The poll which Greenfield appended to his post offers three choices: E-books, Ebooks, and eBooks. I voted for the third one, for reasons which I explained in my post last week. So far, eBooks is in the lead, with 17.5 percent of the 160 votes cast, followed by Ebooks, 7.5 percent, and E-books, 6.25 percent.

This poll is an opportunity to strike a blow against useless hyphens and for a style choice that puts the emphasis where it belongs–on B for Book, not E for Electronic. If you agree, please click here and scroll down to fill out the poll. If you don’t agree, please resume your regularly scheduled work and forget about it.

Note: For Kindle subscribers, I made this handy URL that you can enter on the browser of a computer or other device faster than your e Ink Kindle:  bit.ly/eBookPoll .

It’s weird, but since converting to “eBooks” I get a small but noticeable lift every time I type the word. It just seems right to me. How about you?

[Obviously you won't be able to see this video if you are reading on a Kindle. You will need to switch to a computer or tablet and navigate with your browser to YouTube.com/lenedgerly where it will be the most recent item.]

Eric Loss's Self-Portrait at Sea, a Week After Rounding Cape Horn

Ever since I interviewed Eric Loss on October 31, 2011, just before his departure on a solo circumnavigation of the world, I have been following his beautifully written blog to see how he’s doing. I regularly copy and paste his navigation coordinates into Google Maps to see where in the world his last post came from, and these days the map appears on my screen as nothing but blue, with a tiny red “A” marker in the middle of it. You have to zoom out to see any land, and that’s when you realize he’s smack dab in the middle of the South Pacific.

He set sail from Los Angeles on November 7, 2011, in Odyssey, his aptly named 36-foot yacht. He rounded Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America, crossed the South Atlantic to the Cape of Good Hope, proceeded thence to the southern coast of Australia and now, at last, he is crossing the vast Pacific on his last leg home.

Eric is an extremely competent sailor, as well as a bookish sort. He would have needed a bigger boat if he had stowed enough paper books to keep him company. Luckily he has a Kindle 2. Unluckily, the battery died. Here is an excerpt from his post from May 25:

My Kindle, which has been warning me for the past few months that its battery was slowly dying and that I really should go out and buy another Kindle or two from Amazon, finally decided today that it had had enough of my malingering and kicked the bucket.  When I turned it on this morning, the portrait of Virginia Woolf vanished from all but the top right quarter of the screen, where it merely faded and blurred, leaving me with a reading device that only lets me read the first half of the lines on the top half of the page.

Forrester Research’s James McQuivey likes to talk about KPH, a new metric that stands for Kindles Per Household, because he predicts e Ink Kindles will become convenience devices cheap enough to scatter around the house for various family members. Luckily for Eric, the KPB (Kindles Per Boat) total for Odyssey is two. His mother, Katie Loss, sent her son off with her Kindle 3, which has now been activated for the rest of the journey.

Eric took the time yesterday to post a unique, seafaring user-interface comparison of the Kindle 2 and the Kindle 3, AKA Kindle Keyboard. He misses the row of number keys that was eliminated with the Kindle Keyboard, and I remember thinking the same thing. I did learn how to press the Alt key on the K3, which turns the keys in the top row into number keys, but you have to remember which is which. You can also press the SYM button, and a dialog will appear where you can select numbers and symbols with the 5-way controller.

In the following passage, Eric demonstrates why digital rights management (DRM) is such a pain in the keel:

Since my mom’s Kindle is still registered as hers, it has a whole slew of new books on it, but I can’t transfer any of my Amazon purchases between Kindles. Fortunately Baen is an enlightened publisher and has had success selling non-DRM’d eBooks (and in fact offering up a significant free library), and Project Gutenberg obviously does as well, so I was able to finish the book I was in the middle of by transferring it to the new Kindle, along with a few others I had been planning on reading soon.

I hope Mom’s Kindle will last the rest of Eric’s circumnavigation of the globe. What an amazing adventure. I can’t wait to talk to him on his return, for the definitive World Traveler’s Guide to Kindles!

Fair winds and following seas!

News

John Read, Chief
Litigation III Section
Antitrust Division
U.S. Department of Justice
450 5th Street, NW, Suite 4000 Washington, DC 20530

Mike Shatzkin has already sent his comment. Stephen Windwalker offers a lively account of the background to the case.

Tech Tips – 1) Shelly Crawford-Stock tells how she keeps track of who buys what Kindle book on her shared Amazon account. 2) Which device is better for sharing comments on newspaper or magazine articles, e Ink Kindles or Kindle Fire? Answer: Not the Fire.

Interview (starts at 21:39) – Paul Slack is co-founder and Chief Learning Officer of the Dallas-based Splash Media, where he also serves as President of Splash Media U, the company’s e-learning platform. His new 319-page book, Social Rules: A Common Sense Guide to Social Media Marketing, was released for Kindle this week at a truly great price:  99 cents. I spoke with Paul on May 3rd at Splash’s Dallas studios. Click here for video of our conversation.

Content – Sketch n Draw and Whiteboard Pro apps for entertaining a six-year-old grandson.  Also, Simon & Schuster gets it right with a creative, free eBook sampler of upcoming novels. The Digital Reader has more.

Next Week’s Guest: Eric Hellman, president of Gluejar, talking about unglue.it.

Note: Pastor Mark Pierce has posted his interview with me on his Church Requel podcast.

If you are familiar with the image viewer that has existed on all Kindles prior to Kindle Touch, then you’ll appreciate how this works, though it is different, as with many things ‘Kindle Touch’. It’s not clear if this was added as part of the 5.1 update or was always there, but at any rate, you can indeed view jpg/png/gif files directly on Kindle Touch:

1. Connect via USB.
2. Using explorer/finder, create a folder named ‘Images’ at the ‘top’ or ‘root’ of the Kindle drive.
3. Add images to the folder in one of 3 ways:
- Drag images directly to Images folder. These will appear as individual items in the Images list with display name the same as the file name.
- Create a subfolder of Images and add images to that folder to be treated as a ‘gallery’. This will appear as an item whose display name is the same as the folder name.
- Package the image files in a .zip file and place this in the Images folder to be treated as a ‘gallery’. The display name will be the name of the .zip file.
(Note: ‘large’ images may not appear in the Images item list or display as part of a collection. I don’t know if the limit is one of resolution or of file size, or a combination of both. Empirically, I was able to display a 2500×2500 pixel image, but not one that was 5000×5000.)
4. ‘Eject’ Kindle from computer.
5, Make sure the ‘Filter By’  option is set to ‘All Items’ (should say ‘My Items (n of n)’ in header bar.)
6. Jump to last page by tapping ’1 of n’ label in header bar and entering ’99′ (or any number greater than or equal to number of pages.)
7. On this page (or the previous page, depending on how items are paginated) there should be an item named ‘Images’ (along with ‘Dictionaries’, ‘Periodicals: Back Issues’, and ‘Archived Items’).
8. Tap on this item to view a list of image collection items.
9. Tap on an item to view.
10. Use page turn gestures to cycle through images in a ‘gallery.’
11. When done viewing, use Home button or tap at top of screen to reveal Back button to go back to Images list.

Images are viewed scaled to fit the screen in their original orientation, anchored in the upper left corner of the screen. Unlike the image viewers of previous Kindles, there’s no pan/zoom or ability to rotate, so ideally you’d use an image manipulation program to make everything have a resolution of 600×800 in the desired orientation, for maximum efficiency and ‘prettiness’. Also there is no way to delete images from Kindle Touch short of hooking up the USB cable and using the computer’s file manager. Previous Kindles also save ‘reading position’ within a series of images, but Kindle Touch does not. So it is rather limited and I would say more of a curiosity than something useful (as the previous Kindle image viewer was).

I suspect this is part of an unfinished screen saver feature, where it would actually make sense to display only 600×800 images without any other frills. For example, if they just added a  ‘Set as screensaver?’ option that appears when you tap and hold one of the ‘Images’ items, it would make some people (at least the ones with non-Special Offer Kindles) very happy (unfortunately I tried this and it doesn’t work…). I’m really curious to know if this was there all along, or whether it got added by 5.1. I suspect it has been there all along: the procedure for ‘activating’ it is rather different than that for previous Kindles, which is why I didn’t discover it initially and assumed it was not there at all.

Thanks, Tom!

I actually like her choice better. It’s cleaner without the hyphen, and the capital “B” gives the word authority. So from here on, until I’m overruled by a higher court, I will spell the word “eBook.”

Judge Denise Cote

I just finished reading U.S. District Judge Denise Cote’s 56-page opinion and order in the eBooks class action lawsuit filed against Apple and five Defendant Publishers. Click here for the PDF.  Some of it is writing only a legal beagle could follow, but surprisingly long sections read like a novel or a well-written Harvard Business School case study. On May 15, Judge Cote denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss the lawsuit. What made as much news as that, though, was the clarity and oomph with which she described the case against Apple, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster.

