Kindle : Computer Hardware Buyers’ Glossary

A wireless device for reading electronic books. It uses a high contrast display that looks much like ink on paper. However, the contast is not nearly as high as the competing Kobo and Sony eBook readers. I have not seen it side by side with a Nook.

Introduction

The first things that struck me when I first saw a pair of Kindles was:

• They are thinner than most cellphones.
• I thought the display was a plastic overlay to protect the screen. It looks like printed ink. There in no sign of pixelation, though the edges look a little rough, like newsprint. The contrast is very high, really solid blacks like nothing you have ever seen before. It supports 16 shades of gray which lets it do anti-aliasing to smooth the edges of letters. You can read them from any angle.
• Supports AZW (Amazon Word), AZW1, TXT, MOBI (Mobile pocket eBook format), PRC (Palm Resource Code), AA, AAX, PDF (Portable Document Format), Microsoft Word documents, JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) images and Mp3 music file formats.

Kindles are a loss leader to sell eBooks. They cost Amazon roughly twice what they sell them for.

These Kindles are in ascending order by list price. This approximates the order of street price. Amazon insists I not display prices, fearing they will be obsolete. You can find out the prices by clicking through to the Amazon site. The 9.5” Fires are obsolete, replaced by a smaller 7” model.

	recommend electronic⇒Kindle Basic
	asin	B007HCCNJU
	dim	9.10 × 12.20 cm 3.58 × 4.80 in
Basic model in black or grey. Wireless device for reading eBooks, 16 grey levels, Requires WiFi or USB access. Controlled by wiggling button. diagonal: 15.2 cm, 6.00 inches, width × height 600 × 800 pixels.
amazon.cn amazon.ca amazon.de bestbuy.ca amazon.es newegg.ca amazon.fr tigerdirect.ca amazon.it amazon.com amazon.co.uk newegg.com junglee.com tigerdirect.com other stores
Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock

	recommend electronic⇒Kindle Paperwhite, 6”, Built-in Light, WiFi
	asin	B008GEKXUO
Has light, WiFi, but no 3G. Hi res touch display. The Amazon.com database shows this product as out of stock, but the online store says it is in stock. I have asked Amazon to sort it out. So far they have ignored me as they do whenever I report database inconsistencies.
amazon.cn amazon.ca amazon.de bestbuy.ca amazon.es newegg.ca amazon.fr tigerdirect.ca amazon.it amazon.com amazon.co.uk newegg.com junglee.com tigerdirect.com other stores
Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock

	recommend electronic⇒Kindle keyboard WiFi
	asin	B004HFS6Z0
	dim	9.10 × 12.20 cm 3.58 × 4.80 in
Wireless device for reading eBooks with 6” black and white screen. Requires WiFi or USB access, no 3G. Controlled by a keyboard. diagonal: 15.2 cm, (6.00 inches), 600 × 800 pixels
amazon.cn amazon.ca amazon.de bestbuy.ca amazon.es newegg.ca amazon.fr tigerdirect.ca amazon.it amazon.com amazon.co.uk newegg.com junglee.com tigerdirect.com other stores
Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock

	recommend electronic⇒Kindle Keyboard 3G
	asin	B004HZYA6E
	dim	9.10 × 12.20 cm 3.58 × 4.80 in
Only sold in the USA, but works globally. Wireless device for reading eBooks with 6” black and white screen. WiFi or USB access. Receive books via 3G cellphone towers. Controlled by a keyboard. diagonal: 15.2 cm, 6.00 inches, 600 × 800 pixels
amazon.cn amazon.ca amazon.de bestbuy.ca amazon.es newegg.ca amazon.fr tigerdirect.ca amazon.it amazon.com amazon.co.uk newegg.com junglee.com tigerdirect.com other stores
Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock

	recommend electronic⇒Kindle Fire 7”, LCD Display, WiFi, 8 GB
	asin	B0083Q04IQ
	dim	9 × 15.30 cm 3.54 × 6.02 in
Only available in the USA. New version of the basic Fire. Uses WiFi unlike the original which used 3G. 8Gb, colour touch screen. diagonal: 17.8 cm, 7.00 inches, 600 × 1024 pixels.
amazon.cn amazon.ca amazon.de bestbuy.ca amazon.es newegg.ca amazon.fr tigerdirect.ca amazon.it amazon.com amazon.co.uk newegg.com junglee.com tigerdirect.com other stores
Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock

	recommend electronic⇒Kindle Paperwhite 3G
	asin	B007OZNUCE
	dim	9.10 × 12.20 cm 3.58 × 4.80 in
Wireless device for reading eBooks with 6” black and white screen. Requires WiFi, USB or 3G cellphone access. Essentially a Kindle Touch with a backlight for reading in bed. Controlled by touch screen. diagonal: 15.2 cm, 6.00 inches. extra features cost less because they are ads.
amazon.cn amazon.ca amazon.de bestbuy.ca amazon.es newegg.ca amazon.fr tigerdirect.ca amazon.it amazon.com amazon.co.uk newegg.com junglee.com tigerdirect.com other stores
Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock

	recommend electronic⇒Kindle Fire 7” 3G
	asin	B0051VVOB2
	dim	9 × 15.30 cm 3.54 × 6.02 in
Older model. Wireless device for reading eBooks with 7” colour screen. Receive books via 3G cellphone towers. Coverage in 100 countries. Does not work with WiFi. Controlled by a touch screen. Like a low-end Apple iPad. It is an Android device that can run apps and games. Developers program it in Java. diagonal: 17.8 cm, 7.00 inches, 600 × 1024 pixels.
amazon.cn amazon.ca amazon.de bestbuy.ca amazon.es newegg.ca amazon.fr tigerdirect.ca amazon.it amazon.com amazon.co.uk newegg.com junglee.com tigerdirect.com other stores
Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock

	recommend electronic⇒Kindle Fire HD 8.9”, Dolby Audio, Dual-Band WiFi, 16 GB
	asin	B008GFRE5A
	dim	12 × 19.20 cm 4.72 × 7.56 in
Only available in the USA. 32 GB version also available. diagonal: 22.6 cm, 8.90 inches, 1200 × 1920 pixels.
amazon.cn amazon.ca amazon.de bestbuy.ca amazon.es newegg.ca amazon.fr tigerdirect.ca amazon.it amazon.com amazon.co.uk newegg.com junglee.com tigerdirect.com other stores
Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock

	recommend electronic⇒Kindle DX
	asin	B002GYWHSQ
	dim	13.90 × 20.30 cm 5.47 × 7.99 in
Wireless device for reading eBooks with black and white screen. Receive books via 3G cellphone towers. Coverage in 100 countries. Does not work with WiFi. Controlled by a keyboard. diagonal: 824 × 1200 pixels.
amazon.cn amazon.ca amazon.de bestbuy.ca amazon.es newegg.ca amazon.fr tigerdirect.ca amazon.it amazon.com amazon.co.uk newegg.com junglee.com tigerdirect.com other stores
Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock

Advantages

• Kindle books cost about $10.00 USD or less each, including airtime. You can also get magazines and newspapers.
• The kindle is very light. It is not tiring to hold it up in bed on seated to read.
• You are not limited by the selection in your local library or local bookstore. You can inexpensively get your own copy of recently published books without putting a hold on theme and waiting 9 months at the library. You don’t even have to go to a computer or a bookstore. Your Kindle is your bookstore.
• Many libraries will now lend you Kindle books. You don’t even need no visit the library to pick them up. I was disappointed to discover the Victoria public library has licenced only one or two copies of each title, and so there are typically ten holds on each book. This is an artificial limitation on the technology destroying its key benefit.
• New versions can to do text to speech to read aloud to you.
• Internet access is free. The cost in bundled into the cost of the eBooks you download.
• The screen is specially designed to work even in bright sunlight. It is not backlit. You need some ambient light, just like a paper book.
• You don’t need a computer. If you get the 3G model, the device is self-contained, much like a cell phone.
• It is great for travel. You can pack the equivalent of 200 books in a compact package so you can take a huge variety of reading material with you. 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.
• You can enlarge the fonts. Big print books are costly, heavy, bulky and often not available.
• You can plug it into the USB (Universal Serial Bus) port of your computer and it looks like a small hard drive. You can copy documents onto it.
• The books cost almost nothing to publish, manufacture or distribute. This means the prices of books will come down and down and the number of titles will explode. Anyone with a word processor can become a published author.
• Book sellers need keep no inventory. Or looked at another way, they can keep an inventory of every book ever published. They don’t have to guess which books to carry and how many to buy.
• No trees need die to satisfy your reading habit.
• You can create your own eBooks and upload them free to your Kindle with an USB HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) to eBook format using a free utility called Calibri.
• If you buy eBooks from Amazon, you can remove them from your Kindle, and get them again from Amazon without having to rebuy them. That may not be so for other sources. I don’t think you can back up your collection on your own computer. This is how the eBook vendors prevent you from giving copies to your friends. Systems that lock contents to the serial number of a given book are too easy to crack.
• You don’t need to fill your living room with book cases to contain your Kindle book collection.
• A family may own a common Kindle account at Amazon. They can then read the book on any of the Kindle’s the family owns.
• Ebooks are not affected by spills, pets, age, sunlight. In theory they last forever.
• You can send your PDF books to myaddress@free.kindle.com and put Convert in the subject line. Within a minute or two, the book is on your kindle.
• I would hope university texts will soon come in Kindle format. They are so expensive in paper because they have limited runs and need frequent revisions.

