digital subscriber to The New York Review of Books, you can use Calibre to shoot an entire issue to your Kindle, all nicely formatted with a table of contents. You can get the NY Times book review that way as well.
Instapaper (http://www.instapaper.com/)also ports web content over to your Kindle. (And I’m pretty sure both services work with other ereaders, too.)
In lieu of shipping stuff off to Amazon or relying on a third-party service to deliver stuff piecemeal to my Kindle, I often use Word and the free epub ebook editor, Sigil (http://code.google.com/p/sigil/, (or sometimes just Sigil alone) to compile organized ebooks of long-form content I need to drag along with me. (I use Calibre to convert the epub files created by Sigil into Kindle-ready mobi files and to load stuff onto my Kindle via usb.)
Phyllis
Thanks for the tips. I got a Kindle in May for my birthday and I’m still working on figuring out all the features.
J.D. Rhoades
Mine should be arriving today, so this is timely. Thanks for all the links.
Figures I’d buy one right before the goddamn price goes down.
Rook
Sorry, but Barnes & Noble has outdone Amazon with their ColorNook. It has absolutely no adds, it allows for some borrowing of books from/to friends, and I can check out ebooks from my public library for free, all because I have a library card.
Oh, also and apps! Angry Birds Forever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Amanda in the South Bay
Ironically, I had a dream last night about buying a Color Nook and rooting it. I don’t think that’s gonna happen IRL anytime soon, but I’d rather have an e-reader/cheap Droid tablet than just a dedicated e-reader.
mistermix
Thanks for the calibre tips, I’ll check it out.
I was an Instapaper subscriber for a while, but I found that it was unreliable – it would send digests to my Kindle sometimes, and sometimes not. But YMMV.
WereBear
ebooks are the future; like it (I do!) or not.
Pococurante
I’m holding out for the Amazon Tablet… I gave my first gen Kindle to my ten year old.
PaulW
I think this is a nice opportunity to shamelessly plug my ebooks… :)
Last of the Grapefruit Wars (ebook) is on most ereaders, Kindle Nook Sony and I just found out last week it’s on iBook. Prices range from $2.99 to $5.99 depending on the reader. I’m too lazy to add all the different links, so just keyword the title…
“Welcome to Florida” (estory) is on Nook only as I was tempted to see how PubIt (their self-publisher system) works. Price is $.99 Link is here.
“The Hero Cleanup Protocol” (estory) is now and going to be available for most ereaders (B&N has a direct link for it now), although getting it through the epublisher Smashwords might be easiest. Price is $.99
…don’t give me that look. As a self-published author, I have to market like this. ;-)
PaulW
@Phyllis, if you have trouble with your Kindle you can check if your local library offers ebook classes. While Kindle currently can’t download library ebooks yet (they’re working on it) the users do show up for the classes looking for help…
Ricky Roma
Instapaper is amazing, best application I own. If you have a Kindle you need the servie. If you have an iPhone or iPad, not spending $5 on the native app is an act of insanity
Peter J
@Rook:
The Nook Color isn’t e-ink.
Tom Johnson
So here’s a question: I do a lot of research in old, out-of-print books using Google Books. I read them on my laptop, which is irritating. The books are pdf images but most are also available as text. (Albeit, in kind of sloppy, machine-translated text.) Do Google Books translate onto Kindle or other ereaders?
DWGregory
So I’m looking at buying an iPad — is that kind of device useful for reading e-books? Or do you still need a kindle?
Lydgate
I like books. I’m old. But not so old that I fear being labeled a Luddite.
Purchasing used books and using the library is much more environmentally sound anyway.
I read in the Sierra Club magazine that you would have to buy more than 60 new hardcover books a year for e readers to be better for the environment.
Plus, Amazon– no.
lawguy
My wife has a Nook and I have a Sony. I think that I’d get a Nook or Kindle of I had it to do over again.
One advantage to Nook is that one of the Barnes and Nobles in Columbus gives classes at the book store on a regular basis. As an interessting asside the instructor is probably 20, she told the class my wife took that no one in the classes has ever been under 45.
PaulW
@DWGregory, Apple has an app called iBook, and the other retailers – Amazon and B&N especially – have apps you can install to your iPad that can read Kindle and/or Nook books.
If you use the iBook, the bookstore is in the iTunes directory.
I cannot link to my Last of the Grapefruit Wars on the iBook menu, sad to say. But it’s there for the not-so-bad price of $5.99!!! Oh hey if you spent all that money on an iPad you ought to have enough money for a 5.99 book… ;-)
dmsilev
I’ve read plenty of books on my iPad. The big advantages of the Kindle or similar eInk-based systems are (a) the screen is readable in direct sunlight and (b) battery life measured in weeks rather than hours. On the other hand, an iPad or similar can do a heck of a lot more things. Watching a movie on a Kindle would be an …interesting experience, to name just one.
