Get the Amazon Rewards Visa Card and Get $100 Off Kindle
Thanks to Chase, you can get $100 off the Kindle - for a Limited time only. 1) Apply online for Amazon Rewars Visa and get a 30 second decision - If you’re approved you’ll get $30 back on your credit card statement after your Kindle purchase. 2) Add a Kindle to your cart. 3) Place your order using the Amazon.com Rewards Visa Card and enter this Kindle promo code: VISACARD to get the additional $70 savings at checkout. (Additional restrictions apply).

Two caveats - Kindle V2.0 is going to be out in October. (My personal opinion) A credit card is like signing a contract with the devil.

Now, of course, recycled paper is mostly post-consumer waste and as bright as bleached linen, but it hardly matters. We have iPhones, Kindles, blogs, online banking, voicemail and email specifically so we never have to touch the stuff. Poetically, the daily newspaper - that greasy rag that would stain your fingers and your shirt - is limping toward oblivion, its pages now so thin as to be translucent. You can watch it disappear.

You'd think we'd have phased out paper altogether by now. How hard could it be? But the truth is we're nowhere near escaping the pulp of the tree as a major form of communication. According to this industry group, we publish two billion books a year, 350 million magazines and 24 billion newspapers. Gosh, you'd be fooled into thinking the publishing industry is robust! Plus we scribble notes and asides, print yard-long receipts at the convenience store, send greeting cards by the truckload for every holiday. A single printer at my office eats a two-inch package of paper for breakfast, and we have at least a half dozen printers.

Word on the street is that we read less than we used to - you'd think that would be an argument for less paper. But I disagree. I think we read more: We consume information more voraciously than ever. Sure, a lot of it comes electronically. But no one likes to read electronically. We just do it because it's easy and free! I recently printed probably 150 double-sided pages of reports on bluefin tuna because I wanted to use a highlighter. Oh, it's recycled, I told myself. And I'll recycle it again. 

I'm anti-wasting paper, of course, but I love the semi-permanence that paper provides. It degrades, sure, but it exists on three planes the way an electronic medium cannot. But I'm still surprised that we - the cultural "we" - haven't fully shaken paper from our lives. I guess it's one of those futuristic ideals that eventually falls away, like flying cars, meals in pill form and the hypertext novel.

My father is a book collector. One of his simple pleasures is buying a good book and then letting it sit in his bookcase as he anticipates reading it. I imagine that he peers over at it from time to time and finds comfort in knowing that it's there awaiting him.

Blumner seems to enjoy that same experience, and she finds the believes that Kindle readers don't enjoy the same pleasure. In fact, I do experience that pleasure, but instead of a bookshelf, I have a Kindle Home screen. I habitually return to the Home screen before I turn my Kindle off after a reading session, a sort of virtual reshelving of my current book. When I turn my Kindle on, my Home screen "bookshelf" is there to entice me and to awaken my anticipation for what awaits in the pages of my latest acquisitions.

Somehow, I doubt that Blumner would be satisfied by my experience, and I can't blame her for it. Indeed, many of the books in my father's bookshelves evoke memories of my childhood when I visit him to this day. They are ever-present residents of my father's house. Reading the title of these books isn't necessary for identification purposes. I can recognize them purely by the colors and patterns. I'm approaching my mid-40s now, and I still remember seeing these books as a child, likely before I ever learned to read.

So you see, like Blumner, I have an affinity for books. However, unlike Blumner, I don't believe that my Kindle replaces those books. Indeed, it is an extension of my physical library, and it's one that is every bit as enjoyable. Yes, books are to be treasured, but so is reading, and the Kindle makes reading more convenient than ever before.

Ms. Blumner, buy a Kindle. Your virtual library awaits.

Shopping stores were dictating terms before a bunch of guys decided to start a marketplace that could increase the purchasing power of the customer manifold by launching a portal named e-bay. Not that there was a dearth of marketplace, they were in plenty and everybody had focused on either B2B or B2C but e-bay realized the true potential of having a C2C marketplace (with specific focus on how to sell second hand stuff with their selling tips) and end users embraced this concept with open arms.

Each of Amazon, Citibank, Sears, Overstock have epitomized online selling and are continuously transforming themselves to meet the end customer needs.