Disadvantages

• Availability: Some models will not be available until 2001-11. Many are not even listed on the international Amazon sites. The American amazon.com will not ship outside the USA.
• Black & White only, actually 16 shades of gray, except Fire model.
• Images and text only. No video, except with the Fire model.
• Kindle is coy about specs. They won’t tell you the CPU (Central Processing Unit) they use, its speed, RAM (Random Access Memory) or flash RAM capacity. There is no reason for them to be embarrassed. They use perfectly adequate hardware. If are selling the Fire device as a game machine this is important to potential buyers.
• You cannot run apps on the Kindles except the Fire model.
• No PayPal so I doubt Kindle does either. You will need a credit card to buy books.
• 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.
• I tend to highlight my paperbacks and scribble in the margin. I also pepper them with coloured tape flags to mark important sections. I also like to quote from them. I have not yet seen facilities in Kindles to let me do this electronically. If this were done electronically, others could choose to see or hide my markings.
• You can also download your own documents to it for $10.00 USD each.
• Except for the Fire model, 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.
• Every time you turn the page the entire screen goes black, with white writing, then reverts to a normal black ink on a white display. It is distracting.
• The basic model is not a touch screen. I found myself constantly trying to select by touch. You use a little gizmo to navigate.

Kindle Coverage

Kindles used to work only in parts of the USA. Now they work world wide, wherever 3G cellphone coverage is advised. See this map of world coverage. The kindle holds enough books for a lifetime of reading, so you can load them up where there is coverage to read off in the jungle. With WiFi (Wireless Fidelity), the kindle will work anywhere in the world there WiFi is Internet access, e.g. Internet Cafés anywhere in the world.

Kindle Formats

Sony E-Book Readers

Sony makes a line of nine eBook 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 (Advanced Audio Coding) 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 (Dots Per Inch) high resolution scan and store it in less than 100 KB.

ePub is an open format. Kindle AZW is proprietary to Amazon. AZW is MOBI plus weak copy protection. Apple eBook stores use ePub format. BlackBerry uses MOBI format. All else being equal, open: good, proprietary: bad. The two most important formats to create are MOBI and ePub. Apple currently has book-reading software for its iPhones and iPads.

Software Readers

If you don’t have the money for a Kindle or Sony, you can still read eBooks on your computer. There are three basic kinds of readers:

• Dedicated eBook readers, such as the Kindle and the Sony eBook reader. These typically have black and white eInk screen. They are very light and portable with extended battery life. Typically you download files over 3G, WiFi or USB, or get them with a desktop computer from the Internet and upload them over a USB port.
• General purpose notepad computers. These are small general purpose computers or cellphones, typically with colour screens and built-in software to read eBooks.
• Laptop and desktop computers. You download files over the Internet and play them with reader software you must first install. If you have Firefox, the free ePub reader for Firefox will let you view ePub format eBooks. If you have a PC (Personal Computer), MobiPocket eBook reader will let your read mobi format eBooks. I have found eBook software in general quite buggy, so if you have troubles seek out better software.

eBook Creation

The tools I found most useful were the free eCub to create an ePub format eBook then convert it to the kindle MOBI format with Online-ConVert, a free service to interconvert formats. The kindlegen MOBI creator auxiliary program for eCub is buggy.

ePub format is just your tree of HTML zip compressed with a few extra XML (extensible Markup Language) documents to provide a table of contents toc.ncx, meta-information about the eBook content.opf and a manifest container.xml. Kindle’s AZW and mobipocket are similar. To troubleshoot, you can unzip your eBook or others known to verify properly.

Before you even think about converting your website to eBook format, convert it to strict XHTML 1.1, and validate it. Use this DTD (Document Type Definition):

You will have to replace old HTML tags and replace them with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) equivalents.

Then, if you have any sort of macros or dynamic content, create versions of them that generate stripped down vanilla text. You can’t put tags directly into <body>. You must contain them in something such as <div> You will discover many bulk transforms you have to do, and macros will make that much easier. Further, you can use your macros to put the code back to normal after you have created your eBook.

