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.
Category: Kindle
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!
no more PC Mag
I just found out that PC Magazine is going to stop publishing their hard copy, and go “100% digital.” I haven’t picked up a copy of PC Mag in a while, but it’s still sad to see it go. I had a subscription at one point a few years back, and it was one of the more useful magazines out there. Aside from continuing their web site, they will also continue to publish a digital version via Zinio. That’s kind of disappointing, since I’m not a big fan of Zinio’s reader. I’d really like to see them offer a Kindle version, but I haven’t seen any indication that they might do that. Looking at the Kindle magazine list, there actually aren’t any computer magazines in there at all. There are a bunch of computer-related blogs in the Kindle blog list, though. It is, of course, not hard to find tech news on the web, or on the Kindle, really, but it would be nice if even one general-audience computer magazine could survive in “dead tree” form.
WSJ.com – Ghost Tales
There was a good little article on ghost stories in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. Two of their recommendations — Ghost Stories by M. R. James and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, are available at manybooks.net in Kindle format. I think I’m going to read some ghost stories for Halloween!
Kindle 2
It looks like someone has leaked some photos of the Kindle 2. I’m perfectly happy with my original Kindle, and, just from the photos, I don’t think I’d necessarily want to trade it in for the new one. I have to admit I don’t do much with the Kindle, aside from reading Newsweek and the NY Times. I’ve read one novel on it, and a handful of short stories. Since I joined Bookmooch, I’ve wound up with a fairly large backlog of “dead tree” books to read. I think I have about 20 novels stacked up right now.
WSJ.com – Opinion: The Digital Future of Books
Interesting article about the relationship between our devices and our attention spans. The author quotes Jeff Bezos, who hopes the “Kindle and its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over years into a world with longer spans of attention.” I guess we shouldn’t expect a Twitter client to be built into the Kindle any time soon!
Last Lecture
I bought The Last Lecture in Kindle format a few days ago. I’m almost done reading it. It’s a pretty good read. Lots of short chapters, mostly random anecdotes from Randy Pausch’s life. There’s nothing in the book that’s likely to change my life, I think, but just a lot of interesting little insights, and some fun stories.
This is also the first book I’m reading, in its entirety, on the Kindle. It’s been a pretty smooth reading experience. Certainly no worse than reading an old-fashioned paper book, but not necessarily any better. Of course, there are some photos in the book, and they really don’t look at all good on the Kindle, so that’s a concern. In the future, I’ll probably avoid buying any book for the Kindle if I know it’s heavy with photos or other graphics.
free Doctor Who ebooks
The BBC has a bunch of Doctor Who ebooks available for free download. So that’s another three or four free books I’ve got loaded onto my Kindle now. I don’t know if any of them are any good, but they didn’t cost me anything, and they aren’t taking up much disk space, so no big problem there, right?