While amazon claims that they are the biggest seller on the earth and there logo signifies they can sell anything from "a" to "z" with an arrow going from a to z and living up to the expectations of being the No. 1 book sellers the latest to come from their stable is a "Kindle: Amazon's New Wireless Reading Device" which is a Revolutionary electronic-paper display provides a sharp, high-resolution screen that looks and reads like real paper.

Overstock on the other hand with its over sized "O" to signify that they have all thats in this sphere which is directed towards the shape of the earth and, now are close to the real world when they advertise on the net that "Carlos Boozer " who would be playing for US in the Olympics '08 is sponsored by them.

Sears typically plays with the human mind of buying products only when they see a discount available on it through any form. Hence they have promotions of Sales and Coupons on their website and its affiliates. So if we look at it the typical advertising angle of "Aware-Interest-Trial-Adoption" Sears focusses directly on Adoption as they know that giving discount coupons would immediately take an user to the last hurdle of purchase if they are really interested in buying a product.

There's never a famine of examples and if you pick up any of the Marketing books you might see all these compani"e"s listed in them, but the point that I am trying to drive here is that how these companies are continuously enhancing themselves to live upto the expectations that have been set on them by the users and how competition is making them evolve continuously.

This series skirts real close to the Paranormal Romance/Urban Fantasy boundary.  There is sex and I can see the romantic elements developing in the storyline, but I can also see where the heroine could go solo. It's anyone's game at this point.

The fresh perspective that the author presents on demons and demon culture is intriguing. It will be interesting to see how it develops in the next book.

If you like Paranormal Romance/Urban Fantasy you will like this series. Give it a try!

Product Description (Amazon)
The beautiful. The bad. The possessed.
Some people worship them. Some people fear them. And some people—like Morgan Kingsley—go up against them toe-to-toe, flesh to flesh, and power against power. An exorcist by trade, Morgan is one of the few humans with an aura stronger than her possessor, even though her demon can tease her body senseless. She’s also a woman who has just discovered a shocking truth: everything she once believed about her past, her identity, may have been a lie.
With a family secret exploding around her and a full-scale demon war igniting, Morgan is a key player in an unsettled world. Then a rogue sociopathic demon enters her life with a bang. His name is The Hunter. And since she is the prey, Morgan has only one choice: to hunt The Hunter down—no matter what heartbreaking truths she uncovers along the way….

Website: http://www.jennablack.com/

The design of the author's web site follows the mood of her books incorporating a dark theme. You can access standard picks: Books, Bio, Mailing List, Fun Stuff, Free Reads, and Links.

The layout of the home page needs a little work, it seems that there has been stuff added to the bottom of the content with out regard to the overall layout. It comes off as an afterthought.

I think that the author made a very wise decision on her Free Reads page by posting the content as PDF. That is the most readable option on a dark web site.

Overall I think that this site is a good author site that reflects the tone of the books and offers the users/readers many options.

Sorry, but this is Windows-only for now.

The Problem

There are often cases when the title and/or author information displayed on the Kindle's Home screen are either incorrect or are not what you want to see. For example, if you email a file to your Kindle for conversion, Amazon changes the author of the file to your email address and the title to the name of the file.

If you want to change the information you see on the Kindle's Home screen, you'll have to rely on third-party tools. There isn't a way to do it from within the Kindle.

The Solution

The easiest way that I've found to change what is displayed on your Kindle Home screen is to use a tool called Mobi2Mobi GUI. This application allows you to read and change the metadata that is contained within a Kindle's book file. The metadata contains the book's title, author, and other information. By using Mobi2Mobi GUI, you can easily access that information and change it if you wish.

Here's how.

Step 1: Get Mobi2Mobi

The first thing you'll need is a copy of Tommy Persson's excellent Mobi2Mobi application. You can download that at the MobiPerl website. (The link is in the Download section. Download from the Releases link, not the zipped source.)

Once you've downloaded MobiPerl, unzip Mobi2Mobi.exe into the directory of your choice. The MobiPerl download includes many other tools, but all you need is Mobi2Mobi.exe.

Step 2: Get Mobi2Mobi GUI

You will also need a copy of Mobi2Mobi GUI. This is a Windows application that automates the use of Mobi2Mobi.exe. You can download Mobi2Mobi GUI from the MobilRead forums. Download the latest version, but make sure you don't get the file that ends in GPL. That's the source code and not the actual application.