Noting that the defendants argue the complaint against them “contains no independent allegations of a direct agreement to raise the price of eBooks,” Judge Cote penned this simple, declarative sentence: “The defendants are incorrect.” She goes on to recount the complaint’s charge that Hachette’s CEO in a meeting with an Amazon executive represented that Amazon’s $9.99 pricing for eBook best-sellers and new releases was a “big problem for the industry.” The judge opines that it’s a stretch to accept the defendants’ claim that the Hachette boss was talking about bookstores, not the other Publisher Defendants. “And there is more,” she continues, moving on to descriptions of separate meetings that four of the Publisher Defendants had with Amazon “on the very same day in which they made identical demands on Amazon to switch to the agency model.”

If you only have time to read a portion of Judge Cote’s order, I recommend the 17 pages starting at page 4. Titled “Background,” this section is a nearly thrilling account of how we got here. Judge Cote takes facts for this section from the complaint, and these facts are taken to be true for the purposes of her decision on whether to dismiss the lawsuit. As a narrative, “Background” is instructive reading for anyone who cares about eBooks and what we pay for them. In addition, I found the following nuggets to be enlightening:

• The five defendants plus Random House, which did not agree to Apple’s terms for inclusion in the iBook Store until March 1, 2011, published more than 90 percent of all hardcover New York Times bestsellers in 2009.
• By 2010, Amazon had captured 90 percent of eBooks sales volume in the U.S.
• The Complaint portrays the price-fixing conspiracy in three stages: 1) the “windowing” of eBooks–releasing hardcover books first, delaying the availability of eBook versions, 2) contracting with Apple in order to persuade Amazon to raise eBook prices, and 3) forcing an industry-wide shift to the agency model, under which publishers–not retailers–set the retail price for eBooks.
• By not joining the other five publishers and Apple until later, Random House increased its eBook sales by 250 percent in 2010 as it continued to sell them at $9.99.

Judge Cote will preside over the class action suit brought by Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro, a Seattle law firm, as well as the antitrust case brought by the Department of Justice. The defendants are also negotiating with state attorneys general led by the AGs of Texas and Connecticut to reach a settlement that would enable the defendants to escape from the threat of the class action suit.

It is too soon to start counting your restitution payments for all those eBooks you bought in the past two years for more than $9.99. But it’s obvious that the legal challenges facing Apple and the Defendant Publishers will not be inexpensive and will not go away soon.

I Googled “homemade tablet stylus” and came up with several videos showing how to cut up a sponge and stuff it into a ballpoint pen from which you have removed the ink cartridge and spring. This one is a good example of the genre. I found an unused sponge in the kitchen, and with my trusty Swiss Army penknife, I sliced off enough of the sponge to jam into the end of the empty pen. It worked!

Okay, it’s not a elegant or reliable text-entry device, but it worked well enough for me to try the Smart Writing app and to post a tweet with it. There is a better way to enter text and drawings on a Kindle Fire, though, and it costs just $10.91 at Amazon. It’s the AmazonBasics Stylus for Touchscreen Devices, and I ordered one that will arrive in a couple of days.

News –

Tech Tips – Brett McNeil McNeill on Collections for the Kindle Touch, Tom Semple on images for the Touch, and my construction of a homemade Kindle Fire stylus to use with the 99-cent Smart Writing Tool app. It was a fun project, but afterward I ordered the real thing.

Interview (Starts at 17:48) – Mark Pierce, pastor of Church Requel in Mansfield, Ohio, met me for breakfast on May 15th at the Paul Revere Family Restaurant in Lexington, Ohio. Since he had a successful career as a financial analyst before turning to the ministry, I asked him for his take on Amazon as an investment. We then moved on to technology at his church and what he has learned in the last year sharing 1,200 e-books on one Amazon account among 12 family members using about 20 Kindles and Kindle apps. After our interview, we switched microphones, and Mark recorded a separate conversation that will appear on his Church Requel Podcast Monday, May 21st.

Content – Bible by YouVision, and the debut this week of unglue.it . Also: Inside Higher Ed’s post on unglue.it .

Thanks to Tom Atkinson and Bob Anderson for leaving the first two reviews of The Kindle Chronicles blog subscription at Amazon. If you’d like to receive blog posts directly to your Kindle, please consider a Kindle Subscription for 99 cents a month, with a 14-day free trial. And if you’ve already signed up, I’d greatly appreciate your leaving a review!

Next Week’s Guest  (Rescheduled from this week) - Paul Slack, co-founder of Splash Media and author of Social Rules, a soon-to-be-published 319-page step-by-step resource on how to use social media tools for bottom-line results.

Unglue.it will run crowd-funding campaigns to raise money for specific books that are already published. If the financial goal of the rights holder is met, unglue.it will pay to “unglue” the book. This means the title will be published without Digital Rights Management (DRM) with a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.

At today’s launch, unglue.it is starting campaigns to unglue the following five books:

Michael Laser, 6-321
Joseph Nassise, Riverwatch
Nancy Rawles, Love Like Gumbo
Budding Reader, Cat and Rat
Open Book Publishers, Oral Literature in Africa, by Ruth Finnegan.

This seems like a fantastic idea to me. Hat tip to Paul Biba of Teleread, where I spotted news of today’s announcement.

I have an email out to Eric Hellman, president of Gluejar, inviting him to be my guest on a future episode of The Kindle Chronicles. I’d like to learn more about how this innovation came about, and the early results of the first campaigns.

His most recent posts considered how writing and reading have changed in the digital age. An earlier one serves as a good resource for tracking down books and articles on the topic. I’ve added the Critical Margins RSS Feed to my Google Reader and am following @CriticalMargins on Twitter, eager to hear more about an area of inquiry that has fascinated me since my first Rocket eBook.

Pastor Mark Pierce

Kindle Fire tips were just one of the topics that Pastor Mark Pierce of Church Requel and I discussed this morning over breakfast at the Paul Revere Family Restaurant in Lexington, Ohio. You will hear more from Mark next week in The Kindle Chronicles (TKC) episode 198, because at the end of our conversation I turned on my Olympus LS-10 recorder for an official interview. Then Pastor Mark fired up his Zune to turn the tables on me, asking thoughtful questions for his Church Requel podcast episode that will air Monday, May 21st.

Darlene and I are on the road again, somewhere in northern Ohio. During my hour in the passenger’s seat I have had time to check email and work on this post to the TKC blog. So I found an e-mail from Mark that contains the following helpful links and comments about topics we talked about 169 miles ago:

• Free month of Hulu Plus - everywhere else the free trial period is only a week or two.
• Kinde Fire app for Hulu Plus  – it’s probably just easier to search from your Fire on the app store… but make sure you get the one for the Fire and NOT the android version.
• Roku for your television.  If you decide to try Hulu Plus on your Fire, you will probably want to have access to Hulu Plus on your TV.  Sadly, this is not yet available using AppleTV.  If you don’t already have a smart TV, Roku is a great alternative.  There are 4 models from $50 to $90.  I’d buy it through Amazon rather than direct from Roku so you have Amazon’s warranty and money back satisfaction.
• Catalyst Podcast - (A resource for pastors and church leadership.)
• Build and Analyze Podcast with Marco Arment and Dan Benjamin.  Marco is the guy who came up with Instapaper.
• Instacast Podcast Listening iPhone app – This is SOOO much better than using iTunes.  And I have confirmed that there is no Kindle Fire version.
• Downcast app for iPhone.  This is the main competition to Instacast.  They may even be the leading podcast catching software for iPhone.  I can’t remember now why I went with Instacast, though I really like it!
• BeyondPod Podcast Manager for Kindle Fire – BeyondPod is for Android what Instacast and Downcast are for iOS.  When I was listening on my Android Evo, this was the software I was using.  There is both a free and a paid version available for the Kindle Fire.  Definitely worth checking out if you want to use the Fire for this.  Personally, I find the iPhone to be the perfect device for podcast listening since I have it with me all the time.

When two podcasters who listen to each other’s shows get together, there is lots to talk about. Mark has recently updated his show to include comments on weekly issues in the news and personal observations related to his ministry, as well as a recording of his weekly sermon at Church Requel. It’s an original combination of content aimed at people who are not now attending church regularly, which includes me. He has also listened to The Kindle Chronicles since nearly the beginning, almost four years ago.

For my part, weekly podcasts about the Kindle have connected me with fascinating listeners from all over the world, from Ohio to Paris. It’s been an amazing journey, I realize as Darlene and I cross the border into New York state. And there is plenty of road ahead.

If the destination is Mani Osteria & Bar in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and the guest is Doug Lance, creator of  eFiction Magazine, you’ll see him arrive on an orange-wheeled skateboard. Doug is 22 years old and has been living on the Internet since about the age of seven. He’s also a recent graduate of Western Michigan University and was my guest for TKC 194. For our drive from Denver to Cambridge, Mass., I arranged to meet Doug for lunch yesterday en route to our hotel here in Dearborn.

I was glad to hear that his appearance on the podcast generated some new subscriptions and that Doug is pressing ahead to expand the magazine’s reach. He will soon have subscriptions available for the Nook, which will add another good slice of digital readers. You can check out his eclectic mix of crowd-curated fiction and poetry with a free two-week Kindle subscription, which will cost $1.99 a month thereafter.  I was so impressed with his project that I purchased a lifetime subscription for $100.