Edit: You can get several different book-reading apps for the iPad, including Kindle and the Barnes&Noble apps, plus Apple’s iBooks, plus a bunch of others. Not to mention apps that specialize in PDF files rather than books per se.
Janet Strange
DW Gregory – I prefer the iPad as an ereader. When I got the iPad, I gave my kindle to my sister. I like having a bigger screen so I don’t have to turn the pages so often. I’m a fast reader, so on kindle it’s just clickclickclick. Very annoying to me.
Plus I like the backlit screen and being able to read in bed without having a light on in the room. I fall asleep while reading more often than not and the iPad turns itself off after a few minutes so that I’m then sleeping in the dark. When I fall asleep with a light on, I sleep with it on all night long and I don’t think I sleep as well.
But of course, this is all very individual. A lot of people much prefer the eink, the light weight, etc of the kindle.
I’d say try the iPad as an ereader for a few weeks. If you don’t like it, then get a kindle too. But don’t be like me, buying both and then deciding you don’t like the kindle as well as the iPad for books and magazines.
PaulW
@Tom Johnson, the Google Books in PDF do not translate into the epub or Kindle formats. However, there is an app called Adobe Digital Editions you can use to install onto the Nook and then download the Google Books into your Nook and read via the Adobe Digital. I think that’s how it works.
Word is, Google is getting into the epub format with their own digital reader. Scary times.
merrinc
I bought a Nook a couple of months ago because I wasn’t too impressed with my sister’s Kindle. I was also influenced by an article I read a year or so ago by a guy whose entire Kindle library went kaput when Amazon decided to remove him as a customer for returning too many items. When I buy something, I expect it to be mine – forever.
So far, I love the Nook but I have to say that bn.com’s customer service is absolutely fucking atrocious. It’s almost made tolerable by their “Free Fridays” though as the last few books I downloaded for free were actually good reads.
MikeJ
@merrinc: merrinc, first thing to do after downloading a book from anybody, Amazon or BN, is to strip the DRM and save your copies.
Shirt
I use a nook myself. Since turning 45 my vision has predictable gotten worse (presbyopia) and reading has slowed down. With an ereader, the font can be adjusted. Because of that, I’ve bought and read more books in the month I’ve had it than I did all of last year. They’ll be giving these things away if they, like nook and kindle, can capture your market forever.
PaulW
@MikeJ and @merrinc, next, you buy my ebooks! Ow ow stop hitting me, I gotta shill for the bills…
kindness
Buy an ipad instead. They are well worth the additional money.
MikeJ
@PaulW: I’ve bought from other authors here, I may check ’em out.
merrinc
PaulW, I just bought Welcome to Florida. Apropos, as we leave for a week on the Gulf in seven days.
MikeJ, thanks for the tip.
Natasha
@Tom Johnson
Because of its screen size, heavily formatted PDFs are one thing the latest generation Kindle doesn’t handle well. Although there are ways to convert PDFs into ebook format, the results are often problematic. (PDFs are essentially pictures of a page of text. It takes really good OCR software and some tinkering to convert them to ebook format.) If you had, say, an 8 1/2″ x 11″ ereader, no problem. Otherwise, you’ve got to either rely on iffy conversion, or, if reading PDFs in “native” format. scroll around the page. It’s a pain.
And let me re-iterate: a Kindle or any other e-ink reader is a single purpose device. They are excellent for that single purpose — reading plain text — and worth the investment if you do a lot of that single thing. E-ink is easy on the eyes, gives you l-o-o-o-n-g battery life (weeks on a single charge, nearly a month if you keep the wireless turned off), and a lightweight device. If you want to play games, surf the net, or watch movies on the same device, you’ll need something different.
By the way, many classic texts are available for free from Project Gutenberg in formats that can be read on virtually any device. You can read all the out-of-copyright great literature you want for nothing by shelling out a modest amount upfront on an ereader. (You should of course, throw If you don’t need the latest bells and whistles, you can get one for less than what many of us spend on a month’s internet, phone, and cable bill.
And yeah, strip the DRM off when you buy something so you can take it with you when you change devices. The single most annoying thing about DRMed ebooks is that you really don’t own them. You can’t lend them, sell them used, or donate them. That’s why the current pricing structure — where some ebooks cost MORE than the print version — is problematic. An ebook will be worth the price many publishers claim they need to charge when they are economically equivalent to a hard copy. When will media companies ever get the message about what happens when it’s easier to steal stuff than buy it …
Natasha
Well that attempt at a coherent post sure failed … Let’s try this again:
If you had, say, an 8 1/2” x 11” ereader, no problem. Otherwise, you’ve got to either rely on iffy conversion, or, if reading PDFs in “native” format, scroll around the page — not just down the page, but side-to-side, too. It’s a pain.
and
By the way, many classic texts are available for free from Project Gutenberg in formats that can be read on virtually any device. You can read all the out-of-copyright great literature you want for nothing by shelling out a modest amount upfront on an ereader. (You should of course throw a little donation Project Gutenberg’s way as well.)