Unzip Mobi2Mobi_GUI.exe to the directory of your choice. There are several files in the Zip file, but you only need Mobi2Mobi_GUI.exe.

Note: In my original post on this, I said that you need to also install ActivePerl. As it turns out, that step is not necessary because the Perl libraries needed by Mobi2Mobi are built into the Mobi2Mobi.exe application.

Step 3: Get the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5

You will need to download and install Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5. You can get it here. You need this because Mobi2Mobi GUI was written as a .NET Framework application.

Step 4: Run it!

Now that you've installed all of the necessary plumbing, you're ready to run Mobi2Mobi GUI. Go ahead and double-click on Mobi2Mobi_GUI.exe and you'll see the window shown below.

Setting Mobi2Mobi Configuration

The first thing you need to do in Mobi2Mobi GUI is click Set Dir to the right of the Mobi2Mobi Dir box and select the folder where you put Mobi2Mobi.exe. Then click Set Dir to the right of the Book Directory box and select the directory where the books that you'll be editing are located. When you have done this, it will look like the following.

In my situation, Mobi2Mobi.exe is located in c:\mobi2mobi and I am copying my Kindle books that I am going to be editing into the c:\KindleBooks folder.

Notice also that Use Win32 is checked.  This is simply an indicator that Mobi2Mobi GUI is going to use the self-contained Mobi2Mobi.exe instead of using ActivePerl. (If you don't know what that means, don't worry about it. It's not important.)

Opening a Book

After you've configured the location of Mobi2Mobi and your book directory (which only has to be done once), you're ready to open a book. Click the Open File button and Mobi2Mobi GUI will display the contents of the folder you specified in the Book Directory text box. Select the book file that you want to edit. (If the file is a book downloaded from the Kindle Store, you'll need to change the file extension from .azw to .prc first. More on Kindle Store books later.) Once you've opened the file, you'll see the book's information displayed in Mobi2Mobi GUI as shown below.

Editing Metadata

To edit the book's metadata, enter the new information in the appropriate text box and then check the box to the right of the text box. (If you don't check the box, it won't work.) For example, if I want to change the author of the book you see in the figure above, I would enter the new author name in the Author text box and then check the box to the right of that text box. Once you've entered in all the correct information, click the Convert button (on the far right side of the dialog) to save the file with the correct information. The book is saved with a .mobi file extension using the name entered in the Output File text box and is stored in the folder specified in the Book Directory text box.

Warning! If you check the box next to a particular field and then change the data for that field, it won't work. You must change the data before you check the box.

All that seems simple enough, right? Wrong! If you're editing the metadata for an unprotected book you downloaded from the Internet, you can simply enter the correct information and be done with it. However, if you're working with a book you purchased from the Kindle Store, there are a couple of changes to the procedure.

Editing Metadata for Kindle Store Books

Before you can open a book purchased from the Kindle Store in Mobi2Mobi GUI, you first have to change the file extension from .azw to .prc. (If you can't see the file extension, you may need to follow the steps documented here.) Once you've changed the file extension to .prc, you can open the file in Mobi2Mobi GUI.

After you've opened your Kindle Store book in Mobi2Mobi GUI, you'll follow the same steps outline above to change the author of the book. However, if you want to change the title, you'll need to use the exth type and exth data fields in Mobi2Mobi GUI.

Click the exth type dropdown and set it to updatedtitle. After doing that, enter the title that you want to show on the Kindle's Home screen in the exth data field. Finally, check the box to the right of the exth data field so that Mobi2Mobi GUI will write your change to the new file and then click Convert. (When you do this, Mobi2Mobi GUI will ignore the title that is entered into the Book Title field.)

Copying the New File to Your Kindle

When you click Convert, Mobi2Mobi GUI will generate a new file using the name you specific in the Output File text box. The new file will have a .mobi file extension. To copy that file to your Kindle, simply plug the Kindle into your computer using a USB cable and copy the .mobi file that Mobi2Mobi GUI created into the documents folder on your Kindle's main memory or on an SD card. You should then see the book listed on your Kindle's Home screen with the new information that you entered.