“You look healthy,” I told Doug as we sat down for designer pizzas at Mani’s. “I hope you are eating well and working out, so that my lifetime subscription turns out to be a good investment!” He did, in fact, look fit and lit up with his work of creating a literary magazine from scratch. Darlene took the photo of us after lunch, standing in front of the original Border’s store, now sadly closed and empty.

But as one door closes, another opens in Ann Arbor. I like to imagine looking back decades hence to memories of our lunch yesterday, to consider all that one young man with a dream and cheap transportation can accomplish in digital America.

Tom Atkinson helped me pack two boxes of Kindles that we shipped from Denver a few days ago, and I have one more box of 10 new Kindles that I plan to ship to Afghanistan from Cambridge, Mass., when Darlene and I arrive there next week, just after the new regulation is scheduled to go into effect.

It may be wishful thinking, but I can’t really believe this won’t be aborted at the last minute, once reaction against the regulation is heard. It turns out that E-Books for Troops is not alone in sending devices to U.S. Troops. A nonprofit named iPads for Soldiers is doing similar work, distributing Apple’s tablet via USPS. It would be a real shame if we can’t find a way around this obstacle to continue distributing new and used Kindles to U.S. Soldiers in serving overseas.

Tech Tip – Tom Semple offers these instructions on how to use the pan/zoom mode of the Kindle Touch running the latest software version, 5.1.0:

- tap and hold until the ‘+’ icon appears over the image

- tap the ‘+’ icon to zoom full screen (or 100% whichever is smaller)

- pinch/spread to zoom in further, drag to pan

- touch ‘x’ icon to exit zoom.

John McCormack notes that the Touch can be used as a gallery for images.

Kindle Tech Support helps me solve a nagging WiFi connection problem for my Kindle Fire. I had to enter the password of our home network every time I put the Fire to sleep. The solution: Restart the Kindle Fire by pressing and holding the power button on the bottom of the Kindle for 2 seconds and tapping “Shut Down.” Hold the power button for 2 seconds to turn the device back on. While the Kindle is restarting, unplug the network router for a full 15 seconds. After plugging the router back in, wait until the router has finished rebooting before attempting to connect to your Wi-Fi network again.

Interview (Starts at 12:32) – James McQuivey, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, puts Q-1 Kindle Fire sales estimates into perspective but warns that poor results in the “Moms, Dads, and Grads” second quarter would be bad news indeed for Amazon’s tablet. He welcomes the Microsoft-Barnes & Noble partnership as bracing evidence of disruption in digital media. And he predicts “a mess” for e-book pricing if the federal court approves settlement terms for three of the Big Five publishers while the other two and Apple fight the Department of Justice antitrust suit in court.

Content – Andrys Basten notes another good Android app for reading ePub files on the Kindle Fire. It’s Mantano Reader, available in a Premium version for $4.99 and a freeone. You can’t download it to your Fire from the Amazon App Store, though. From your Fire, try this link to Slideme for the download; you’ll need to set up a free Slideme account.

Pottermore reports impressive sales for Harry Potter ebooks. Laura Hazard Owen and Nate Hoffelder wonder what wizardly announcement Amazon was teasing early this week.

NOTE AFTER AUDIO WAS RECORDED: The suspense ended Thursday morning with Amazon’s announcement that it has purchased a license making all six Harry Potter books available for free borrowing at the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.

Bufo Calvin analyzes results of Amazon’s Thomas & Mercer mystery imprint and finds them impressive.

Next Week’s Interview Guest – Paul Slack, co-founder of Splash Media and author of Social Rules, a soon-to-be-published 319-page step-by-step resource on how to use social media tools for bottom-line results.

Links mentioned - Grieg – 100 Supreme Classical Masterpieces: Rise of the Masters for $1.99.

“The deal is one of the many ways we continue to invest in the Kindle ecosystem on behalf of Kindle owners,” Bezos writes.

You get to borrow one book a month for free on your Kindle device (not Kindle apps) if you are a member of Amazon Prime, so this is a big addition to what’s available. The list of Kindle Owners’ Lending Library now contains more than 145,000 books, including more than 100 current and former New York Times Best Sellers.

One of my questions to James McQuivey for this week’s interview in the podcast was whether all those dress ads I’m seeing on the Amazon home page mean the company is backing away from its emphasis of books and the Kindle. James this morning emailed me a link to the press release, with this comment:

“In case you were wondering whether Amazon is no longer as interested in the book business… Seems like they’re as committed as ever.”

I agree, and I’m glad to see it. With sales for the Kindle Fire having taken a big dip in the first quarter, and who knows how the E Ink readers are selling, I like to see the depth and long time horizon evident in Amazon’s investment in what makes e-readers magical: great stuff to read.

Since I’ve begun adding blog posts to the weekly podcast show notes here at TheKindleChronicles.com , I decided to make the site available for Kindle subscription. The information was loaded last night, and the first thing this morning I checked to see if the site was live. It was like scampering downstairs to check under the Christmas tree. And there it was! A brand new blog subscription, available with a two-week free trial and 99 cents a month thereafter.

Our Casper friends Tom and Tish Atkinson happened to be staying here in Denver with us, to help with departure tomorrow for Cambridge. When I told Tom he could subscribe to TKC on his Kindle 2, he took the plunge and became, I’m pretty sure, the very first subscriber who isn’t me.

I hope lots of podcast listeners will join Tom as subscribers to TKC the Blog, and that you will take the time to leave reviews and rankings at the Amazon listing. As the podcast approaches its four-year anniversary, I’m excited to add a writing dimension to the work. I work pretty hard writing the scripts for each show, but I’ve always loved seeing my words dance onto a page or a screen for others to read.

My thanks to Chris and Pete Kraft and the team at Splash Media for helping me configure the site to do double duty as blog and show notes page. If you are subscribed to the original RSS feed, you will receive just audio posts each week, as before. Same for the iTunes feed. But you will now see show notes plus written posts about the Kindle and e-book related topics here. My goal is to post four times a week, in addition to the podcast. Who needs sleep?

I had an enlightening talk this morning with James McQuivey of Forrester Research for this week’s episode of the podcast. With all the reports of the Kindle sky falling, I wanted to check in with James for a dose of reality. And as always, he delivered. The plan is to have the episode done tonight, pre-loaded for Friday release. By then we’ll be on Day Two of the drive East.

Tech Note: I don’t think the Kindle can access an audio file from the posts you will see if you subscribe. But I’m going to include this link to the audio of TKC 196 as a test, to see if you can access it when your Kindle is connected to WiFi. If you have any ideas on listening to audio directly from the TKC blog on Kindle, please let me know!

Yesterday, for example, BookBub sent me an email with a single book to consider - The Humbling by Philip Roth. I love Philip Roth, and I haven’t read this novel, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2009. The Kindle version, BookBub reports in the email, originally cost $15.85. Yesterday’s price in the alert was 85 cents. I should have bought it then, because today the price has crept up to 93 cents. Sold! I just one-clicked it to my Kindle Touch 3G.

The other more well-known daily temptation is the Kindle Daily Deal. I end up buying maybe 20 percent of the offers that Amazon emails to me this way. I passed on today’s, Heat Wave, a mystery starring NYPD homicide detective Nikki Heat, but you might like it. It’s Richard Castle’s first novel starring Ms. Heat, and it’s available for 24 hours at the sizzling price of $1.99. Even when I don’t buy the featured deal, I enjoy my daily click on the missive from Amazon.com titled “Kindle Daily Deal” followed by the day’s title.

Serendipitous discovery is often mentioned as one of the most vital things passing from the scene as bricks-and-mortar bookstores continue their inexorable decline. And I agree. There’s nothing like coming across a book at The Tattered Cover or the Harvard Book Store too good to pass up. Unfortunately, I never buy them in paper any more, since I read everything on a Kindle or other device. It’s not the same, but these two daily mini-browsings by e-mail give me a similar feel of surprise when they offer something I can’t pass up.

How are you discovering odd new books to read on your Kindle or other e-reader? Not that I need more daily temptations!

Amazon has invented wonderful new ways to share what we read on Kindle, and I feel as if I should be an evangelist for them. We can now highlight a passage in a book, click on “share” and within seconds have the passage appear as a tweet or a Facebook update. This is a feature that I do actually use, because it meets a felt need to share something that provokes or inspires me. It’s like when I find my wife to read her something I’ve read. “You’ve got to hear this!”

You can also go to kindle.amazon.com and click on “Public Notes: Make Yours Public” for any book in your Kindle Archive. That way anyone who is following you at the Kindle site will be able to see any passage you highlight in a book you’re reading on a Kindle. As you’ll see on my profile, I have enabled 13 of the books in my archive for public notes, but I have not spent any time reading the notes of others. I’m a one-way social media guy when it comes to reading, which violates all the rules of social-media citizenship. My mind says I should be all over this social reading phenomenon, but my feet, or my fingers, refuse to cooperate.