Bobby D
Good site for curated long-form journalism links is longreads.com, good variety of subject matter and sources. I don’t do kindle or tablets, but have longreads on my bookmark bar and use it about 2/week.
KXB
I got the 3G Kindle as a Christmas gift from my brother, and it is fantastic. But, I’ve only read one magazine article on it, a ProPublica piece about the trial in Chicago of men thought to have planned the Mumbai attacks. All my other purchases are books. There is just something really cool about sitting in the frozen yogurt store, enjoying my treat while browsing the books online, buying what I want, and then start reading it right away.
Another bonus – less clutter in the house. I enjoy reading, but having to always find shelf space can be a challenge. Then, when I consider that I do not always actually re-read the books, I wonder why I keep them. And every-time I moved, books were always the heaviest and most numerous item.
Maude
Get a color nook. The apps for every other ereader and PC are free.
It is popular.
lawguy
Oh yeah, a couple of other things. One is thata my wife’s Nook updated about a week ago (all on its own) it wiped out all of her books. Now they were still available in the big holding book place in the sky and she didn’t have to rebuy them, but she had to redownload them and lost all her bookmarks. And, as you say the support was not real good.
Its my understanding that both Nook and Sony can use Google books at this point and Google has a very nice video explaining how to down load to Sony, at least.
Also, you should check out Project Gutenberg.org for other countries some of which have shorter copywrite periods.
Sloegin
I love my iPad, but I wouldn’t consider it a proper e-reader due to the weight. I prefer reading with one hand, maybe lying on the couch, and the weight (and relatively “sharp” edges of the iPad2) really don’t allow for anything other than 2-handed-sit-up-properly reading.
Battery life of my iPad is nice enough, but I’m already down to about 7 hours on it (batteries die, get used to it), and I typically go a LOT longer when i sit down for a marathon reading session.
I’ll probably be picking up a 3G ad kindle in the next couple of weeks.
AC in BC
Correct me if I’m wrong, but you can’t use Amazon’s email feature if you are using the Kindle app.
Emerald
I’m still running my 1st generation Kindle, which has a changeable battery and an SD card. I will run it until it dies, and then get a cheaper one. (I’m sure the Nook is very nice, but I couldn’t cope with the backlit screen for hours and hours.)
I have got virtually all of classic English and Continental literature on it, thanks to Gutenberg (manybooks.net) and feedbooks.com (another free site).
Plus, I’m saving scads of $$$ by just downloading free samples from Amazon. By the time I get around to buying them the price has dropped. Seems to solve my book-buying obsession and the floorboards in my house may not crack eventually from the weight of books.
I am most intrigued by this “just strip the DRM” idea. Didn’t know that was even possible. Pray tell, how does one accomplish such a feat? You make it sound so easy.
lawguy
@Emerald, I am told stripping the DRM is indeed possible, but I have been unable to do it yet. Although the problem may be that I am on the far side of 60, and such things may be beyond my mental abilities.
MikeJ
@Emerald: Google around for the site of a person that loves cabbages.
Tom Johnson
@Natasha — I’m not reading great literature so much as I am obscure government reports and social histories. Most are available as pure text along with the pdfs. Thanks for the informative answer. I didn’t think your first version lacked clarity at all. It was incredibly helpful.
Chad N Freude
An easier path than MikeJ’s suggestion is to visit Apprentice Alf’s Blog. Be sure to read the comments at the bottom of the blog entry. The tools package referred to contains plug-ins for Calibre (highly recommended for managing e-books). The package contains brief instructions for adding the plug-ins to Calibre. I use this scheme for backing up e-books from both B&N and Amazon and converting between their respective formats (epub for B&N and Mobi for Kindle) so that I can read them on both platforms.
jenn
I can’t give up reading real books (they’re entirely different things), but I do love my Nook color. I haven’t had updates screw up my library, and I haven’t had anything happen that required customer service, so I can’t help there. The reason why I bought a Nook was the heavy hand of Amazon (the Orwellian story of the Orwell book removed from folks’ Kindles!),but mostly because I wanted to support store floor space. I love browsing in bookstores. I mean, I LOVE browsing in bookstores! Buying the Nook helps support that. I don’t really buy many e-books – a few, but most of mine are free from Project Gutenberg. Any book, that I truly love, that I want to keep, gets purchased as a real book. The thing I discovered about the Nook this summer, is that it’s perfect for camping – I can lie there in my sleeping bag, and read — no flashlight required! My 9 year old self is so incredibly jealous! :-)
John
@Tom Johnson — you want http://www.retroread.com/ to convert googlebooks into kindle format — service is free and works fairly well …formatting might not be as clean as buying a kindlebook for 99 cents.