-- Jim Cheshire

Changing data on Kindle Store books is not quite as simple as with non-DRM books, but it's still pretty easy. Here's the command line you'll use:

mobi2mobi --outfile c:\kindle\NewFile.azw --exthtype updatedtitle --exthdata "New Title" c:\kindle\OldFile.azw

In other words, if you have a file called MyBook.azw with a title of "My Kindle Book" and you want to change the title to "My Cool Book", you would use the following command:

mobi2mobi --outfile c:\kindle\MyNewBook.azw --exthtype updatedtitle --exthdata "My Cool Book" c:\kindle\MyBook.azw

If you want to change the author as well, you'll need to use the steps provided in my original post. Yes, I know it's a hassle to do all of this. I'm experimenting now with a Windows application that can update this same information and I'll post results on that as soon as I have them.

It's a brave new world!

-- Jim Cheshire

Anyways, in other news, we are still trying to work out all the housing stuff for France, seeing as how I'm going to be moving in this time next week...  There are some definite drawbacks to being the first one to enter a program, and it certainly doesn't help to have a rookie study abroad advisor at my home school who seems to have even less of an idea of what's going on than I do.

The most exciting thing to happen this weekend was that i got to play with a Sony Reader.  Recently, I've been salivating over Amazon's Kindle, but have not had the chance to actually touch one since no one I know owns one and, considering Amazon is totally online, there's nowhere I can go to test one.  Thus, it was sooooo cool to actually be able to touch/handle/play with a Sony Reader even though I didn't know too much about it.  I really liked the design and ease of use, but since I have read so much about the Kindle, I was constantly comparing the two.  At least now I know that I really really do want one.  Of course, I would need unlimited funds to use it as I would like to, since they cost between $300 and $400 each, not to mention that books are $5-$10.  So in order to fill the Sony Reader with 160 books, as they advertise, I would have to be able to spend about $2,000, which, as a poor student who is about to go to expensive Europe for a few months, is nowhere near a good idea.  (And for the record, I would get the Kindle over the Reader even though I have not experienced the former, simply because it has more capabilities for only about $50 more.)

PS I know the title of this post doesn't make sense, but it popped into my head, so bear with me :D

Introducing Kindle™

Three years ago, we set out to design and build an entirely new class of device—a convenient, portable reading device with the ability to wirelessly download books, blogs, magazines, and newspapers. The result is Amazon Kindle.

We designed Kindle to provide an exceptional reading experience. Thanks to electronic paper, a revolutionary new display technology, reading Kindle’s screen is as sharp and natural as reading ink on paper—and nothing like the strain and glare of a computer screen. Kindle is also easy on the fingertips. It never becomes hot and is designed for ambidextrous use so both "lefties" and "righties" can read comfortably at any angle for long periods of time.

We wanted Kindle to be completely mobile and simple to use for everyone, so we made it wireless. No PC and no syncing needed. Using the same 3G network as advanced cell phones, we deliver your content using our own wireless delivery system, Amazon Whispernet. Unlike WiFi, you’ll never need to locate a hotspot. There are no confusing service plans, yearly contracts, or monthly wireless bills—we take care of the hassles so you can just read.

With Whispernet, you can be anywhere, think of a book, and get it in one minute. Similarly, your content automatically comes to you, wherever you are. Newspaper subscriptions are delivered wirelessly each morning. Most magazines arrive before they hit newsstands. Haven’t read the book for tomorrow night’s book club? Get it in a minute. Finished your book in the airport? Download the sequel while you board the plane. Whether you’re in the mood for something serious or hilarious, lighthearted or studious, Kindle delivers your spontaneous reading choices on demand.

And because we know you can't judge a book by its cover, Kindle lets you download and read the beginning of books for free. This way, you can try it out—if you like it, simply buy and download with 1-Click, right from your Kindle, and continue reading. Want to try a newspaper as well? All newspaper subscriptions start with a risk-free two-week trial.

Kindle’s paperback size and expandable memory let you travel light with your library. With the freedom to download what you want, when you want, we hope you’ll never again find yourself stuck without a great read.

We're very proud to introduce Amazon Kindle and we hope you like it as much as we do.

- The Amazon Kindle Team

WATCH THIS VIDEO

It does not fully support Portable Document Format (PDF)

Many reviewers have expressed concern with the ergonomics of the Kindle. [18] Without its cover, it is difficult to hold onto without accidentally pressing one of the buttons.

