Csquared Thoughts

a new Amazon habit

For a long time I have saved books I thought I might want to read to my Amazon Wish List. But since I now read most books available in that format on my trusty Kindle, I realized there was a better way. I requested a sample of the books on my wish list that were available in Kindle format be sent to my Kindle and deleted them from my Wish List. When I see a new book I'm interested in, I now request a Kindle sample. Now I have the samples all there on my Kindle, and when I'm ready to buy one of those books I can download it with just a couple of clicks.

How cool is that?

Kindle 2

I got my new Kindle 2 today. Wow!

Opening the box was like opening a container of top-secret documents that would have been delivered by a special courier. Once it was out of the box and in my hands, it exceeded my expectations.

The functionality is somewhat different, and there's a 5-way button for navigation and selection that didn't exist on the original Kindle. The search button is missing from the keyboard, and you have to get there via the menu. Deleting books is done differently. All of which are easily gotten used to. And the list of improvements is impressive.

• Much thinner than the original. About half as thick.
• As advertised, the buttons are smaller and you're much less likely to turn the page by mistake.
• Keyboard is much improved, again as advertised.
• There's only one cable instead of two, with an adapter for AC charging.
• Wireless is turned off on-screen, rather than having to pull it out of its case and slide a switch on the back.
• Sleep mode is done with a switch, instead of having to use a keyboard combination. 
• It fits securely in the case, rather than flopping around and wanting to slide out.

I'm sure I'm missing some things, but those are the high points.

Amazon did a great customer service thing here. I thought I would have to go on-line to Amazon and manually download all my existing books to the new Kindle. Nope. There is a link on the Kindle 2 called Archive, and when you click it, it displays all the Kindle books you've purchased from Amazon. Select the title, click the button, and it's delivered to your new Kindle 2, no charge. Way cool!

In deciding to buy the Kindle 2, I didn't think much about the speech-to-text feature. But I tried it and it's pretty darn amazing. You can select a male or female voice, as well as the reading speed. Sounds very natural. Sometimes it gets tripped up by chapter titles where there's no punctuation, but reading paragraphs in the body of the page sounds very natural.

I'm very pleased. Highly recommended.

P.S. Terry, of course, gets the old Kindle.

which book where?

I was having coffee with my friend Lynn on Saturday. I had my Kindle with me and I started it up to show her a book I was planning on reading soon. It wasn't there. I remembered it was on my iPod.

Oh, yeah. That's right.

a nice Kindle feature

There was a time shortly after my graduation from college when, while reading a book, I would write down words for which I did not know the meaning in order to look up later. This was so as to not interrupt the flow of what I was reading by stopping and picking up a dictionary. Problem was, I never got around to looking them up.

That's why I really like one neat feature in my Kindle. You can select any line on the "page" and display the of definitions of the words on the line. You can then go on and select the full definition of a word from the Oxford American Dictionary. It's not perfect. There's words missing that I would expect to be there. But overall, it's a cool feature to have and I enjoy using it.

kinda scary

My Amazon Kindle has multiple "screensavers," if you will. They are images that display when you put the Kindle into "sleep" mode. One of these says:

Your purchased digital books are backed up on Amazon.com in Your Media Library.If you delete a book from your Kindle, you can always re-download it using Content Manager and begin reading where you left off, with all of your bookmarks and annotations intact.

So Amazon knows what I'm reading, how long I'm taking to read it, and what my comments are on the book.

Kinda scary.