April 6, 2008
Any Kindlers out there?
I have never had the remotest interest in ebooks before, but I will be leaving the states for some place far away (Kenya) that will likely lack decent bookstores, so it occurred to me that the Kindle is probably the perfect thing for me. I know, I know, call me a hypocrit, with all the preaching I’ve done about the merits of paper books, but it seems a lot easier and greener to download books than have them shipped to Nairobi. And I have to admit, I hate having books around when it comes time to moving.
I know Cooper started a thread a while ago about this, but I just wanted to follow up to see what the consensus was. Coop, did you ever get one? Anyone else? I guess the main concern I’d have is the availability of non-mainstream books as most of what I read usually comes from independent presses. And I’ve heard different things about the compatibility of PDFs with Kindle. Any other ebook readers people would recommend?
From the other end, does anyone have any experience getting their books into Kindle format for sale on Amazon? I’ve gone through their Search Inside program and that’s pretty easy, but I can’t find anything on their site for publishers wanting to sell books in Kindle format.
Any thoughts on the subject would be appreciated…
comments
Leave a Reply
I’ve heard it’s selling very well. Otherwise, I don’t know much. I’m looking forward to what you find out.
yes, like hot cakes. They apparently can’t keep with the demand, but I wonder how much of that is hype they are trying to create around it. If it sells well and people adopt it, then that would be a good sign as to the availability of new titles.
doi, I’m reading the fine print now and “anywhere” to Amazon means the united states, and even that anywhere doesn’t include remote regions like the entire state of montana and alaska. That makes it completely useless to the people that probably need it most!
Anyone tried the Hanlin ereader?
I’ve had a Kindle since last November (bought it with 5 minutes of going on-sale).
Title availability is scarce relative to the number of books in print, but Amazon is currently claiming more than 115,000 titles and it’s growing very fast — 15,000 titles in the last month! While Amazon has pushed the major publishers for content, with far more success than any previous e-book effort, you’re actually more likely to find independents than mainstream books. If you want to see how it does, though, simply go to the Kindle store on Amazon.com and poke around (click on the Kindle ad, then “Kindle Books” on the top bar).
As for PDF compatibility, the Kindle does not support direct reading of PDFs at all. Amazon has a conversion service (via e-mail) that works fairly well on textual PDFs, but not too well for anything that has tables in it. There is a conversion tool, Mobipocket Creator, that can do the job as well without Amazon’s involvement. I have no direct experience with either.
Some people consider the lack of PDF support to be a big hit, but I don’t: PDFs render poorly on small display devices (I’d argue they even suck on a big monitor; I almost always end up printing them, even though I print very little). If you’re in acadaemia I think you’re just SOL without PDF support, since that’s the standard for papers, but if you’re buying it to read books then PDF is pretty much a no-op; almost nobody publishes books in PDF.
Whether or not a Kindle would be a good choice for what you want to do is an interesting question. On the face of it the ability to load it up with a ton of books is very nice, and the battery life is fine. Overseas you can’t use the cell radio so you’ll only need to recharge once a week. On the downside the device is $400; you really don’t want it to get stolen. I might also worry about electrical power. I don’t know what the grid is like in Kenya, I might worry about power glitches. I used a power converter in Spain with no issues but … that’s not third-world.
Regarding publishing on Amazon, anyone an put up Kindle documents. I don’t have the link handy but you set up a seller account and submit them, along with the price you want to charge ($1 or more). You can do it in a few minutes.
I hope this answers your questions. If you want a whole lot more you could read my review of the Kindle at http://www.jetdrop.com/jimfrost where I am analyzing the market and the device. It will be going up piecemeal over the next five days.
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
The Kindle wireless capability will not work in Kenya but if you have internet access you can download your books to your Kindle account and then transfer them to the Kindle with a USB cord.
PDF transfer works great.
thanks for the great information, Jim.
yes, thanks John and Brenda. For some reason I’m only notified of Deron’s comments.
The PDF compatability is just interesting to me out of sheer accessibility. If I was to make an ebook available, this would be the easiest way (though not secure). But that’s good to know that anyone can make books available in Kindle, something I will have to look into as a publisher, especially one moving overseas.
And Brenda’s comment is reassuring. The impression I had was that it was completely wireless and didn’t even connect to your computer, but if you have USB and can transfer back and forth and store your library of Kindle files on your computer, then this makes it an interesting proposition…
thanks.
Looks like you can get the likes of Cormac, Saunders, Ben Marcus, Amy Hempel, etc. but not the likes of a Lutz or Diane Williams, etc. There are 2760 literary fiction titles, and some big small presses, but not what most of us would think as small press. They do have Flatland by Abbott which would be an interesting read on a Kindle!
Hey, Derek. How long will you be in Kenya? Wow. I haven’t gotten a Kindle, though it may be in my future, especially if the price drops. I guess you could load it completely up before you go, yes? And that would keep you in books for a while?
Long enough to get a goat! For at least 9 months or a year.
I’ve managed to get rid of my vinyl and CD and photo albums, I think it would be cool to do the same with books.
[...] A Word on the Kindle For those of you thinking about converting to the electronic book, in this case, the Kindle, you might want to check out this post on Clusterflock asking for comments on people’s satisfaction or not. [...]