The Kindle Terms of Use forbid transferring eBooks to someone else or using them on a different device.

source: Wikipedia

Compare with Sony Reader

Hence, the Kindle. I've been using it for several months now and find reading from it to be easier than a paper book because it is possible to turn the page and hold it with the same hand. You simply press the paddle on whichever side is right for your style. Rarely do I experience glare on the screen. Enlarging and reducing the type is a feature I don't use much, but it is there for people who strain with smaller type.

I've downloaded numerous books to the device using the "whisper net" service that functions just about flawlessly. My Amazon account was charged and the books arrived in about 30 seconds each. Switching from one book to the other is easy using the interface. When you turn the device off it remembers where you were. So, if you fall asleep with it in your lap, you don't have to worry about losing your place. When I get on an airplane, I know I have a large selection of reading material all packed into the form of one lightweight device.

What about all those paper books? I'm not giving them up. I use the Kindle for my entertainment reading. That is books I enjoy for leisure. The ones I expect to refer back to time and again will be purchased in solid form and placed upon a noble shelf where they belong. In a worst case, I may have to buy a book twice. Or, I might just buy several more memory cards and keep them loaded with the books I like. Takes the romance out of a grand old library, but the price of Kindle books is about 2/3's to 1/2 the price of paper books. Some classics can be had for $1. Something to be said for that. Frees up cash for those great books and fine woodwork to contain them.

See Gawker! Kindles really do exist!

Here's the commercial from Verizon.

What is a Kindle? It is like an IPod for books, and yes, it can "read to you" if you like to listen to books on "tape". I find reading very relaxing and is something that I am always asking our guests..."What are you reading?". Now I will have to start asking, "What's on your Kindle?"

In the short time I have had it, I have downloaded a number of books, via the FREE whispernet feature that works with Sprint's cell phone coverage, and have downloaded a large number of classics for free via the computer.

You can find great tips for books in many spots online like the Kindle Reader, or the Kindle Guide, or from Amazon's Kindle blog.  Just yesterday I wanted to look up a passage from "The Prophet" by Kahil Gibran and had the whole book on my Kindle in under a minute and for less than $5.  All while sitting on our back porch!  How cool is that.

Now, what was I going to say?  Oh yes....

My first semester at the two-year junior college I atteneded, into which I crammed a solid four years, I took a class on mass communications.  My main reason for taking the class was that the course description in the catalog seemed to imply that it involved a good deal of movie and TV watching and analyzing of the same.  I did pretty well, except that since it was my first class of the day, I often arrived late.  It was when grades came out that first semester that I discovered that college professors aren't like high school teachers and won't sent a note home to mommy and daddy alerting them to your tardiness, thereby initiating corrective parental action in the interest of saving your grade.  The second time I took the class I was in the throes of what I like to call my Educational Dark Period.  This time around I had a different teacher, one who had a very different interprataion than my previous one of what the course should be.  A lot less TV watching, and a lot more reading and thinking.  I was not prepared for this.  The third and final time I took the course, in the dawn of what I like to call my Educational Awakening, I had the same teacher as the first time, took the class in the afternoon, and was mentally prepared for anything.  I got a B.

Somewhere in all or parts of those three tries, we discussed the message and the medium of modern communicaiton.  Quick communicaitons lesson, the message is the content (news, information, etc.), the medium is how we access it (newspaper, TV, internet, etc.).  In 1964 a guy named Marshall McLuhan wrote a book called Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, in which he posits that, to quote his famous phrase, "The medium is the message."  I won't go into any more details of his theories, but that phrase is interesting in and of itself and I think is more true now than ever.  In the early days of TV there wasn't much by way of content.  But who needs content?  There's a magic picture box in my living room!  Even before content finally became systematic and more sophisticated the television itself, the medium, had changed the culture.  People stayed in, they started eating their meals in front of the tube, hello TV dinners and TV trays.  It had a significant impact on the culture.  The same can be said of virtually every new innovation in mediums since:  audio tape, compact discs, the Internet, mobile phones, everything.

In the New York Times last week, columnist David Brooks wrote an interesting article that is sort of related to this.  In a "Dear Abbey" type format, he traces the history of what he calls cultural one-upsmanship.  Whereas, the heights of the cultural totem pole were, for centuries, things like the opera, literature, poetry and the like, since the 1960's there has been a change.  Now the totem toppers are those with the newest generation iPhones (that's not a slam on you, dad, especially since you're giving me your iPod :]).  The iPhone, and mobile phones in general, have had, and are having, nearly as great a cultural impact as the TV, maybe even equal to.  Think in terms of politics.  Couple the Internet with everyone's cell phone video cameras, and politicians have to be more cautious then ever about what they say, even in what before would have been considered "safe" environments.

