A wireless device for reading electronic books. It uses a high contrast
display that looks much like ink on paper.
Introduction
Kindle already makes up a whopping 12% of the
book sale market of titles also available in Kindle form. Last revised/verified: 2009-02-22
Kindle II is a thinner, sturdier, lighter version of the original.
Advantages
- Kindle books cost about
or less each, including airtime. You can also get magazines and newspapers.
- The screen is specially designed to work even in bright sunlight.
- You don’t need a computer. The device is self-contained, much like a cell-phone.
- It would be great for travel. You could pack the equivalent of 200
books in a compact package. You can add a memory card to expand that limit.
- There are more than 145,000 books, blogs,
newspapers and magazines available in kindle format.
- It can display a variety of fonts, diagrams, half tones and maps.
Disadvantages
- The Kindle hand-held device itself is about
 | recommend Amazon⇒Kindle II |
| asin: B00154JDAI |
| Wireless device for reading e-books. |
|
- Black & White only
- Kindles are for Americans only.
- Time magazine subscription is text only, no photos, no graphs, to save bandwidth.
- You can also download audiobooks, but not via the air due to their large size.
You must download them to a computer over the Internet, then download them to
the kindle via a USB cable.
- You can also download your own documents to it for
each.
- It is just a book reader. It has no Blackberry or calculator functions, or user-written
software. It has Linux and Java inside, so in theory it could play games and run
small applications, but Amazon has locked it into one function only.
Kindle Coverage
The green areas in the above map show where the Kindle works. It needs access to
the EVDO high-speed data network, the same one that advanced cell-phones use.
They call the service Whispernet. You will note, from
the map that Kindles only work in urban USA, not Canada, Europe or anywhere else.
You can download 200 books into your Kindle in
the USA and take them to read anywhere on the planet. It is just you can’t
download more until you get back to the USA in one of the green zones. Unfortunately,
this means Kindles are for Americans only!
Kindle Formats
Kindle is quite limited in the formats of book it can display. It supports only ISO-8859-1
encoding, so has only limited support for non-English. It supports Mobipocket
format (.MOBI, .PRC), plain
text files and Amazon’s proprietary, copy-protected AZW format. Word, HTML,
PDF etc. have to be converted before use.
Outstanding Questions
- Can the Kindle deliver full motion video?
Sony E-Book Readers
Sony
makes a line of nine e-book reader models. They do not support Kindle format,
but they do support Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word, BBeB Book (Sony's previous
proprietary format) and other text file formats, as well as ePub/ACS4 and
connection with Adobe Digital Editions. You can even play back unsecured MP3 and
AAC audio files (headphones required and sold separately).
DjVu format has advanced compression technology that makes it very good at
handling high resolution images of scanned documents and photographs. With DjVu
you can take a 300 DPI high resolution scan and
store it in less than 100 KB.
ePub is an open format. Kindle AZW is proprietary to Amazon. All else being
equal, open good, propriatry bad.
Books
 |
recommend book⇒Publish Your Book On The Amazon Kindle: A Practical Guide |
| | paperback | kindle |
|---|
| ISBN13: | 978-1-4404-5694-7 | B001KYG5AY |
|---|
| publisher: | CreateSpace |
|---|
| published: | 2008-11-14 |
|---|
| by: | Michael R. Hicks |
|---|
| A practical guide to publishing your book for the Amazon Kindle. You can read more about it on the author’s website KreelanWarrior.com. |
|
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