The reason, I suspect, is that reading has always been a solitary haven for me. As a boy, I soon learned to retreat into a good book as a way to forget the trials and confusion of the real world. The Count of Monte Cristo comes to mind, or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. For an image, I see myself stretched out on a rock at the shore of Bearcamp Pond, where my family used to vacation in New Hampshire. It’s sunny. I am far from peer pressure or homework or girls. The solitude lies at the heart of my delight in reading. When my mind has glommed onto a story or an argument, the pond disappears, the book disappears, and I am alone in a big world. Isn’t that how most of us learned to love books?

So now comes this invitation to share what we read not after our reading but during it.

I want to be open to this opportunity, and I enjoy my one-way sharing of things I read via Twitter and Facebook. But I’m not going to jump all the way in, or even up to my ankles, any time soon. Reading is too precious an activity in my life to experiment with. Which might sound odd coming from someone who totally jumped into the Kindle and eBooks and has finished just one book in print during the past five years. But that transition was not as disorienting as social reading. Nothing about reading a Kindle upset the solitude of my reading. It was just a different technology, and it added so many conveniences – like being able to take my whole library to that rock by the pond, if I were to return there today. No, this social reading portal is much more trouble for me than the Kindle itself.

I’m curious how others who love to read are navigating this passage. I am open to being lured forward, to becoming a Social Reader. What am I missing? What are you gaining, if you’ve gone further down this road than I have? Has social killed your delight in reading books, or enhanced it?

Note: I found the photo of the reading dogs at a blog named Belle’s Bookshelf . When I clicked on the source link it didn’t go through, so I don’t know how to give attribution for the image. You’ll find other great images of dogs reading books, most of them by themselves, at Belle’s.

News –

Tech Tips – Don’t forget you can share Audible content on your Amazon account. Tom Semple points out that the Kindle Touch 5.1.0 update enables zooming on larger-than-standard-size images.  Via Eolake Stobblehouse, an article by Adam Engst tipped me off to Aldiko Reader,  a good Kindle Fire app for reading ePUB files.

Interview (Starts at 16:44) – I visited Dr. Temple Grandin at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, on April 30 and brought with me an array of Kindles and an iPad. Her considerations of the devices as reading aids for those on the autism spectrum were candid and astute. Her bestselling books include Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals and The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger’s. The story of how she used her personal experience of autism to revolutionize the livestock business was dramatized in an HBO special starring Claire Danes.

I recorded video of my interview with Temple, available at YouTube in two parts. (Part 1 is live, and Part 2 is here. will be up by the end of Friday May 4.)

Jean Remple Recommendations from Paris: 1) French Kids Eat Everything: How our Family Moved to France, Cured Picky Eating, Banned Snacking and Discovered 10 Simple Rules for Raising Happy, Healthy Eaters by Karen Le Billon. 2) French Children Don’t Throw Food: Parenting Secrets from Paris by Pamela Druckerman, available from Doubleday on Kindle for the U.S. audience retitled as Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting.

The Next TKC Google Plus Video Hangout will be held Monday, May 7 at 2 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time. I hope you’ll stop by during the hour to join a lively conversation about all things Kindle and e-books. If you have not participated before and would like to receive an invitation when I start the hangout, please email the URL of your Google Plus profile page to me at PodChronicles AT Gmail DOT com.

If you have already listened to the episode, the only information that you will find in this one that you haven’t heard is the date and time of the next TKC Google Plus Video hangout. As this file states, the next hangout will be Monday, May 7 at 2 pm. Mountain Daylight Time.

If you are linking to episode 195 of The Kindle Chronicles, please use this link to this revised audio.

My apologies for letting the earlier episode slip out onto the Internet with the audio glitches.

–Len Edgerly

May 2, 2012

Denver

News –

Tech Tip – 1) If you have a Mac and a Kindle, you’re in luck. Amazon this week released Send to Kindle for Mac, which enables you to send personal documents to your Kindle from your Macintosh computer. It works great, providing a “Send to Kindle” option from any print menu, and other handy tools. If you have a PC, you’ll want to check out Send to Kindle for PC.  2) The latest version of the Kindle Fire Firmware, 6.3, made some nice improvements, but I discovered today that there’s something missing from the WiFi settings. You used to be able to forget or save a WiFi network and password, but that option doesn’t exist any more. I confirmed this with a Kindle support tech, because I was getting tired of entering the password for our home network every time I turned on my Fire. I think the WiFi connection itself is improved in reliability, but the customer interface took a step backward, IMHO.

Interview (Starts at 6:03) - Mike Shatzkin, founder and CEO of The Idea Logical Company in New York, spoke with me on April 23rd by Skype about why there was so much hand wringing at the recently concluded London Book Fair, what’s ahead for authors and readers if Amazon’s dominance of the book business grows, and how his father, the late Leonard Shatzkin, who also had an illustrious career in publishing, probably would have been more inclined to applaud Amazon’s disruption than is Leonard’s son. Other topics mentioned: Mike’s Kobo-inspired collection of blog posts, The Shatzkin Files – Volume I, Richard Kennedy of the Drongos playing “Don’t Touch Me,”  Joe Konrath, “Funny or Die,” Jane Litte on the Department of Justice antitrust suit, and Mike’s comments on it.

Content – This interview with the co-producer, Matty Simmons, made me think it might be fun to recommend watching “National Lampoon’s Animal House” on your Kindle Fire. So I rented it for $2.99 and watched a half hour of it while working out this morning. Let’s say it’s still not for the faint of heart, so proceed at your own risk. For your reading terror, Stephen King and his son Joe Hill have a new Kindle Single titled Throttle, available for 99 cents.

Mentioned in Comments - Is Jeff Bezos now “dictator for life?” The New York Times’s account of the small publisher who removed his books from Amazon. All of Beethoven’s symphonies for just $5.99 at the Amazon MP3 Store. Readdle. The case for paper, by a paper company, and its useful Knowledge Center.

The Next TKC Google Plus video hangout will be Monday, May 7 at 2 p.m. Mountain Time. If you’d like to receive an invite, please email your G+ profile page URL to me at PodChronicles AT Gmail DOT Com. If you have no idea what that means  and you want to participate in the hangout, email me and I’ll be glad to walk you through it.

Next Week’s Guest – Dr. Temple Grandin, author of The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger’s, discussing how the Kindle and other technology can benefit those with autism and other disabilities. If you are unfamiliar with Dr. Grandin’s work with animals, which revolutionized the livestock industry, you owe to yourself to to watch the BBC’s unforgettable 2006 profile of her titled “The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow,” available at YouTube in five parts, as follows: One, two, three, four, and five.

News –

Tech Tip – A comparison of Audible audiobooks on the Kindle Touch/Kindle Keyboard, Kindle Fire, and Kindle for iOS. Recommended: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. Audible sounds better with this Phillips speaker for $19.99.

Interview (starts at 27:28) – Doug Lance, 22, a recent graduate of Western Michigan University, is making a decent living with his eFiction magazine, available at the Kindle Store for $1.99 a month. I spoke with him by Skype on Monday, April 16, but contrary to what I say in the podcast, I don’t think it was a Casper-Kalamazoo connection. The pleasing aliteration led me astray. He’s in Michigan, but it’s too late tonight to fact-check the correct city. NEXT MORNING: And the answer is, Ann Arbor!

Content – Laura Hazard Owen’s e-book Bestsellers Breakdown. Amazon Publishing inks an exclusive deal for Bond, James Bond. If you like to tango, $5 will get you a reason to move: the La Revancha Del Tango album by Gofan Gotan Project. The best thing about the Sketch n Draw app for your Kindle Fire is the price – free. I found the ads distracting, and it seemed to take too many taps to pull up the drawing tools. Still, you can make some cool designs with it when you should be doing something else.

Next Week’s Guest: Mike Shatzkin.

I love The New York Times and am a loyal subscriber to its Kindle version. But honestly. Are all of the Times’s objective, hard-hitting journalists in the pockets of New York publishers? When you scan the prestigious addresses of the five Defendant Publishers listed in the Department of Justice’s antitrust complaint, they are all in the same Manhattan borough as the Gray Lady, if I have my New York geography right. So when David Carr or Julie Bosman or David Streitfeld report a story involving a company located 2,900 miles from Manhattan, maybe it’s not surprising that they tend to favor the home team.

I find it irritating, but it doesn’t really matter. Nicholson Baker’s writerly takedown of the Kindle in The New Yorker in 2009 didn’t slow the advance e-readers one pixel. And if The New York Times continues to offer one-sided coverage of the e-book revolution, portraying Amazon as the death star for literature instead of a facilitator of new audiences for independent authors and more affordable choices for readers, it won’t matter much. Disruption will continue to occur 2,900 miles away from Manhattan at the hands of Bezos and company.

I see The Times does have a Seattle bureau. I’d love to hear from them once in a while!

News –

Tech Tips – RepliGo Reader app for reading PDFs on your Kindle Fire. Amazon’s 5.1 update for Kindle Touch.

Interview (Starts at 24:02) – I spoke with Jim Cheshire, author of My Kindle Fire, by Skype on April 10. Other links of interest: MyAmazonKindleFire.com – The My Kindle Fire companion site. The “On” podcast that Jim did for Que, including a tip on using LastPass with the Kindle Fire and also on using ES File Explorer to access files on your network without having to pay for an app. (The podcast is available via iTunes and Amazon as well.) Jim’s review of Kindle Fire. Jim’s first visit to The Kindle Chronicles in 2008.

