mystery books

I finished reading Spirit House today, on my Kindle. I’m a little annoyed that there’s only one other book in the Calvino series available in the US. The remaining books are available mail-order from Thailand, but that’s kind of expensive. One of the good things about the Kindle is that it should make it relatively easy and risk-free to get a bunch of already-written books into “print” in the US. You don’t have to worry about upfront printing costs, the risk of returns from brick and mortar retailers, or any of that noise. Just put them out there on Amazon, and see what happens.

productivity books

David Allen’s new book just came out. I’ll probably pick up the Kindle version at some point, though I think I’ll wait and see if they drop the price on it. It’s $14.27 right now; the hardcover is $17.13. I’m assuming the Kindle version will drop to the usual $9.99 eventually.

I still haven’t finished reading Ready for Anything , actually, so I’m in no hurry to start the new book. Along similar lines, I’m almost done with the audio version of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits.

I don’t know if all this book-reading is doing me any good, really, but I like to think it’s helping.

bookmarks

I’ve been using both Spurl.net and delicious.com to save my bookmarks to the web over the last couple of years. Spurl has clearly been on life support for awhile now. It continued to work, but it didn’t seem like anyone was doing any maintenance or support work on it. Their site became inaccessible a few days ago, and hasn’t come back, so I’m guessing that they’re finally dead.

I ran across an article that mentioned ZigTag today. It looks like it might be kind of interesting, but I still wish Spurl was alive and well. Meanwhile, Yahoo doesn’t seem to have screwed up Delicious much since they acquired it. It still works well, and it’s still fairly simple and fast.

More Readers Picking Up Electronic Books

Here’s an article from the NY Times on the Kindle, and other e-book readers, and the e-book market in general. The gist of it is basically that the market is picking up, and people, both readers and authors, are becoming more accepting of it. I’m still waiting for J K Rowling to decide that she’s OK with e-books. I wouldn’t mind re-reading the first few Harry Potter books at some point, but I had borrowed them from a friend when I first read them, and have since returned them. I could probably be talked into buying Kindle versions, though! I guess JKR just doesn’t want my money.

odd Kindle content

Okay, another Kindle post. Sorry. I just read that Rand McNally is releasing a few road atlases for the Kindle. I don’t know, I guess that could be useful, but really, the Kindle seems like a really bad platform for a book of maps. The screen is small and grey-scale. If you really want static maps, just buying a paper atlas is a much better idea. And if you want electronic maps, just use Google maps on your cell phone, iPod Touch, or whatever. Or get a GPS.

great Kindle covers

These guys make some great covers for the Kindle. They’re pretty expensive though. I guess I’ll stick with the one that came with it.

It seems like I haven’t been blogging about anything other than the Kindle lately. There’s no particular reason for that. I just haven’t had much else to say. I think I’m nearly done fighting the cold I caught a couple of weeks ago. I should, hopefully, be fine by Christmas.

new magazines on Kindle

There are two new magazines available on the Kindle: Cash, a personal finance magazine, and The Escapist. I’m still hoping that they’ll eventually add The Economist. As magazines go, it’s perfect for the Kindle — nearly all text. Very little would be lost in the translation.

I’m curious about “Cash”. The general format itself is interesting — it appears to be a Kindle-only compilation of repurposed content from other TMS sources. I wonder if we’ll see more of this kind of thing on the Kindle.

free books

Random House has made a number of their Kindle titles free to download, until 2/28/09. There are three Charlie Huston novels on the list, and a few other ones that sound interesting. I actually haven’t read any of Huston’s novels yet, but I did enjoy his run on Moon Knight.

Meanwhile, I’m fighting a cold this week. It snuck up on me on Sunday afternoon. I’m assuming I picked it up while I was out Christmas shopping. Hopefully, it won’t linger for too long. I want to be healthy for Christmas and New Year’s!

Cyber Monday

I spent a fair bit of time this weekend browsing around on the web, looking at Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. I didn’t find anything that I was really compelled to buy, though I did order a couple of Christmas presents this weekend. And I broke down tonight and ordered a couple of cheap Blu-Ray discs from Amazon, along with a copy of Thursday Next: First Among Sequels. This is another example, by the way, of a case where the hard-copy book costs less than the Kindle version — $6.49 vs $9.99. I haven’t bought many Kindle books yet, largely because the dead tree versions can often be had for less.