Inside View

Value for Money Kindle

Bernie Goldbach in Fenn's Quay | 495 words

AFTER AN ACADEMIC YEAR of reading, annotating and sharing essential content on my Kindle, I can strongly recommend Amazon's Kindle as technology that delivers high value for money.

I think the standalone Kindle is better than having an iPad with the Kindle app, primarily because when you read on a Kindle, you're less likely to be interrupted by notifications and less prone to procrastination via Facebook.

Both the app and the Kindle lets you read Kindle books, newspapers, magazines and PDFs through an intuitive interface. I've Kindle editions of all the essential and supplemental textbooks for five creative multimedia modules that I teach in the Limerick Institute of Technology. Plus I've paid subscriptions to both the Irish Times and the Financial Times. And I get Kindlefeeder content once a day along with items I send to my Kindle via a Klip.me bookmarklet. Every day, I have no less than 50 minutes of reading arriving on my Kindle.

The Scrivener Discovery

Bernie Goldbach in LIT-Clonmel | Illustration by Scrivener | 220 words

IN PREPARATION FOR a short session with DIT's e-learning summer school, I'm unpacking Scrivener so I have a faster method of producing a variety of electronic publications.

The $50 program is worth two times its purchase price, not because it works elegantly but because it complements an author's workflow while facilitating several different kinds of outputs. I spent 25 minutes with it running in demo mode and discovered I could correct page breaks and ensure proper paragraph breaks remained intact when saving for iBooks and saving for Kindle. I watched one of the Literature and Latte videos before starting the program, then just set forth with a blank document to pull in my blog posts from my website. That's actually the reverse process than the one I'll start using next week. 

I plan to start using Scrivener to create my content, for my blog posts, for classroom reading materials and for the novel that's rotting away in the bankers' boxes in the attic. By the end of the week, my new blog posts will have a download button that allows readers to get last week's i-book and Kindle version of my website. And if more than 50 people start doing that, I could have a sponsored channel of content before the end of the summer.

---

kindle

Related articles

• Writing and Researching Workflow (everythingscrivener.wordpress.com)
• Using Scrivener can be a 'life-changing experience' (teleread.com)

The Elegant Save-to-Kindle

BERNIE GOLDBACH in Golden | Screenshot of Klip.me | 144 words

SEVERAL TIMES A WEEK, I announce triumphantly that I've saved something to Kindle. It means I'm carrying the information in as clean a format as possible without the need to go online to see what I've downloaded. It feels very empowering to know I can flick through screens that help me revise content, prepare blog posts, and answer questions in my third level classrooms.

I enjoy my "send-to-kindle" routine via a bookmarklet that I've installed in Chrome and Internet Explorer. It's a process that hooks my Kindle e-mail address to Klip.me web services for free. If you've a Kindle, I recommend looking at the free service.

I'm finding, reading, sending and distilling more content now with this elegant send-to-Kindle service. I'm so happy with its reliability.

---

kindle

Related articles

• Send web articles to multiple Kindle devices (keyvan.net)
• Kindle makes good editing tool (teleread.com)

File Sharing Involves More than Music

WE TEACH HOW TO MAKE e-books in a module at the Limerick Institute of Technology and we know some students acquire their books through file-sharing sites like the now-defunct Library.nu.

Until its closure on 15 February 2012, viewers could access an enormous collection, including nearly every essential textbook prescribed in the creative multimedia curriculum of LIT. The presence of Kindles in student backpacks from first to third level has boosted the appeal of electronic titles. I saw this trend emerging three years ago when I spotted a Bit Torrent seed in a shared Dropbox folder. The link allowed people to sync and download book titles related Adobe products. By 2010, this practise had become a private set of links, shared casually wherever wifi access was served on campus. But the real burst of activity happened when I saw Library.nu being discussed in a Facebook group. People were interested in reading dozens of the titles that Amazon was marketing and the easiest way to fill your Kobo, Nook or Kindle was to drop some things onto it from Library.nu. As the screenshot at left shows, around 1000 people per week visited this illegal book site from the States. Enough of them left behind a donation to make a handsome operating profit for Fidel Nunez, the NUIG graduate running the site.

The Easily Revised Mobile Reading Experience

I HAVE REDEFINED "mobile experience" because it is not difficult to find someone who owns a Kindle, a Kobo, or a Nook nowadays.

Right under the noses of those looking at how people use mobile data lurk biblophiles. They are reading living books. Dan York suggested this idea during a segment on For Immediate Release and he's writing about it on his Disruptive Conversations blog. He muses about a book being "more than just a fixed collection of text at a given point of time" and offers a treatment for a narrative that "evolves and changes over time". I like his thinking in this regard because it means our early 21st century concept of a book has changed.

The change is nearly mainstream too because Irish broadcasters, not known for their confidence with embracing new technology, now sprinkle words like "Kindle" and "iPad" into their radio minutes. These talking heads often buy and chat about e-ink they've read. While that's nice, Dan York points out an O'Reilly innovation that goes one step further.