Content – Kids Place – with Child Lock app for Kindle Fire, Readability, John Tayman’s A Single Story, and War and Peace. 

Upcoming Guest – Mike Shatzkin for TKC 195 on April 27.

Lord’s minute-by-minute account of the Titanic disaster was published in 1955, when I was five years old. I vaguely remember reading this book when I was a boy, but with the centennial here I decided to one-click the Daily Deal to my Kindle Touch for another read.

Publishers Weekly reports that 650 books have been written about the Titanic since 1912, including 98 books brought to market this year.

James Cameron’s 1997 Hollywood rendering of the story is not available for free Prime video or other rental/purchase at Amazon. But there are a number of other video offerings about the Titanic here.

Engadget has a full review of the GlowLight device including a video demo.

The e-mail I received from B&N confirming my order said the new Nook will ship on May 1st.

Engadget says the new Nook will be slightly lighter than its non-glowing sibling. I just put my Kindle Touch on the kitchen scale and found it weighs 7 5/8 ounces, a quarter of an ounce heavier than the current Nook Simple Touch.  So I hope the new Kindle Touch, if one’s coming, will also shed a fraction of an ounce or more. Lately I find that the amazing improvements in weight and thin profile of each new Kindle have spoiled me, and I am always on the lookout for even more lightness of being in e-readers.

Thanks to listener Jenn Jacobsen for alerting me to this new Nook!

DOJ’s 22-page Competitive Impact Statement.

Proposed final judgement as to defendants Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster.

Other related filings.

News -

Tech Tip - Two more things the Kindle Fire can’t do compared with the Kindle Touch: Text to Speech, and swipe up or down for the next or previous chapters. Are you planning to give a used Kindle to someone? The process we use to prepare Kindles for E-Books for Troops might give you some ideas. Click here for information on donating a Kindle for use by a U.S. Soldier overseas.

Interview (Starts at 20:53) – Panio Gianopoulos, publisher and creative director at Backlit Fiction, sees a bright future for Young Adult literature. I reached him by Skype in Los Angeles on April 3rd to learn more about the innovative plan his startup company has for revolutionizing YA with old tricks and new technology. Click here for a well-done Forbes profile. Other links mentioned: The Encyclopedia of Exes: 26 Stories by Men of Love Gone Wrong by Panio Gianopoulos, Joel Stein’s essay, Panio’s response, and A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.

Content – My rave review of The Start-Up by Sadie Hayes, published by Backlit Fiction. An edgy test movie for your Kindle Fire: “I Think My Facebook Friend is Dead.” And BookBub will email you a manageable dose of one free-book suggestion a day, like this one: The Price by Alexandra Sokoloff.

Audio Note: After using GarageBand to create TKCs 1 through 191, with this episode I have moved up to Logic Pro 9, a powerful audio editing program that I have just begun to learn. One objective was to increase volume levels to match other podcasts I listen to. I would love to hear feedback from you on how this episode sounds, and how you listen to the podcast – earbuds while running? Bose speakers at your desk? In the car? Any suggestions would be appreciated!

Photo Credit: George Whiteside

News – 1) This just in: Reuters reports that a settlement in the anti-trust investigation of Apple and some of the Big 5 Publishers may be reached in a few weeks that would end the so-called agency model of e-book pricing. 2) Scientific American in its 60-second science podcast reports on a survey highlighting advantages young readers see in the Kindle. Click here for the research paper cited. Laura Hazard Owen reports on Association of American Publishers data showing a big jump in e-book sales in the children’s/young adult category. 3) Le Figaro and TechCrunch report that the Kindle Touch is coming to Europe on April 27. But, alas, no Fires anytime soon. 4) TheNextWeb reports that Amazon is readying three new Kindle Fires this year.

Tech Tip – You will miss the good, old one-click method of buying an e-book when you start here and travel to Pottermore. But it’s worth the effort to land a Harry Potter book on all your Kindle devices. And with no discernable DRM, you can download an ePub copy to your computer and convert it to Kindle format with Calibre for very convenient personal use. Also, click here for info on the Kindle Fire 6.3 download.

Interview (starts at 22:54) - Margaret Atwood, the award-winning author of The Handmaid’s Tale as well as forty other books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, which has been made into a new documentary film, spoke with me by telephone on March 29th from Toronto. Her dystopian short story, “I’m Starved for You,” was published this month by Byliner and is available as a Kindle Single for $2.99. Atwood, who maintains a lively and generous presence on Twitter, says e-books have revived the opportunities to publish short stories as traditional magazine outlets have declined. Would she advise a major younger author not constrained by current publishing contracts to make a deal with Amazon’s New York publishing arm? Will there be a sequel to “I’m Starved for You”? Listen in for some surprising answers.

Content – Amazon’s new Weekend Deals and two apps for the Fire: MapQuest (with faux GPS capability provided by Skyhook) and Xiant Mobile, a new email app.

Next Week’s Guest - Panio Gianopoulos, who founder of Backlit Fiction .

Next Google Plus TKC Video Hangout – Monday, April 2, at 2 p.m. Mountain Time. Please stop any time during the hour for an informal chat about Kindles, e-books and everything else. If you are not in my TKC Hangout Circle, just email the URL of your Google Plus profile URL to me at PodChronicles AT Gmail DOT com for an invitation.

News – 1) 

Tech Tips – Darlene gets some help organizing the titles on her sister Deb’s Kindle, using screenshots and collections.

HOW TO MAKE SCREENSHOTS ON YOUR KINDLE:

Original Kindle, Kindle 2 and Kindle Keyboard: Hold down the Alt and Shift Keys while you press the letter G.

$79 Kindle: Press the ‘menu’ and ‘keyboard’ buttons down at the same time and then release.

Kindle Touch: Push the home button then touch the screen.

In each case, you will find the screenshots in the Documents folder when you connect your Kindle to a computer with the USB cable. From there you can open and print as needed.

WHAT TO DO WHEN YOUR FIRE CAN’T GET YOUR BOOKS FROM THE CLOUD:

(via Judy and, at KindleBoards, Betsy the Quilter)

- click the settings gear at the top
- select More..
- select Applications
- select Filter by > All Applications
- click Amazon Kindle
- click the buttons “Force Stop”, “Clear Data”

This restores all the books to the cloud.

Interview (Starts at 13:55) – James McQuivey, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, looks ahead to the future of e-ink Kindles and the looming War of the Tablets between Apple and Amazon. I spoke with James on March 20th by Skype.

Content - Three for the Fire: TurboTax, 250+ Solitaire, and Feedly. And, how watching “Page One: Inside the New York Times” led to my renewal of a monthly subscription to The Times with an unexpected extra.

Other Links – Brian Matt’s report on Cheap Hotspots.

Tom Semple on a feature of the Kindle for PC update:

I don’t think Amazon has announced it officially, but there is a recent update to K4PC and it supports Kindle Format 8 (KF8), mostly:

- K4PC will download KF8 if the ebook is available in that format (to try it, download a sample of any O’Reilly-published title or at least a recent one such as “Machine Learning for Hackers”)

- K4PC supports fixed-layout KF8, but you have to side load it (i.e. it has to be Digital Rights Management (DRM) free. It won’t download wirelessly from Archive and you can’t select K4PC as the Deliver To.. (as of now anyway). Seems like they need to change something on the servers to allow it.

- 2 column layout is not enabled with reflow able KF8

- I think there are going to be sync issues, since the calculation of Locations depends in part on the specific HTML markup used, which in general is different between mobi and kf8. This will go away as other apps and devices become kf8 capable but not all will be upgraded.

Note that Personal Documents service is currently hostile to KF8, you can’t even email directly to Kindle Fire with the send-to-kindle windows app with ‘storage’ option turned off, it always strips the kf8 out. But PD service doesn’t work with K4PC anyway so it is moot at this point.

Next Google Plus Video TKC Hangout: Monday, April 2nd at 2 pm Mountain Time.

Next Week’s Guest: Novelist Margaret Atwood, who has just published I’m Starved for You from Byliner.

Intro –

News – 1) Amazon updates Kindle for iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch just in time for the arrival of the iPad – 3rd generation. Is the screen better than the iPad 2? Absolutely. 2) Laura Hazard Owen reports on a survey showing college students are switching to tablets and e-readers. 3) Should you buy a refurbished Kindle Fire for $30 less than the new ones cost? Maybe.

Tech Tips - Piotr Kowalczyk’s EbookFriendly site is a good source of information and tips about the Kindle, including his method of using Twitter for quick links to Kindle samples or purchases.  Also, I’m still having trouble with my Kindle Fire’s WiFi connection.

Daniel A. Cohen

Interviews – Daniel A. Cohen (starts at 13:12), author of The Ancillary’s Mark: A Novel and Masters of the Veil, the first of the Veil trilogy, described his experience as an author in the Era of EBooks. His publisher is Spencer Hill Press.