One new media related techno doohicky that is causing a stir right now is the Kindle from Amazon.com.  It's basically an electronic book.  Or more like an electronic library that's the size of a book.  You can check out more about it here.  I think it has the potential to be the "next big thing."  A medium that can have the kind of cultural impact of the TV.  Or it could go the way of BetaMax and Laser Disc; a few early adopting zealots, but no mass appeal.  We'll have to wait and see on that one.

I bring up the Kindle because I have heard many Old Media folks (print journalists, novelists, people over 40) lament its inception.  "Nothing beats the feel of wood pulp between your fingers and the musty smell of a real to life book," they say.  "Who wants to curl up by the fire with a miniature computer monitor?  Not I," say the aged.  I'm not totally discounting their feelings, but that kind of talk smacks of Not Like the Good Old Days faux-nostalgia.  Like those people who say they miss their old '53 DeSoto.  Do they really?  It might be a nice thought, but remember how you used to have to start it 20 minutes before you actually wanted to drive it just so it would warm up?  It might be nice for the occasional Sunday drive, but not for everyday.  I love books as much as anybody, to the point where I've been repeatedly forbidden to buy anymore until I finish the ones already on my shelf.  But if I had a Kindle I wouldn't need that shelf, would I?  So in a kind of reversal, its the older folks that are clinging to the medium, rather than the message.

To wrap up this already too long post on things that probably don't interest you, I will recount one last, very topical story that is especially appropriate given the first part of this sentance.  I was listening to KNBR sports talk radio the other day and the host, Ralph Barbieri, was deriding bloggers as a group, though specifically sports bloggers.  He said something along the lines of, "Who do bloggers think they are anyway and doesn't there have to be a hefty dose of narcissism involved for them to think that anybody cares what they have to say?"  Besides the obvious irony of a sports talk radio host musing on who is qualified to offer an opinion up for public consumption, the comment struck me as paranoid and a little old-fogy-ish.  He was denegrating a group that basically does the same thing he does, just using a different medium; internet versus radio.  Using sports talk may not be the best example for the point I'm trying, poorly, to make, but it dovetailed nicely with the Brooks article and the ongoing backlash to the New Media by the leery Old Media establishment.

Ok, next time I promise something more fun.

"As for the much-heralded e-ink screen, it reminds me of an Etch-a-Sketch, only crisper. The latter, incidentally was first released in 1973--around the time that color TV really began to take over in earnest in the U.S. from the old black and white system," says Striphas. He goes on to say, "I wish Amazon had taken a cue here and aimed for a color screen, although I realize that their doing so could have resulted in an undesirable price point for Kindle. The screen renders text quite well, although it still seems vaguely pixelated to me. Word spacing and character tracking could be improved."

A color screen would be nice, but the technology doesn't exist. E Ink is supposedly researching color, but nothing exists at this point, even in prototype. Had Amazon decided to go with color, it would have ended up with an LCD screen, and readers agree almost unanimously that an LCD screen is inferior to E Ink for reading.

Given that fact, what exactly does the iPhone or iPod Touch have going for it that makes it a better option than the Kindle for reading? After all, the screen is substantially smaller, and battery life is terrible compared to the Kindle. The Kindle also doesn't carry the heft price tag (and hassle) of a data plan with AT&T. If I read between the lines of what Striphas and others are really saying, what I see is "Apple is cool and Amazon is not." It appears to come down to that one point with nothing of substance to back it up.

I have nothing against Apple. They make beautiful hardware that works well. However, I'm not willing to read on a device that is inferior for that purpose purely so that I can feel better about my cool factor.

In order to view pictures on your Kindle, you'll need to create a folder called "Pictures" on either the Kindle's main memory or on an inserted SD card. All of the walk-throughs I've seen say that you should create a folder inside of the "Pictures" folder and name it "screensavers" in all lower case. In fact, the case of the folder doesn't matter, and neither does the name! You can, in fact, create as many folders as you want inside of the "Pictures" folder.