Kindlegen Delivers

WE HAVE THOUSANDS of euro sunk into pretty software packages for e-publishing and I've discovered that it might be more worthwhile to teach creative multimedia students how to use the cryptic Kindlegen software instead.

I draw my conclusion after spending less than an hour to produce an eight page document. Things would have gone smoother if I was not required to create the source document with tables in Microsoft Word. Even so, Kindlegen delivered content that quickly dropped onto my Kindle for testing. I need to spend hours every day, engineering my work flow so an ePub sits at the end of every week's production line. When I do that, the lessons learned will flow directly into the e-publishing module we teach in the Limerick Institute of Technology.

---

Kindle Touch available internationally for $139.

Related articles

• Kindle Publisher Tools with KF8 available for download now (teleread.com)
• Cut down on Microsoft Word Clutter with a few Tweaks (beast4romtheeast.wordpress.com)

I Listen Most Intently through Earbuds

ONE SIDE EFFECT of owning a Kindle is having to upgrade earbuds because the Kindle is really good at storing MP3 and buying Audible books.

I spread my audio experience across several platforms, mainly to avoid a flat battery on any one device. Although my preferred listening experience is through Pocket Casts on the iPod Touch, Zune's Music Player on my Nokia Lumia is also a brilliant option. However, the production values achieved on the Kindle through Audible.com books is superb.  So it's Pocket Casts (iOS ans Android), Zune subscriptions (Windows Phone) and Audible on Kindle. After less than a year with the Kindle, I've run out of space on the device. That's mainly because I'm carrying too many PDFs in the Kindle. I've decided to sort out that issue, keeping PDFs in Evernote on both the Lumia and the iPod Touch.

Sony eReader for Note Taking

AS A LOYAL KINDLE owner, I've discovered I want access to my notes on screen. That's something Sony's eReader does nicely so I've marked my eBay Wishlist accordingly.

The Kindle's wifi access works well where I live and work so I expect the Sony's on-board wifi to be the same. That means it will probably encounter wifi problems when trying to connect to the internet in many Irish wifi hotspots (places requiring a browser log-in) and it probably won't work well with the wifi on public transportation. But when it connect, it will give me access to more than two million titles in Sony's Reader Store.

We need more than one flavour of eReader because I think our children will see the day when they can borrow books from the local public library and that's easier done with the Sony eReader. It's also easy as a link to download Google public domain books with the Sony eReader.

I am planning to convert a lot of Mia's primary school books onto e-ink. When they go to the Sony PRS-T1, they will be in the lightest eReader on the market. The PRS-T1 weighs less than six ounces. That's lighter than a paperback. Plus its slim curved profile makes it easy to hold.

Earnestly Reading

WHILE LIVING IN GERMANY, I used to read Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the language of my forebears and it was comforting.

While living in Kilkenny, I often found German emanating from the local paper in pieces written by Josephine Gräfin Plettenberg. Today, I return to Goethe, in words written inside the cover of my 2012 Moleskine.

Then indecision brings its own delays, and days are lost lamenting over lost days.

Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute.

What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.

Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

Thanks to my endearing relationship with my Kindle, I've rekindled my love for voracious reading and without asking Pinterest about books. I want to have the mental discipline to think about advice sitting inside the memory of my Kindle when I get wound up by little things at work. That mental discipline extends from reading earnestly, not reading only professional tomes.  So I'm back with my long read. I dive into biographies. I've discovered free adventure titles in e-book form. I've started to enjoy an intensive journey into myself, following characters on electronic pages I can keep tucked away on my Kindle.

Life is good.

---

My photo of books on my shelf and a candy bar from home. The Google query "Are you in earnest" returns 82.5m results, 90 from my personal network and one in my Evernote stash.

kindle

Related articles

• Audible, Kindle, and Me ("It’s a love affair. Audible, Kindle, and me.")
• Book-Talk Monday: Wishlists ("Pretty covers are a definite draw.")

Four Year Old iBook Creator

SINCE OUR FOUR-YEAR OLD has better tap-and-move coordination skills than her parents, we're letting her put together her first epub by using Book Creator on the iPad. If she doesn't get bored with the process, we'll keep using the app.

The problem I'm facing lies in media rights management. Our four-year-old lives inside a world she has created with friends named Lola, Charlie, Homer, Bart, Lisa, Maggie, Ben, Holly, Barney, Peppa, and Dora. Creating a digital album of Mia's world by using the faces of her digital friends will walk us right into a copyright crossfire and probably would result in Mia's iBook being tossed out of the public iBookstore. We're happy enough to have a title sitting in our own bookshelf and in trying to share Mia's Book with cousins across the pond. In the meantime, Book Creator on the iPad has shown me that it's possible to incorporate Apple's iBook format on our third level epublishing curriculum without buying a suite of Macs.