The Kindle Chronicles

News – 1) Amazon’s update of the Kindle for Android app gives a clue about what the microphone on the Kindle 3 might be used for. 2) Tweets by BiblioVault about a slight change in KindleGen makes Nate the Great wonder if ePub is coming to the Kindle. Tech Tip – Three ways to do [...]

News – 1) Early reviews of the Kindle 3 are uniformly positive, including judgments by David Pogue,  Wired Magazine, Fast Company, and The Telegraph. 2) The Jackal backpedals with Random House, putting a premature end to a Kindle exclusive on some great backlist titles. 3) Amazon touts record sales of the Kindle 3 without saying [...]

Photograph copyright James Duncan Davidson

News – 1: Amazon announces stunning new data showing the Kindle has done quite nicely during the first three months of the iPad Era. Mike Kane says Kindle is now the new standard for eBook formats. Also weighing in on the news are Stephen Windwalker, Andrys Basten, Bufo Calvin, and Abhi. 2: Literary Agent Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie makes good on his threat to create his own publishing arm, which makes an exclusive deal with Amazon for 20 $9.99 Kindle titles by modern literary giants. Random House is not amused. Mike Kane says get over it, Amazon has won. Here’s a good Guardian piece on the row and Harvard Magazine’s profile tells how The Jackal got his name. Andrys Basten suggests you back up these titles if you buy them, in case Random House succeeds in rolling this deal back somehow. 3: Amazon’s stock price recovers after opening sharply lower as a result of great earnings in the second quarter. Huh? 4: My video take on the new Borders e-reader, Aluratek’s Libre.

Tech Tip – With help from Joshua Tallent, listener Alan Morris completes his labor of love, turning a memoir by an RAF pilot, The Last Enemy by Richard Hillary, into a high-quality e-book. He’s offering the e-book at no charge to publishers who own the rights to the book, in hopes it will survive into the digital age. You can help by clicking here and then clicking on the “I’d Like to Read this Book on Kindle” button. Alan gives a very thorough account of how he did it in this blog post, which you might want to check out if you have a similar e-book project you’d like to undertake.

Interview – Bob Stein, founder of the Institute for the Future of the Book, spoke with me from Portugal on July 13, 2010, about his vision of the book. Also mentioned in our conversation: Craig Mod’s “Embracing the Digital Book,” Sophie, Commentpress, Eucalyptus reader, and Eastgate Systems. Click here for the “On the Media” NPR program on which Bob appeared on July 2, 2010. If his plans for a new publishing venture materialize, you’ll see information about it here.

Comments – From John C. Adamson, Mary Hundley, and Rick Askenase.

Next Week – To celebrate the second anniversary of the Kindle Chronicles, I plan to interview my very first guest, Baratunde Thurston, who appeared on TKC 1 on July 26, 2008.

Click here to download this episode.

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.

News – Item 1: Seth Godin’s free advice for Amazon with reaction from Abhi and a followup interview by The Wall Street Journal. Item 2: A slippery slide on e-book market share at Steve Jobs’s WWDC keynote sparks controversy and a suggestion by Stephen Windwalker for what Jobs should have said.

Tech Tip – Via Kes Woodward, a reminder of the joys of Instapaper and a new resource, Longform.

Interview – John Just, assistant superintendent for management information systems at the Pinellas County School District, visited with me by Skype on June 7 about what would apparently be the first high school in the nation to issue Kindles to all students instead of textbooks. Click here to send John a tweet with information that might be helpful in the project.

Content – Thanks to Zoe Winters, I have read my first paranormal romance in five decades as an otherwise-omnivorous reader. Kept, the first of a trio of novellas in her Blood Lust series, is a well-written, sometimes sexy, sometimes funny account of a heroine who can shift into the form of a cat and back. Click here to listen to the full “Whiny Indie Authors” episode of her podcast that I excerpted in this TKC episode.

Comments – Tom Semple’s rebuttal to a couple of points made by James McQuivey in the interview last week, GuitarLover 1999 on the Joe Konrath interview, and Al MacDiarmid on the wonders of Calibre.