At the same gathering, Bytes and Books, on March 11, hosted by Shelton Interactive and Cave Henricks Communications, I spoke with Todd Sattersten (starts at 20:28), author of Every Book is a Startup: The New Business of Publishing, available at O’Reilly Media in DRM-free multiple formats for $9.99 and at the Kindle Store for $5.03.

Todd Sattersten

Other publishers mentioned: Harvard Business Publishing and Hay House.

On March 12, after moderating a panel titled “Publishing Models Transforming the Book,” Rachel Deahl spoke with me about how Amazon is perceived from within the traditional publishing industry. She is Senior News Editor at Publishers Weekly. 

Content – The Man Who Wrote Old Yeller: Fred Gipson, Texas Storyteller by Mike Cox, Penguin’s Book Country, and a free TED app for Kindle Fire.

Upcoming Guests – Next week: James McQuivey of Forrester Research. TKC 191 on March 30: novelist Margaret Atwood, who has just published I’m Starved for You from Byliner.

Other topics mentioned – “Do E-Books Make It Harder to Remember What You Just Read?” in Time Magazine. 

News –

Tech Tips – Amazon now makes it easy to reset the Furthest Page Read across your Kindles and Kindle apps. Click here for details at My Kindle Stuff. Clippingsconverter is a free web tool for creating beautiful collections of your notes and highlights from the MyClippings file on your Kindle devices. And, how to make a mindmap on your Kindle Fire and tweet it using ES Explorer.

Interview (Starts at 20:19) - Lawrence Lessig has a new eBook out from Byliner titled One Way Forward: The Outsider’s Guide to Fixing the Republic. I spoke with him in his office at Harvard on February 29th about how the ebook (and its companion print-on-demand version) relate to his book published in October of last year, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress – and a Plan to Stop It. You can help him with a planned free update of One Way Forward here. Lessig gave a sobering assessment of what’s ahead if the corruption of Congress is not addressed in a meaningful way. He also shared an innovative way of doing research for a book using notes and highlights made on his Kindle for iPhone app. Other links related to our conversation: Winner-Take-All-Politics by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson; Lessig’s Free Culture at the Kindle Store and in free PDF; The Anti-Corruption Pledge; Corey Doctorow’s praise of One Way Forward; and Dwight Garner’s lame dismissal.

Content – Now and Then – a good, new source of serious nonfiction.  Random House will publish 10 Judy Blume titles as ebooks this month. Citibank offers a free app for the Kindle Fire. Also on the Fire: Mint.

SxSW Meetup – The Kindle Chronicles will join forces with hosts of the eBook Ninjas Podcast for a meeting during South by Southwest Interactive Sunday, March 11, at 8:30 Central time. Location: Ginger Man Pub, 301 Lavaca Street, Austin. If you’ll be in the area, please stop by!

Upcoming Guests – Next week: conversations with interesting people at SxSW. TKC 190 on March 23: James McQuivey of Forrester Research. TKC 191 on March 30: novelist Margaret Atwood, who has just published I’m Starved for You from Byliner.

News

Tech Tip - How to print out your highlights and notes using kindle.amazon.com . Also, syncing calendars with CalenGoo and more on Apple/Kindle power adapter compatibility, courtesy of John P. McCormack.

Interview (Starts at 15:04) – John Cog, editor of the Me and My Kindle blog, tells how his new Kindle word game, Throw in the Vowel, got its start in conversations with his co-developer more than 20 years ago.

Content - Matter, a promising startup publication that will offer long-form journalism this spring, has been a runaway success raising pledges at Kickstarter. Look for good things to read on your Kindle from them once they launch. Via Amazon Studios, I’ve been watching a trial movie, The Nevsky Prospect. (My apologies for misstating the name in the audio.) Click here to watch via Prime Instant Video.

Other Links Mentioned – Cuyahoga County Public Library.

SXSW Meetup – The Kindle Chronicles will join forces with hosts of the eBook Ninjas Podcast for a meeting during South by Southwest Interactive Sunday, March 11, at 8:30 Central time. Location: Ginger Man Pub, 301 Lavaca Street, Austin. If you’ll be in the area, please stop by!  There will be no Google Plus TCK video hangout next week.

Next Week’s Guest – Lawrence Lessig, author of Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress – and a Plan to Stop It and One Way Forward: The Outsider’s Guide to Fixing the Republic, a new title released by Byliner.

News

Tech Tips – Pastor Mark Pierce informs me that if you log into Audible with your Amazon account username and password, you can listen to Audible content on an unlimited number of Kindles. KlearKase introduces an impressive protective case for the Kindle Fire.  Beware an aptly named app, Badass Battery Monitor.  But check out a good seven-minute video tutorial on the Fire posted by the Ebook Reader website – thanks to Eolake Stobblehouse for the link.

Interview (starts at 20:46) – Brad Stone, a senior writer for Bloomberg BusinessWeek in San Francisco, has begun work on the definitive book about Amazon, to be published next year by Little Brown.  His first book, Gearheads, profiled the community of robot hobbyists. Click here for his BusinessWeek cover story last month on Larry Kirshbaum, head of Amazon Publishing. I spoke with Brad on February 20 via Skype about his plan for the book, whether Kirshbaum will succeed in landing a big-name author for Amazon, and more.

Content – Kindle Reader this week has a great compendium of chess apps, chess manuals, and chess history, all available on various Kindles. Also, O’Reilly Media offers a free collection of smart pieces about digital publishing, Best of TOC 2012. 

Next Week’s Guest – Jon Cog, co-developer of a challenging, new Kindle word game, Throw in the Vowel.

Next TKC Google Plus Video Hangout – Wednesday, February 29 at 3 p.m. EDT.

News

Tech Tip – Kindle Support confirms what I found out by my own experiment: You can use an earlier-version Kindle power cord to power up your Kindle Fire, and vice versa.

Interview (starts at 11:13) - I spoke with Peter Meyers, author of the just-published Kindle Fire: The Missing Manual, on February 16th by Skype. Since finishing the 280-page tome, he has returned to work on Breaking the Page: Transforming Books and the Reading Experience. This is the second half of the interview. I will post the first half separately as a TKC Extra.

Content – A great new $1.99 word game, Throw in the Vowel, is available for Kindle 2, DX, Kindle Keyboard, and $79 Kindle. I’ve tried it, and it’s an elegant, challenging creation by the editor of the Me and My Kindle blog.  On my Kindle Fire, I’ve enjoyed trying out a free app named Tonido, which enables you to open content on your Fire from your computer, and vice versa, using WiFi.

Other Links Mentioned – A behind-the-scenes video of the Audible headquarters. Hyperion by Dan Simmons (Audible and Kindle versions).

Next Week’s Guest: Dan Stone, author of “Amazon’s Hit Man: Larry Kirschbaum Was the Ultimate Book Industry Insider Until Amazon Called.”

The next TKC Google Plus Video Hangout: Wednesday, February 22 at 3 p.m. EDT.

Mike and Julie Brown

I recorded this episode during our last two days at Maho Bay Camps on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands, after 10 days off the Internet. I’m back in Denver now, catching up with the news, and will resume regular episodes next week from Cambridge, Mass., for TKC 185.

Kindles were much in evidence in paradise. I had a chance to speak with Mike and Julie Brown of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, who are conducting an intriguing comparison of e-readers. Mike has a Nook Simple Touch, and Julie’s e-reader is a Kindle Keyboard WiFi. Their interview begins at 24:06. The next day, I spoke with Chris and Julie DONNA Bredlow of Moorhead, Minnesota, who were staying at the nearby Cinnamon Bay campground. Their interview begins at 34:41. Books mentioned by Chris and Julie: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford and Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football by John U. Bacon.

Donna and Chris Bredlow

Here are links to other books and topics mentioned in this week’s show:

Kindle Formatting by Joshua Tallent and How to Format Perfect Kindle Books by Steven Lewis.

Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller. “The Male Mystique of Henry Miller” by Jeanette Winterson, which is her review of Renegade: Henry Miller and The Making of  ”Tropic of Cancer.”  Click here for the audio of Sam Tanenhaus’s interview with Winterson on the Book Review podcast.

Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry. The Mission Song by John LeCarre. The New York Review of Books.  eFiction Magazine. This Is Herman Cain! by Herman Cain. Getting Things Done by David Allen. Expositions of Holy Scripture St. Luke  by Alexander Maclaren.

Next Week’s Guest will be Peter Meyers, author of Kindle Fire: The Missing Manual, available for Kindle preorder at Amazon for $9.99, with delivery set for February 15.

The Next Google Plus TKC video hangout will be Wednesday, February 15 at 2 p.m. Eastern Time. If you’d like to receive an invitation, please email me at PodChronicles AT Gmail dot com.

Our cabin-tent at Maho Bay Camps

Here are some links to topics discussed:

The TWIT FrameRate podcast, episode 59.

Marware Folio cover for the Kindle Fire.

M-Edge Incline cover for Kindle Fire.

ScreenDim app.

GetJar for apps.

I plan to prepare next week’s show from St. John, with an overview of 10 days off the Internet but still enjoying the delights of reading on the beach and elsewhere with our Kindles. I will be on the lookout for fellow Kindlers in Paradise for possible beachside interviews.

