Kindling

[marydell]

I've had my Kindle since about January. I love, love, love it. Yeah, it has corners so pointy you can lose an eye and the buttons get pressed if you don't hold it "right." But I don't mind those details. I find it generally comfortable to hold, and I can read it comfortably with my crappy, crappy eyes, which is critical. My focal distance isn't bad, but I get terrible eye strain. I can read the Kindle for hours without getting a headache, which makes it better than any other electronic device I've spent time with, and also better than most paper books.

Many people, quite sensibly, hate the idea of buying DRM'd books, which is the main model for getting books onto your Kindle - buy them from Amazon, and be locked in to the format. Yeah, you can put free stuff on there in Mobi format, but it won't read PDFs properly, and most of what you're going to want to put on there is probably not going to be available without DRM. So, if you care about that issue, save your money, because this gadget is all about selling DRM'd stuff. Me, I have just never cared about DRM, even though I know it's bad, even though my husband has campaigned for years to get me to break up with my Ipod. I know that I can't share the books I'm buying, and that I'm SOL if Amazon ever retires the Kindle. And that DRM is essentially a way of screwing the paying customer. But, eh, whatever.

So, leaving the evil bits aside, what I like about the Kindle store at Amazon is that every full-length book they sell lets you download a free sample chapter before you buy it. So I've got a trillion samples on my reader, and a small group of purchased books and stories (you can buy short stories, yay, but you can't sample them).

Excluding samples, here's what's on mine.

Purchased:

- 2 short stories from Tobias Buckell - In Orbite Medievali and All Her Children Fought...
- The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler (just finished. Very good)
- Works of Arthur Conan Doyle (great, cheap collection from www.mobilereference.com, available in non-kindle formats too)
- Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by Lord Byron (terrible formatting! formats stanzas as paragraphs. What the hell. So much for that $1. Went and got free version from Gutenburg instead)
- Works of Sir Walter Scott (also from www.mobilereference.com)
- Works of Mark Twain (mobilereference)
- Works of Alexandre Dumas (mobilereference)
- The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett (good first chapter. Downhill since)
- Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge, by Mike Resnick (awesome short story)
- The Vor Game, by Lois McMaster Bujold
- Triplanetary (Lensmen), by E.E."Doc" Smith
- American Gods, by Neil Gaiman (got for my husband, as I've already read it, and my only paper copy is a signed one...no touchy!)
- The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova (I own the hardback, but it's a doorstopper...so I bought it 2x. Reading it when the mood strikes me. It's not a page-turner.)
- Three at Wolfe's Door, by Rex Stout. (I own pretty much the whole Wolfe canon in paper, but it's nice to have one handy when I'm out & about, and hubby's only read a few so far)
- Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (mobilereference)
- Getting Things Done, by David Allen (have read part of it, suggested by my boss. Haven't finished it, oh the irony, etc etc)
- a couple of, ahem, recreational titles
- A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens (nice for reading out loud during the holidays)
- Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life, by Steve Martin (very very good)

Free:

- Fanny Hill, by whatsisname. Free books don't show their authors in the browser. Cleland?
- Child Harold's Pilgrimage, the readable version
- Lilith, by George MacDonald
- The House on the Borderland, by William Hope Hodgson
- The Kalevala, by some Finnish or Nordic bard or other
- The Call of Cthulhu, by H.P. Lovecraft
- The Warden, by Anthony Trollope
- Phantasies, a Faerie Romance, by George MacDonald
- ThePrincess and the Goblin, by George MacDonald
- The Door in the Wall and Other Stories, by H.G. Wells

If you have a book reader, what's on yours? If not, what physical books are at the front of your "next reads" queue?

Comments

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Fanny Hill (properly, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) is by John Cleland.

In a word: DRM sucks. If the Kindle is as cumbersome as you say, and it won't handle PDFs (all my TOR e-book downloads are PDFs) and it costeth the earth, wherefore should I spend my and my wife's hard erned dollars for it?

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I find it less cumbersome than a book, but it's a good deal more cumbersome than, say, an iphone. I really wanted something that's as big as a book, and easy on my eyes...for me, the e-ink was the primary selling point. I'd considered the Sony reader, but I really didn't like the form factor and their store charged full price for all the books. I've been downloading the TOR e-books in mobi format so I can put them on there--as I understand it, the problem with PDF's is that you can't zoom in and out of them on the Kindle, so they're hard to read, because they have a locked in page format.

