Here’s a story from the WSJ with some more details on the next version of the Kindle: “Amazon is unveiling a new version of its Kindle e-book reader, and possibly an exclusive agreement for a Stephen King work.” Interesting.
I’m not too enthusiastic about the idea of exclusive content on the Kindle, or any other e-book reader. I don’t mind the idea of a new book being released for the Kindle before it’s published in physical form, though. That even kind of makes sense, since you can publish for the Kindle much faster than you can print actual books and ship them out to stores and all that. And maybe a publisher could use Kindle book sales as an indicator of how popular a book is going to be, and hence make judgements about the size of a print run.
This story doesn’t have much info, or any photos, about the actual hardware. I’ve seen new photos elsewhere on the web though. I’m still not seeing anything in the new Kindle that’ll make me want to toss my old one. Hopefully, we’ll get full details later today.
Author: Andrew Huey
Supermen
Patrick
Today is the fifth anniversary of my brother Patrick’s death. Go light a candle for him.
new Kindle?
According to a variety of sources (including the NYT), there will likely be a new Kindle model released on Feb. 9. I’m pretty happy with the current Kindle, but I’m curious to see what the new model looks like (assuming that’s actually what Amazon is announcing on 2/9).
It doesn’t look like they’ve got any really revolutionary advances in E-Ink technology ready, and that’s the area where they could really make a difference in the hardware.
Making It All Work
I posted a couple of weeks back that I would likely pick up David Allen’s new book, Making It All Work, whenever the Kindle version dropped to $9.99. Well, it just did, so I bought it today. I just just thinking that our new president could probably use a bit of organizational help from David Allen. He’s got such an ambitious agenda, and in such a challenging environment, that I really think he should put a personal productivity guru of some sort on his staff. (Who knows, maybe he already has one.)
I’m not sure when I’ll actually get around to reading this book, though. I’m in the middle of a Doctor Who novel right now, plus I just started reading 1776, and I have John Adams on the Kindle too. Plus a boatload of SF and fantasy novels, both dead-tree and Kindle format, waiting to be read.
Batman and Ted Kord
The Brave and the Bold is turning out to be a really fun show. It’s nothing like the classic B:TAS, but it’s great in its own way. The next episode will have Wil Wheaton playing Ted Cord!
bad timing
Don’t you hate it when you randomly come across a really good band, and check their web site, only to find out that they played a show in NYC just two days ago, and now probably won’t be back any time soon? Yeah.
more iTunes Plus
Only a few days after upgrading 200+ songs to iTunes Plus, I went back again today, and found another almost 200 songs to upgrade. The biggest chunk there is the complete Led Zeppelin, which I bought for $99 a while ago, and will now cost me about $30 more to upgrade. I’ve noticed that the songs are downloading pretty quickly, but the bit where it says “processing file” right after the download is taking quite a long time on each song. I have no clue why that is, but whatever it is, it’s going to take a long time to get all that Led Zep converted to iTunes Plus.
Virtual PC
I finally got around to installing an XP virtual machine under Virtual PC on my VIsta desktop PC. This is one of the last things I need to do before wiping out the XP install on that machine, which I’m currently running in dual-boot mode.
I discovered one odd thing while setting this up. If you install XP with SP1 under VPC on Vista, the VPC additions won’t quite work right until you upgrade the virtual machine to SP2. Just a little hint, in case anyone else runs across this problem.
I’m currently letting the XP VM upgrade itself to SP3 via WIndows Update. Boy, that’s taking a long time!
iTunes Plus
I spent a little over $50 yesterday upgrading my iTunes library to the DRM-free iTunes Plus. I had 219 songs upgraded. I feel a bit like a chump for paying Apple so much money just to get DRM-free, slightly higher bitrate, versions of stuff I’ve already paid for. But it’s a one-time thing, and I like the idea of having the DRM-free tracks. In practice, I don’t think it’s going to make much difference though. I listen to my music primarily on my iPod, or through my CD player, so the DRM never got in my way.
It took a surprisingly long time to download all the new tracks. I had to quit the download last night, so I could turn off the computer and go to bed. I picked it up again this morning, and I think it ran for a few hours at least. It was still running when I left for work, so I’m not sure. The download process does an OK job of replacing the old tracks with the new ones, but it didn’t move all the old tracks out of the way like it should have. I had to go in and clean out about 50 tracks manually.
I wish Apple would have come up with a good way of automating the replacement of the old tracks on a second computer, though. To get the new tracks from my desktop to my laptop, I had to attach to the desktop, put together a “smart folder” to pull the new tracks together, copy them to the laptop, move them into the library, then delete the old versions manually for *all* the tracks. That was a bit of a pain. And there’s no way to fix existing playlists, to replace the old tracks with the new ones, so now I have a bunch of empty, or nearly empty, playlists. Well, it was probably time I cleaned up some of my old playlists anyway.