For a dollar, you can read my account of a similar Internet/media fast that I did five years ago at the same low-impact resort on St. John. It’s titled Cold Turkey in Paradise: 12 Days Off the Internet at Maho Bay, available at the Kindle Store. Some of the links to videos are not live anymore, unfortunately.  Click here to see the video collage I made of our 2007 visit to Maho Bay.

News

Tech Tip – More on highlighting across pages on the Kindle Touch, and Dave Sparks’s tip on how to turn off auto-renew for those three-month free trial subscriptions you might have signed up for when the Fire came out in November. Also, a pretty good external battery for the Fire by PowerGen that costs $39.99 and weighs just 4 3/8 ounces. And Clearly from Evernote, a great way to read articles online.

Interview (Starts at 15:20) – On January 19th I reached Eric Loss by Skype in Concon, Chile, where he had detoured to fix a problem with the mast of his boat after 70 days at sea. He is now set to resume his solo circumnavigation of the globe. The eclectic reading library on his Kindle and a backup Kindle includes scifi from Baen Books, Les Miserables, Moby Dick, The Essential P.G. Wodehouse, Patrick O’Brien’s Master and Commander series, and Alone by Admiral Richard E. Byrd.

UPDATE: Eric’s mother, Katie Loss, e-mailed me this report early Friday morning:

Eric got off this Thurs. morning at about 11:30 a.m. with a tighter, snugger ship having successfully cleared the Chilean Navy’s walk-through and approval process.  They have asked him for daily position updates as long as he is in Chilean waters.

Content – How to sign up for e-mailed alerting you to the Kindle Daily Deal, where I got great prices on The Paris Wife: A Novel by Paula McLain, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, and Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany by Stephen Ambrose.  For the Fire, I’m getting ready for our stay on St. John, USVI, by watching Miss Marple solve a murder in Caribbean Mystery, a two-part rental from the BBC.

Mentioned in Comments – Video demo of an impressive page-flipping scheme for tablets developed by KAIST Institute of Information Technology Convergence.

Next Week’s Show will be an all-comments edition that I pre-loaded this week in preparation for an unplugged 10-day stay on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. I hope to interview some Kindle-toting guests on the beach for a special TKC episode to be uploaded on Friday, February 10.  My interview for TKC 185 on February 17th will be with Peter Meyers, author of Kindle Fire: The Missing Manual. You can pre-order the Kindle version of Peter’s book now for delivery on February 15.

The Next TKC Google Plus Video Hangout is tentatively set for Wednesday, February 15th at 2 pm EASTERN time. Look for details in the show notes for TKC 184.

News

Tech Tips – From Jim Cheshire’s excellent new book, My Kindle Fire, we’ll learn a handy way to save steps when punctuating with the virtual keyboard of the Fire. (Click here for my interview with Jim in September, 2008, for TKC 10.)

Interview (Starts at 18:00) – Catherine MacDonald, founder of BookLending.com, spoke with me from Nova Scotia on January 16th about the impressive growth her site has experienced in its first year of operation. Click here for my interview with her a year ago, from the island nation of Malta.

Content – In Topazon’s latest list of the top-ranked products on all of Amazon, there is only one book, The Lost Dogs: Michael Vick’s Dogs and Their Tale of Rescue and Redemption by Jim Gorant.  Via Pastor Mark Pierce of Church Requel, I learned of an impressive Kindle Fire App by YouVersion that offers lots of ways to encounter The Bible. Click here for a sample of Pastor Mark’s sermon notes, using YouVersion, and here for his podcast.

The Next G+ Video TKC Hangout: Wednesday, January 25, at 1 p.m. Mountain Time.

Next Week’s Guest: Eric Loss, making a stop for repairs in Chile during his solo circumnavigation of the world.

News

Tech Tips – If it still bugs you that the Kindle Fire does not have a physical volume controller, you might want to download a clever free app named Volume Control 1.1 that will add a discreet controller to your screen, always available to adjust your Fire’s volume.  James Schorr recommends SquareTrade for Kindle extended warranties.

Interview (Starts at 16:38) – John Tayman, author of The Colony and founder and CEO of Byliner.com, spoke with me by Skype and phone from San Francisco on January 11. He explained how he chose the length of Byliner Originals, great nonfiction and fiction stories published for Kindle and other ebook platforms. Among the topics discussed: And the War Came by Jamie Malanowski, Three Cups of Deceit by Jon Krakauer, Rules for Virgins by Amy Tan, and Apple Quick Reads.

Content – Nancy Pearl, the author of Book Lust: Recommended Books for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason,  partners with Amazon to create a new series, Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries. The first of six planned books in the series is A Gay and Melancholy Sound by Merle Miller, available for preorder. Northwest Book Lovers are unamused. On my Kindle Fire, I’m enjoying Monopoly and Downton Abbey, but my music listening has migrated back to my computer’s better speakers.

Next Week’s Guest: Catherine MacDonald, founder of BookLending.com .

Next Week’s Google Plus Video TKC Hangout: Wednesday, January 18, at 3 p.m. Mountain Time.

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Tech Tip – How would you describe the right way to touch the screen of a Kindle Touch to a new user, over the phone? Using my BookGem Kindle holder, I made a discovery. Also, a tip for adjusting the Default Zoom setting on your Kindle Fire’s browser, for better viewing of web sites. And, why I might just need a solar-powered Kindle case for $79.99 that I saw profiled in Forbes. 

Interview (starts at 12:50) – I spoke with Dr. Eric McLuhan on Wednesday, January 4th, reaching him at his home office near Kingston, Ontario. The author of The Human Equation: The Constant in Human Development from Pre-Literacy to Post-Literacy and other books, some co-authored with his father, the late Marshall McLuhan, Eric spoke of his own explorations of media and what his father might have made of the Kindle.

Content – After an enjoyable period of Kindle Fire frenzy, I have rediscovered the slow delights of reading a novel by Henry James on my Kindle Touch. It’s The Awkward Age, available for free at the Kindle Store with an intriguing and lengthy forward by the author. As for the Fire, I’ve discovered that it sits nicely on the cross trainer across the street during my 45-minute aerobic workouts, the better to admire the fierce beauty of Baltimore’s mean streets as rendered in Season One of The Wire. In music, check out Jon Cog’s fun appreciation of an Amazon mp3 sampler. In apps, when I use the Fire in bed, the screen is too bright even at the lowest brightness setting. Solution: Screen Filter, a third-party app not available in the Amazon Android Appstore – click here for discussion of it in the Amazon forums, as well as tips for installation.

Next Google Plus Video TKC Hangout: Wednesday, January 11 at 3 p.m. Mountain Time. Please e-mail me your G+ profile page URL, if you’d like to be added to the TKC Circle for invites. For help on how to do this, you can e-mail me at PodChronicles AT Gmail DOT com.

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Tech Tip – Stephen S recommends SanDisk Memory Zone, a free app available at Amazon’s Appstore for Android, as a way to see which files are taking up the most space on your Kindle Fire. Other handy free apps Stephen mentions are Quick System Info Pro, Gemini App Manager, File Expert, ES File Explorer, and AndroXPlorer. Tom Semple offers a smart tip for preventing unintentional navigation or user-interface activity if your Kindle Touch’s power button gets turned on by mistake in a pocket or a purse. Hint: It’s about a password.

Interview (starts at 11:50) – My wife Darlene gives her first impressions of the Kindle Touch and explains why she hates the Fire.

Content – Books: Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes; Queen Elizabeth’s Christmas Speeches, 1952-2010 (click here for Forbes story); a free preview of Breaking the Page: Transforming Books and the Reading Experience by Peter Meyers; and Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander and the rest of his Aubrey-Maturin series (via Katie Loss who hopes to zoom Kindle copies of the books to her son, Eric Loss, during his circumnavigation of the globe). Video: Arrested Development and The Wire. Music: Amazon’s 100-song playlist sampling  “Outstanding 2011 Albums You Might Have Missed” led me to purchase Delicate Steve’s Wondervision album for $5. Apps: Solitaire and Bejeweled 2.

Next Week’s Guest: Dr. Eric McLuhan, son of the late renowned media theorist Marshall McLuhan and an internationally known lecturer and author on communications and media in his own right.

Next Google Plus TKC Hangout: Wednesday, January 4 at 3 p.m. Mountain Time. If you are not yet in my TKC hangout circle, please email me at PodChronicles at Gmail Dot Com with the URL of your G+ profile page.

Mark Isero, left, and Antonio Beasley

News – 1) Amazon updates the Kindle Fire software to version 6.2.1 . Consumer Reports and David Pogue are impressed. As is Stephen Windwalker.  2) Kindle for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch receive an update.

Tech Tip – Why I had to reset my Fire to factory default, how to download a Project Gutenberg book in Kindle format to the Fire, and why the E Ink Kindles are more convenient for Project Gutenberg downloads.

Interview (Starts at 16:08) – Mark Isero, an AP English teacher at Leadership High School in San Francisco, is using five Kindles in his classrooms. He and Anthony Beasley, a senior at the school, talked to me by Skype on Monday, December 19th, about how the Kindle experiment is going.