Paul in KY
merrinc, just returned from Navarre Beach. Water was great, should be even warmer now that I soaked in it for 2 weeks.
Hope y’all have a great time!
dutchmarbel
Had an ebook I wasn’t happy about, but decided to sit it out till the perfect machine comes out because I still had my android tablet with a kindle ereader *and* an epub ereader. But when the summer started I discovered I really can’t sit outside and read with my tablet. Kindle app was sooooo easy, I bought a kinde too. I have the same books on the kindle and on the tablet (they sync) so I can read at night with backlight and during the day in the sun – just have to remember which page I was.
PaulW
@merrinc, you bought a copy of my story? Yay.
Here, lemme autograph your Nook!
(grabs Sharpie pen, scribbles on the monitor)
…what?
Catsy
That depends on what you’re reading and where you’re typically reading it. As others have noted, the e-ink display of the Kindle looks absolutely amazing and natural in bright sunlight, whereas the glare from the iPad’s screen makes it almost unusable even at full brightness. If you’re usually reading outside, you probably want a Kindle. The form factor and weight of the Kindle are much better for extended reading than a full-size tablet. And of course with the Kindle you have access to Amazon’s impressive stock of books.
However.
With that said, so far I vastly prefer the iPad for reading. For starters, our house is typically not brightly lit and I do most of my reading in bed or on the living room couch, where the iPad’s illuminated screen works much better than e-ink.
Second, the formats and DRM. I have an intense, white-hot hatred for most proprietary formats and DRM schemes, and Amazon’s is pretty bad in that regard. If you buy an AZW book, you’re locked into only being able to read it on your Kindle, or using the PC/iPad Kindle app. You can convert it to another format, of course–which Amazon will do for a price. And there are a number of (verifiable) horror stories of people losing their collections due to a DRM screwup.
Oh yes, the apps. Frankly, I really just don’t like the Kindle app very much. You have to associate it with your Amazon ID and login in order to even use it–and I’ve been burned far too many times by applications that are dependent on an online service that can break or go away. You can only associate a given device with one Amazon account–so for example, when my spouse registered our iPad with her Kindle login, it made it impossible for me to register it with mine so that we could switch between accounts. And in terms of the interface and functionality, iBooks beats the pants off of both the iPad and PC Kindle apps.
PDF support. I have a number of books in PDF format (including many that were purchased that way, such as the entire Girl Genius collection) which the Kindle does not deal with gracefully. I hear the Kindle 2 supports PDF, and there is a hack that will let you read PDFs on the other models–but I shouldn’t have to fucking hack it in order for it to read such a common format.
Color. If you want color at all, the Kindle is not for you. Period. It’s not a big deal if all you read is text novels, but if you’re reading comic books, school textbooks, color magazines, or anything else with color illustrations, you want an iPad or something else that can do color, because the Kindle is black-and-white only. That may change in future models, but at the moment it is an inescapable limitation.
And then of course there’s the fact that the Kindle is, in the words of Alton Brown, a “unitasker”–it has one purpose and it does it pretty well, but that’s it.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate the Kindle. The e-ink really does look exactly as good as advertised, and it’s a great device for what it does. But what it does is very limited in scope.
I spent the majority of last night sitting on the couch with my iPad, reading A Dance with Dragons which I just bought from Google Books, occasionally flipping back and forth to my email or the web.
Blue Gal
Driftglass got me the plain one for my birthday, at my request. These tips are great. I also really really like that I can drag and drop podcasts onto my kindle and play them in the car.
mem from somerville
Bonus feature for traveling: if you get the 3G, you can get access to stuff in Yurp without the wifi access, and no extra cost to your cell phone plan (like I have had to do in the past). Worked for me in Ireland, England, and Cyprus so far.
It’s not speedy, and sometimes have to reload a page, but free is hard to beat for a hit of some newspapers and blogs when you haven’t seen one for days.
I wish I had thought of the kindle email address last night when trying to figure out how to get my boarding pass….Great tip, thanks.
No one of Importance
No, you don’t need Kindle! The Kindle app on the Ipad is fine. You can use iBooks for epubs and pdfs, whether puchased through Apple or not. There are a host of ebook apps for the iPad. The screen is lovely, and superior to every other reader for PDFs.
It’s not eInk, so not much good in the sun, but on the other hand, eInk screens are prone to failing fatally over time, so the iPad is def a better buy.