News – 1. Amazon announces a new Kindle DX. 2. The new Digital Text Platform (DTP) 70-percent royalty option goes into effect. Stephen Windwalker’s comments here. 3. Kindle for Android launches, and Len Charnoff provides a minireview. 4. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos tells Fortune he has already seen a significant market-share shift away from high-priced e-book publishers toward those who are being aggressive on prices.
Tech Tip – Courtesy of Joel Anderson, a way to send periodicals content from Calibre to your Kindle via AOL’s free e-mail. The following is a condensed print version of the steps I discuss in the audio:
* If you are new to Calibre, run the Welcome Wizard, which you’ll find by clicking an icon at the upper right named preferences. This gives you a place to enter your AOL email address and to click on whichever e-reader device you’re using. For Amazon, you can choose to optimize content for either Kindle 1 and 2, or DX.
Next click on the Fetch News icon on the top menu bar. This will bring you to sources for news and features. Some require username and password for subscription content, but many of them are free. When you find a periodical you want, you can click on “Download Now” and it will take a while for Calibre to fetch the content and convert it to .mobi format for the Kindle, if that’s what you specified in the Welcome Wizard. Once it’s finished, you’ll see the publication name on your main library list. From there, right click on the name of the periodical, choose “Send to Device” and roll the cursor right to “email to” and you should see your AOL address.
Go to your Kindle and from the Menu button, choose Experimental and then “launch browser” next to Basic Web. Navigate to AOL, move the 5-way down till the “Get Free Mail” box is highlighted. Near the top of the page that appears next you’ll see Already have a username? Move the 5-way to highlight login and enter your username and password. When your inbox of mail appears you should see a message titled E-Book: and the name of the publication. Highlight and choose that message and then move the cursor down to “View Header (1 attachment)” and select it. On the next screen you’ll see the name of the attachment. Select and activate that link and you’ll see a message titled “Download file,” stating that the file will appear on your Kindle home screen and are you sure you want to proceed?” Click OK. You’ll know it’s working if you see percentage numbers near the top of the screen, making their way to 100 percent and Done. Once you see that, click on the Home button, and you’ll see the item ready for reading.
Interview – With three young teens (ages 13, 14, and 15) visiting us in Ocean Park, Maine, this week, I did a joint interview with them to talk about the Kindle and reading.
Content – Amazon this week launched Kindle Editions with Audio/Video and one of the first titles with the enhanced content is Together We Cannot Fail: FDR and the American Presidency in Years of Crisis by Terry Golway. I reached Golway for an interview on June 30th, shortly after he himself had heard about his previously published book’s enhancement with audio for Kindle on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch.
Comments – Jack Greene on Apple products and Tom Semple on the Russ Grandinetti interview.
