Amazon announced an upgrade to its Kindle for PC reader yesterday.
Wait! You didn’t know that you could use your PC as a Kindle and get access to over 375,000 ebooks? Well it’s easy. And free. All you have to do is click on this link and then find the download button. (I understand that Kindle is only available for the Mac in a beta version so far, but apparently that will change soon.)
Then all you have to do is pop across to the Amazon site, set up an account, and navigate to the Kindle -> Books catalog. Lots of ways to navigate there: by genre, sales, price, number of reviews, publication date, author or title, topic tags. Or just browse till you find something you like (The Lebanese Troubles, plug, plug, plug – just click the Amazon link on the right), and then to test your PC Kindle, download the free sample.
That’ll take you back to your Kindle application. On the home page, you’ll see the book you’ve selected in your library. Open it up and you’ll be able to play with the features. What can you do? Select a font-size you feel comfortable with. Change the background color – white, sepia, or black. Bookmark a page or find a previous bookmark. Right-click to add a note or highlight a key passage. Review all notes. Move to full-screen. Nothing especially fancy, but everything I needed. And it’s a very comfortable, smooth read.
So why use Kindle for PC? First, because it is comfortable. Much more so that any other way I’ve found of reading a book on a PC. But for lots of other reasons too:
- It’s a great way to discover new writing. (Check out the Amazon discussion groups or Kindle Boards – listed below – to find out other reader discoveries
- Ebooks are much cheaper than printed books – and many cost almost nothing. (Amazon doesn’t publish free material, but Smashwords does.)
- You can usually sample a book before you commit to buy
- Delivery is instant.
- Reader reviews – from people just like us – are pretty good guides to the quality of the book. Look for quality reviews.
- You’ll kill fewer trees.
But what if you’re a really serious reader, and 375,000 books just isn’t enough for you? What if the book you want to read isn’t on the Kindle list? Many of the out-of-copyright classics are now available as free ebooks. And then there are all the free Smashwords publications. Well the good news is that, as well as Kindle, there are several other decent e-readers for the PC.
Not quite as polished as Kindle for PC, but still effective, is the Adobe Digital Editions reader. This will read any book released in an EPUB or PDF format. (Officially, EPUB is supposed to be the standard format for ebooks: there’s a movement to encourage all publishers and e-readers to use the same format, so that books once acquired can be read on any e-reader.)
Try it out with any of the Rapscallion releases. Go to Smashwords and download the EPUB version. Save the file in the Downloads folder on your computer. Then open up Digital Editions, click on the Books icon at the far left of the screen, and then on Library -> Add item to library. Find the EPUB file in your Downloads folder. For comparison, you might also want to grab a second Smashwords publication, but this time download a PDF version. This will open directly on your computer, but save it into your Downloads folder, and then copy it into your Digital Editions library just as before. Then open up your books and experiment with the controls.
What I don’t like so much in Digital Editions is the heavy black background around the text, which I find distracting. Also I’d like to be able to adjust the page margins in the EPUB files so that the text is not so close to the edge of the page. But I prefer the EPUB to the PDF version because it offers more flexibility with font size, and also scrolling down a page is more precise – it’s exactly one page at a time. I’m not sure whether I prefer the vertical scrolling of pages, which is what I’m used to on the computer, or Kindle’s horizontal left and right scrolling, which resembles a printed book.
Like Kindle, the Adobe reader, allows you to set bookmarks, automatically remembers the last page you read, and has a Find tool, so you can search for a word or phrase. But it differs from Kindle in two important ways. First Adobe offers a Print capability – which somehow seems to defeat the purpose. And it misses a feature that I think is an essential: there’s no capability for note-taking.
That’s my experience, but there are other free e-readers for the computer too. Perhaps you’d like to tell us about another you’ve tried. What’s your favorite way to read an ebook?
Useful Links
Download page: Kindle for PC
Amazon’s Kindle Discussions – Main Page
Kindle Boards – mix with Kindle readers and writers.
Rapscallion publications – so far – via Smashwords
Download page: Adobe Digital Editions
Tags: e-readers, ebook, kindle, Rapscallion, short stories, Smashwords
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Here’s my problem: I HATE reading off of a screen. Really, really hate it. Which makes it hard to consider e-publishing. I downloaded Kindle for Mac and bought your book, but whenever I sit down to read, I want to hold a book, so I turn to my stack instead. I’ve been reading a lot right now, and mostly, I read in the tub. Can’t take my Mac in the tub. If this is the way the industry is turning, it makes me very sad. I’ve tried. I want to give it a chance. But so far, as I said, I really, really hate it.
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Can you read kindle (or an ifailure) in the park on a sunny day? Maybe you can… but would you risk either on the beach? Or indeed in the bath. The technology needs to become robust in the physical sense… which means dustproof, waterproof and shockproof and with long term battery life of more than 12 hours (ie no batteries that start with 24 hour life and rapidly recede to <2hrs).
I actually think electronic readers probably are the future. Just not quite yet. They have to become life-proof and <£50.
But I also think there's something aesthetic about a book that possibly can't be replaced by a reader… and more importantly it will always be faster to skim through a book to find something than search an electronic file, which makes me wonder if academic books (as opposed to journals) will be a sensible switch.
Alan said that short stories were naturals for ebook format. And I think that's probably true (you'll also make more money selling 20+ shorts at $1 a pop than one novel at $10…). And as we seem headed toward the good old days of the pulps (where authors cheerfully – or not – bashed out upwards of a million words a year to earn their crust), short stories – ideally themed shorts – may well be the future.
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How do I upload these to my site? Where do I need to FTP??
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