Anyway, to answer your question, you probably shouldn't buy it, unless you spend so much on new fiction and poetry that the per-book savings over a year or so ends up paying for the device. Books with footnotes are typically not formatted right, and most scholarly works aren't available for it yet anyway. Mystery, SF, Fantasy, and bestsellers generally are available, though, and there's a significant discount over paper. It's definitely not for everyone, but it's working out very well for me.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Since I'm not the only reader in the house, and it wouldn't be economic until the price fell below $120, I don't think I'm in the running just yet. It would be economic if the capital cost were $120-200 and the price of scholarly books for it dropped to $10 or so. (Then I could write it off as a business expense, as well.)

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Yeah, $400 is utterly ridiculous...it was sort of a combined xmas present from my Dad, my husband, and myself. $200 would be a lot more sensible, and I hope they'll drop the price eventually.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

I hope so too, and I hope (of course) that they remove the stupid DRM.

Still thinking

[(Anonymous)]

I've been thinking about getting one as well, but I figured I'd wait for the next generation version. Do you back the books up on your computer somehow, or do they only exist on the Kindle? I live in constant fear of losing all my data...

Sarah
www.clodia.org/journal

Re: Still thinking

[marydell.livejournal.com]

You can back them up to your computer, and they also stay on Amazon "forever" so you can re-download them. Also, you can put an SD card in it and put the books on that instead of/in addition to the built-in memory.

Of course, if the Kindle stops working after the warranty period and you don't choose to replace it, you won't have any way to read the stuff that's in the proprietary format.

[pedanther]

If you have a book reader, what's on yours?

Purchased books:
- Complete Short Stories of James H. Schmitz, volumes 3 & 6 (Baen)
- complete Liaden series, Steve Lee and Sharon Miller (Baen)
- Lord Darcy, Randall Garrett (Baen)
- The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump, Harry Turtledove (Baen)
- The Best of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine (ASIM Co-op)
- Barrack-Room Ballads, Rudyard Kipling (Fictionwise)

Free books:
- Complete Short Stories of James H. Schmitz, volumes 1, 2, 4 & 5 (Baen)
- Mountain Magic (short stories by Henry Kuttner and others) (Baen)
- Digital Knight, Ryk Spoor (Baen)
- Doc Sidhe, Aaron Allston (Baen)
- 1632, Eric Flint (Baen)
- Pyramid Scheme, Dave Freer and Eric Flint (Baen)
- Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow (straight from his site)
- Farthing, Jo Walton (Tor)
- Spin, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)
- Old Man's War, John Scalzi (Tor)
- Mistborn, Brad Sanderson (Tor)
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde (University of Virginia Library Etext Center)
- Beowulf (UofVLEC)
- Emma, Jane Austen (UofVLEC)
- The Island of Dr Moreau, HG Wells (UofVLEC)
- The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole (UofVLEC)
- Fairy Books in assorted colours, Andrew Lang (UofVLEC)
- Paradise Lost, John Milton (UofVLEC)
- The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Coleridge (UofVLEC)
- The Compleat Angler, Isaac Walton (UofVLEC)

Purchased stories:
- a whole bundle of short stories by Stephen Dedman (Fictionwise)
- The Borders of Infinity, Lois McMaster Bujold (Fictionwise)
- Labyrinth, Lois McMaster Bujold (Fictionwise)
- Winterfair Gifts, Lois McMaster Bujold (Fictionwise)
- Leaks, David Langford (Fictionwise)
- Moonrise, Dorothy J. Heydt (Fictionwise)

Free stories:
- The Mountains of Mourning, Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
- The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Edgar Allan Poe (UofVLEC)


My main sources for purchased ebooks are Fictionwise and Baen, for free ebooks are the Baen Free Library, the University of Virginia Library Etext Center, and now Tor.com.

My book reader is a Mio PocketPC loaded with Mobipocket, Microsoft Reader, and Adobe Reader. It's not as easy on the eyes as an e-paper device would be, but since I carry it everywhere anyway...