Content- BOOKS: A Kindlesphere blockbuster arrived this week and is available for 99 cents through Christmas. It’s The Complete 2012 User’s Guide to the Amazing Amazon Kindle: Covers All Current Kindles Including the Kindle Fire, Kindle Touch, Kindle Keyboard, and Kindle by Bruce Grubbs and Stephen Windwalker, creator of Kindle Nation Daily.   Also, Our Dog, Lucca by Moe Zilla (free).  VIDEO: NSFW and probably offensive to most listeners, comedian Louis C.K. is breaking new ground with his $5 direct sale of the video for a show he produced. In 12 days he’s earned $1 million from the project, and he’s putting the money to innovative use. If you liked the late George Carlin, you may enjoy Louis C.K., who gave this tribute to Carlin. MUSIC: How to use Amazon’s MP3 Uploader to copy your iTunes music to the Amazon Cloud and Kindle Fire. APPS: Wattpad is an innovative and successful content site offering unlimited stories. ES File Explorer and AndroXplorer are free apps for managing your Kindle Fire files. This just in (and received too late for the audio): 7 Dragons has launched a solid 99-cent app available for the Fire. It’s named Alarm Clock, Calendar, ToDo List – Productivity Helper. Another app worth noting: a free app connecting you with Kindle Nation Daily. PODCASTS: The Unofficial Kindle Fire Podcast is worth checking out!

The Next Google Plus TKC Hangout will be Wednesday December 28th at 3 p.m. Mountain Time, since we’ll be back in Denver.

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Tech Tip – Sorry about my mixup last week on WiFi security. The one you want is WPA, not WEP. I had them reversed, but George from Tulsa set me straight. Also, be mindful of where you tap your Kindle Touch screen, or you may go skittering off to some web site you had no intention of visiting.

Interview (Starts at 13:22) – Sven Birkerts, editor of the literary journal AGNI and author of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, sees the Kindle as a step back from the cultural commonality of the book. I spoke with Sven by phone and Skype on December 12. His latest book of essays is titled The Other Walk, and his 2009 Atlantic essay is titled “Resisting the Kindle.”  As director of the Bennington Writing Seminars, he sees little evidence of Kindles among students earning their MFAs in creative writing in the program. Also mentioned: “The Machine Stops,” a prescient 1909 short story by E.M. Forster.

Content – Music: Goat Rodeo Sessions with Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile. Movies: Return of the Pink Panther and Fahrenheit 451. Apps: Bufo Calvin’s overview includes ColorNote and WiFi Explorer. I also like Any.do, a To Do list maker. Books, etc.: Sven’s books and Eric Loss’s latest blog post.  Plus my essay titled “Visual Intensity of Words” in the Winter 2001 2011 issue of Nieman Reports.

Other links mentioned: Mark Roberts on “Will E-Books Destroy the Democratizing Effects of Reading?”

Next Google Plus video hangout: Wednesday, December 21 at 3 p.m. Eastern. Please e-mail your Google Plus profile URL to PodChronicles AT Gmail DOT com if you’d like an invitation to participate.

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Tech Tips – Fire: WiFi Analyzer helps you see if you’re camping on your neighbor’s WiFi channels. Click here for the steps to add Screen Filter (not in the Amazon Adroid App Store) to your Fire as a way to lower the screen brightness when you’re reading in bed. Kindle Touch: Andrys Basten’s rundown of tips includes navigation tips for the Touch. Correction: I confused WEP and WPA in the podcast. George from Tulsa caught the error and states  ”The SAFE WiFi Security Standard is WPA. WEP has long been hacked.” My apologies for the mixup!

Interview (Starts at 13:04) – Robert Darnton, University Professor and Director of the Harvard University Library, gives a thorough update on progress toward the planned April, 2012 2013, launch of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). I visited him at his office in Harvard Yard on Wednesday, November 30. He is the author of The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History and The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future, as well as a New York Review of Books essay in October titled “Jefferson’s Taper: A National Digital Library.”

Content – Music: 25 Days of Free Holiday Music at Amazon’s mp3 Store. Free Prime Movies: “The Gay Divorcee” starring Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers and “You’ve Got Mail” starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. App: Stitcher for listening to podcasts on your Fire. Kindle Single: Playbook 2012: The Right Fights Back by Evan Thomas and Mike Allen.

Next Google Plus TKC Hangout: Wednesday, December 14 at 3 p.m. Eastern.

Next Week’s Guest: Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.

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Tech Tip – Fire: Reports surface of WiFi connection problems with the Kindle Fire. Bruce Beris posts an overview and troubleshooting suggestions. Also, how to get some hot orange color into the name of your Fire. E-Ink: How to make screenshots with your basic Kindle (hold down the menu and keyboard buttons at the same time, then release) and Kindle Touch. Also, how to tell your Kindle with Special Offers which city you want to see offers in.

Interview (Starts at 16:03) – Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s Vice President for Kindle Content, gives details of the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library for Amazon Prime members and describes the similar mentality of the Kindle Fire and the e-ink Kindles. He doesn’t sound worried about the Nook Tablet or Big Six publishers’ lack of enthusiasm for the Lending Library. I spoke with Russ by phone and Skype on November 28.

Content – Jean Remple shares content possibilities for the Fire, including two blockbuster comic books by Alan Moore and Co., Watchmen and V for Vendetta. Also, Jean’s favorite music station and his wife Laila’s recommendation of handsome art books by the Ankele husband and wife team showcasing the art of  Rembrandt, Jean-François Millet, and Honoré Daumier. Garrett Riley recommends a great web tool for seeing the order of books in a series. The Wall Street Journal is now available as an app on the Fire.

Other links mentioned – “After the Wedding” on Amazon Prime instant video.

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Tech Tip – Gib Wallis of Brief Episode helped me load the Nook app onto my Kindle Fire without rooting or jailbreaking the Fire. Here are the steps he e-mailed me: 1) Allow the Kindle Fire to install apps from other app stores, emails, and web links: Tap the settings from the Home screen or any screen with it visible; Tap More; Tap Device; At Allow Installation of Applications, tap ON. 2) Get the GetJar app, for a free app store for Android: Go to the mobile version of GetJar at: m.GetJar.com; When prompted, download the GetJar app; Let the app download. 3) Move the GetJar app to your app folder; Download a file manager that’s free from the Amazon app store, like File Expert; Move the GetJar app from the Kindle Fire’s Downloads folder to the Apps folder; Go to your apps and start GetJar; In the GetJar store, look for the Nook app – it’s often on the front page, but there’s also an option to search; Download the Nook app; install the Nook app just as you would an Amazon app store app.

Also, George from Tulsa sent me this link which offers easy steps for adding Dropbox to your Fire. And finally, tips on how to highlight on the Kindle Touch and the Mystery of the Missing My Clippings File.

Interview (Starts at 24:17) – Laura Hazard Owen, a Staff Writer at PaidContent, describes how Penguin Group USA this week directed Overdrive to pull Kindle versions of Penguin books at public libraries, then rescinded part of the decision. I spoke with her by phone and Skype on November 25th.

Content – Bufo Calvin’s Love Your Kindle Fire: The ILMK Guide to Amazon’s Entertablet and Moe Zilla, aka Jon Cog’s The Turkey Mystery Rhyme: A Short Thanksgiving Day Mystery for Kids. Also, I found a mindmapping app for the Fire, called Mindmaps by Endare. It costs $3.99 at the Amazon App Store for Android, and it’s pretty good.

Next Week’s Interview Guest: Russell Grandinetti, Amazon’s vice president for Kindle content.

Next Google Plus Video Hangout: Wednesday, November 30, at 3 p.m. Eastern.

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Tech Tip – What a great idea: take advantage of Amazon’s brilliant openness regarding third-party apps and sideload, say, the Barnes & Noble Nook reader app onto my Fire. Well, I didn’t get very far. If you want to try this for yourself, you might consider clicking here, here, and here.

Interview (Starts at 20:47) – Stephen Windwalker, creator of Kindle Nation Daily, reflects on this week’s arrival of the Kindle Fire and Kindle Touch and announces the birth of his own new contribution to Kindle content. I spoke with Steve today, November 17th, by Skype and phone all the way from Cambridge to Arlington, Mass. For information on the weekly KND Fire Sweepstakes, in which you could win a free Kindle Fire, click here.  Steve’s historical perspective includes the prescient question he asked Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in a radio conversation in June of 2008. (Fast forward to about 23:26 to 27:00.)

Content – Since making my 10-minute video review of the Kindle Fire, I’ve changed my mind about which magazine design I prefer on the Fire. I now see that publications like Rolling Stone offer the reader more choices in font size and readability than the, by comparison, locked-down design of the Conde Nast publications, including The New Yorker.

EBook Ninjas Podcast – Joshua, Chris and Toby at eBook Architects in Austin know e-book formatting inside and out, so their podcast is a feast of useful information and opinion on all things e-book. I had a great time joining them for this week’s show via Skype, to talk about the new Kindles.

Our Next TKC Google Plus Video Hangout is scheduled for Wednesday, November 23 at 3 p.m. 5:30 p.m. Eastern.  If you’d like to join us, please email your Google Plus profile page’s URL to me at PodChronicles AT Gmail DOT COM.