Suppose you have some pictures of your kids, some nature shots, and some more from your recent vacation. If you create three folders inside of the "Pictures" folder (called Kids, Nature, and Vacation) and then press Alt+Z on the Kindle (after disconnecting from the computer's USB port,) you'll see one item for each of these folders on the Kindle's Home screen. When you select one of those, you'll see only the pictures that are in that particular folder.

By doing this, you can conveniently organize pictures that you put on your Kindle. As with any picture, you can press Alt+F to switch to full-screen, and you can press Shift+Alt+0 (zero) to add the displayed image to your Kindle screensaver.

La librería electrónica Amazon no atrae a los editores españoles | El Periódico de Catalunya | Agenda: Días de verano

Mucho se ha hablado ya de los intentos de implantación de nuevos dispositivos electrónicos de lectura como el Kindle que comercializa Amazon. Por ahora, más parece un inquietante medidor de tensión arterial que un elemento de ocio. Para Daniel Fernández, mi editor en Edhasa, el enjendro, como sus precedentes, sigue recordando a las "tablillas sumerias", me he reído con el símil y es que sustituir el olor de la tinta recién impresa sobre un buen papel va a resultar difícil.

Unfortunately there are a couple of big Kindle drawbacks. B&W only, for one. You also can't mark it all over with a yellow highlighter and Post-It flags.

In his latest post, Bernstein outlines what he doesn't like about the Kindle and makes the claim that the Kindle "phones home" to Amazon in order to confirm that you are able to read a particular piece of content. Had Bernstein bothered to simply check out how DRM works on the Kindle, he'd know that the Kindle does not phone home. The Kindle uses a serial number embedded into the actual file to confirm your right to read a particular book. That serial number is embedded in the file when it's purchased from Amazon, and the serial number matches the serial number of your Kindle.

How do I know this? I took a pretty radical approach to finding out how DRM works on the Kindle. I talked to Amazon about it! After they told me how it works, I checked it out for myself and confirmed what they told me.

When you read information about the Kindle (or anything else for that matter,) check it out for yourself. Read with a critical eye, especially when it comes to the Internet.

Langendorf does point out some of the frustrations people have with e-book readers like the Kindle. Specifically, he points out that navigating large libraries is cumbersome. He's right. There's no shortage of Kindle users screaming for Amazon to add folders and folder management to the Kindle's Home screen. However, the lack of this feature doesn't represent a fatal flaw in the device. Amazon could make that problem go away with a firmware fix, and I have to think that, eventually, it will.

Where Langendorf falls flat on his face (and also where he reveals that he, like many detractors, doesn't own a Kindle) is when he points out what he feels is "the most flawed aspect of eBook readers." Langendorf says, "I should be able to do the things I want to do while reading a book -- highlighting text, circling phrases and passages, annotating." He goes on to say, "Why can't I select a passage and copy it to a file I'm assembling for a lecture or blog post?"

What Langendorf doesn't seem to know is that you can do all of these things on the Kindle. Note to Langendorf: Try using a Kindle before you describe all the features it supposedly lacks. But don't feel too bad. You've got plenty of company as a naysayer.

- Jim Cheshire

Here is my geek punditry for the day. The Amazon Kindle etext reader is going to sell well. It will succeed for the same reason the iPod did. The iPod did not dominate the mp3 player market by creating a better mp3 player, they did it by greatly expanding the market through its iTunes service. People who had no idea of what an mp3 was or how to create/find them now had a way to purchase digital music easily and for less money than they paid for to get the music on CD.

The Kindle has Amazon shopping built in and thus a way to purchase etext at a reasonable cost. Amazon is attempting to follow the highly successful model Apple used, and it will probably work.

I've been doing the etext thing for years on my Palm based PDAs. There is an amazing amount of material available, including Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Beam Piper, and a good chunk of the Baen Books catalog. I am, however, a lot more geeky than the general public. I was not part of the Apple model because I knew about mp3s and the problems with overly restrictive copy protection.

Apple's "Kindle format" is an encrypted version of the Mobipocket format common on PDAs such a Palm OS based devices. It does support non-encrypted Mobipocket, as well as text files and a few other open formats.

The Kindle's biggest competitor will be the iPhone, once decent reader format is available (and either iTunes supports loading it or there is some third party software you could use without having Apple brick your phone), but I think the Kindle will hold its own, for the reasons stated.