Yes, Jerry, I've purchased yet another gadget. This one is the new e-reader from Amazon.com, dubbed the Kindle. The kindle arrives packed in a box that looks like a book, which I find a bit ironic. I unpacked mine and proceeded to charge it as directed by the sticker on the front screen. It comes with a USB cable and a charge cord that is a standard 2 plug transformer with an itty-bitty round plug that plugs into the bottom of the Kindle. Then I looked for where to plug in my SD card, and determined that it was under the battery cover, so I waited.
Two agonizing hours later the battery was fully charged. I popped open the back and slipped in my SD card which I had preloaded with tons of test materials that I had created with the Mobipocket Creator. After all I want to put this device to the test, right? Mobipocket Creator can convert HTML, Word, Text, and PDF documents into a "Mobipocket" file that the Kindle (and other Mobipocket readers) can display. In the process of creating a few files, some for testing and some for eventual reading, I also installed the reader on my Laptop and on my PDA and neither proved to be a reading experience I would entertain on a regular basis. The PDA was nice that it's my phone and always with me so it's not something extra to carry, but it's not a very enjoyable read. So how did my conversions fair?
One of the most exciting things to me about my Kindle is the ability to get religious texts, for free, in a very portable, easily searchable interface. While the basic Qur'an comes in many sizes, and isn't much of a portability issue, it is not the only text that guides Muslims. There are a series of compendiums of stories about the Prophet (peace and blessings of God be upon him) called hadith that are deemed authentic through a scientific approach and documentation of the chain of transmission. The most famous of these collections was compiled by Imam Bukhari in the year 870 or so and contains 7275 hadith and a collection compiled by Muslim Ibn al-Hajjaj in the year 875 or so and contains 9000+ hadith. Just those two alone can fill volumes, or part of an SD card in your Kindle... Do I need the ability to carry these around where I choose? Probably not, but I like the idea. I found a PDF of the Qur'an online, downloaded it and converted it. And then found the basic hadith collections in HTML that someone had spidered off of the USC MSA website.
Since I had just recently watched the SciFi mini-series Tin Man I decided a read of the original Oz might be in good order, so I went looking for the texts in online libraries. The major online repositories of free reading stuff seems to be the Gutenberg Project, iBilio, and perhaps Open Library. Gutenberg had the Oz series so I downloaded it in HTML. The books were easy to find, and although Mobipocket wasn't an available option, the conversion went pretty quick and rather painless. The resulting text is easy to read and hopefully I'll get around to it soon (as now that I have a portable library, there are many publications vying for my attention).
I love NBC's Heroes. The story is very compelling and I'd love to get more of it, NBC has kindly published some extra graphic novels online with story details above and beyond what we see on TV. To read them means to sit in front of the laptop for a few hours, which I do enough of already, so I figured get them over to the Kindle for a more comfortable read. Each is a PDF, which Mobipocket Creator claims to convert. Here's where we start to see some issues, not unexpected, but unfortunate. While text easily flows from one size to another, images do not. The images lacking color on the Kindle didn't pose as much of a problem as the tiny text in the images that you need to read (since that is the story...) Guess I'll be reading those on my laptop.
As a technical resource the Kindle should be a great help. If I can get my tech library on it, it's available to me even if I'm working in the middle of the woods. I was troubleshooting some IP issues with Vista and grabbed a white paper from Microsoft about the Configuring and Deploying IPv6 on Windows Vista. Wow, this one was tricky. I guess I could have just left it the mess that Mobipocket Creator made, but I can't blame them. What the program does is have Word save out an HTML version of the document and then it does an import of an HTML document. Anyone who works on the web knows that Word does a crap-happy job of saving out to HTML, and Office 2007 is no exception. It rolls it's own unique version of HTML, that most other programs can't quite make heads or tails of. So I fired up my trusty vim and hacked it up until I was happy. The result is quite legible, but the effort means that I won't be doing a lot of Word docs.
Some documents aren't in the public domain, but are readily available for free in a format that could be pulled into the Kindle. One such example is Hacknot which Joe Grossberg made a comment about a while back, so I pulled it in and plopped it on my SD card. They've made it available on PDF in two sizes, can't remember which I picked since I wasn't going to print it anyway, just blend it up with Mobipocket. It was a totally painless process which I'm looking forward to reading the results.
Being that I am a programmer/developer/coder/hack by trade I sometimes have to write tech specs. Even though I have two screens, during coding the real estate on my screens is limited so having an external copy is nice. And since I'd like to leave the world in a better state than when I got here, I don't like killing trees for that luxury (though I do resort to arboricide if need be). Wouldn't it be great if I could just pop the specs on the Kindle? Well in this case no. My tech specs were more like a series of screen caps and and ERD with little supporting text, none of which wanted to be exported out of Word to HTML, and once I coaxed them out, they were not legible enough to do me any good.
Well it says that it can do text files, who am I to argue. I'm on my third time through Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, so it's time to crack out a playing guide to help decode the skill points, since I'm not a pre-teen with years of free time on my hands. I am impressed here, it parses out the text as it imports to help with removing line ending hyphens and to figure out if there are headings or section numbers or what have you.
Excited as I was, I ordered a half dozen items for my Kindle before it was even shipped, and by the time I was playing around with it, post charge, they were all there, delivered to me via Whispernet:
So far I've read the Murderer and that's it. Since I've already read the two Larry Niven stories in the past, as well as Neuromancer, I'm likely saving them for a long wait in an airport or doctors office when I'm bouncing off the ADD walls. So far, so good.
Once it arrived I found a few more items that sparked my interest, though interestingly most I found via Amazon.com and not from the storefront on the Kindle device itself:
All painless whichever method I chose to get it to my device, all look good (though The Nation is a bit dry). All-in-all a very pleasant experience.
Yes music. Apparently the Kindle includes a speaker for audio book playback, and has a not-so-hidden experimental feature to play back that music via the speaker or headphones. I picked up a digital copy of Led Zeppelin's Mothership and loaded it up on the Kindle (I also burned a copy for the car). Audiophiles will not be impressed, but it was good enough for the likes of me. Playback interface and play options are vastly lacking, but this isn't meant to be an iPod.
Since receiving the Kindle a scant 36 hours ago I have read more literature of one type or another than in the 36 weeks previous. The Kindle makes it convenient for me to read when I get the chance, and provides me a better reading experience than bulky books, magazine, newspapers, and even a computer screen. I think my Kindle and I will get on nicely.
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Disclaimer The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions.