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April 20, 2011

Kindle Upgrade Coming

Amazon announced today that "later this year" you will be able to borrow books from 11,000 public libraries using your Kindle. This will balance out the one great advantage that other ereaders have over the Kindle, I think. You will be able to add notes and highlights to your borrowed library book, but they will not be visible to other later borrowers. But if you check the book out again, the highlights and notes will be there for you. The system will be powered by Overdrive.

While you're waiting for that library capability to arrive, there are, of course, tons of free books available for download from Amazon and non-Amazon sites. A lot of those books will come to you in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format. If you've tried reading a PDF book on your computer (you weren't going to actually print it out, were you?), then you know how tedious that becomes. Most annoying to me is having to keep track of where I've left off reading, because every time you open a PDF, you're back at the top. So you've got to keep a little note somewhere, unless you've got a great memory for page numbers.

Kindles will read PDFs as PDFs, but it ain't great. However, I actually read [some of] the documentation for my Kindle, and I tried out the ability to convert a PDF to Kindle format. With a clear text source, like you might get from a free ebook site, it does a FABULOUS job. Turns the PDF into a fully functioning Kindle book where you can change the font size, use text-to-speech, and (best of all) never lose your place in the book.

Free books on my Kindle right now:

  • Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant
  • Letters of a Woman Homesteader by Elinore Pruitt Stewart
  • The Uncommercial Traveler by Charles Dickens
  • The People of the Mist by H. Rider Haggard
  • Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor
  • Poodle Springs by Raymond Chandler

Here's an example of a book you can download for free from Amazon "for a limited time only."
Once A Cowboy by Linda Warren
It appears to be an economic analysis of employment stagnation in the beef industry.

Filed under Books | permalink | April 20, 2011 at 08:32 AM

Comments

I suspect you may think I mean that metaphorically. No, I mean beef. Cowboys [of any phsyique] raise cows which become beef.

Posted by: Ron's Log at Apr 21, 2011 8:32:37 AM

Beef ?
I beg your pardon.

Posted by: Ednixon at Apr 21, 2011 1:31:30 AM

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