Jutoh

Jutoh was the best behaved editor. It generates multiple formats. If your files change, you have to reimport, which basically makes you start over. You have to redelete files and images you don’t want to include and correct the order. When you import, it copies all the text into one giant binary file. You are probably best to write a bat file that copies just the files you want to a directory tree, and reimport from that. Ideally it would just reimport the files it already had, remembering what you had deleted. Oddly, it does not handle tables, something other simpler program do, though there in a general purpose kludge to import HTML unmodified.

eCub

I found the eCub program easy to use. You dump your entire directory tree in a project directory, write bat file to prune it of anything you don’t want included in the eBook (e.g. sitemaps, perhaps the index.html page…) and it finds all the HTML and image files. It creates the table of contents from the title in the HTML header. It generates forward and back navigation buttons. It builds a simplified miniature style sheet. It strips your HTML and put it in a build directory in a tree of files matching the original. Then it zips it up. You don’t find out about your errors until you run the verifier after the ePub file is constructed.

Maximize eCub before use, or various features for adding, removing and reordering files will not be visible.

You can force eCub to notice your changes by deleting all files in the build directory,placing the replacements in the project directory and recompiling. To change which files are included you must manually edit the list of files in the eCub GUI (Graphic User Interface).

Mobipocket Creator

MobiPocket eBook creator is a free program to take your HTML or a few other formats and convert them to *.prc eBook format. I was not impressed and quickly gave up on it in favour of eCub.

I found I needed to strip out all the fancy HTML, navigation buttons, ads, JavaScript etc. Otherwise it crashed. I did my headings with simple <h1, <h2 and <h3. It is easiest to collect the pages you need with drag and drop. You have to add them one document at a time.

It can build you a 3-level Table of contents.

In the example above, major headings are marked with <span class=title>…</span>.
The second level are marked <h2>…</h2>
The third level are marked <div class=level3>…</div>

It is simplest just to use <h1, <h2 and <h3 Note you specify the tags without the <>

The program itself is quite cryptic. Try reading the online documentation.

I could not get it to do anything but the simplest, short test documents.

Costs

There are a number of reasons why eBooks are so much cheaper than paper-based books:

• They don’t have to be manufactured.
• They don’t require paper.
• They don’t require storage.
• They don’t require shipping.
• They don’t get shopworn or dog-eared.
• You don’t have to deal with unsold copies.
• They have a small carbon footprint.
• Because they are cheaper, people buy more of them, which makes them still cheaper.
• Even the tiniest retail outlet or website can maintain an enormous catalog.

Amazon originally set the price of eBooks at $10 or under. At this rate, publishers still make more profit than they did with the equivalent paper book. Barnes & Noble decided customers would tolerate prices up to $12. Then the publishers noticed that libraries were a special case:

• Libraries could lend the same eBook out to many people at once. Why would people buy a best seller when they could get it without waiting at the library, unlike paper best sellers?
• Ebooks never wear out. Libraries don’t have to rebuy popular books the way the do with paper-based books.

So the publishers said they wanted to charge libraries in the order of $90 for ebooks. The libraries are screaming.

To keep things interesting, the US Department of Justice sued Apple, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster for price fixing eBooks.

Most of the classics of science and literature are available for free. Darwin, Plato, Tolstoy, etc. if its no longer under copyright and if its a significant work its been put up for free by the Gutenberg project and is available in Kindle and iBook format. One of the first things I read on the Kobo was The Prince by Machiavelli.

The Future

Books

	recommend book⇒Publish Your Book On The Amazon Kindle: A Practical Guide
	by	Michael R. Hicks	978-1-4404-5694-7	paperback
	birth	1963 age: 49	B001KYG5AY	kindle
	publisher	CreateSpace
	published	2008-11-14
A practical guide to publishing your book for the Amazon Kindle.
abe books anz abe books.co.uk amazon.cn amazon.co.uk abe books.de abe books.ca amazon.de amazon.ca amazon.es Chapters Indigo iberlibro.com abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr Barnes & Noble abe books.it Google play amazon.it O’Reilly Safari junglee.com Powells Kobo Sony eBooks other stores
Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock. Try looking for it with a bookfinder.

	recommend book⇒Plug Your Book! Online Book Marketing for Authors, Book Publicity through Social Networking
	by	Steve Weber	978-0-9772406-1-6	paperback
	publisher	Weber Books	B001NPD2AQ	kindle
	published	2007-02-25
How to plug/market your eBook without spending a lot of money.
abe books anz abe books.co.uk amazon.cn amazon.co.uk abe books.de abe books.ca amazon.de amazon.ca amazon.es Chapters Indigo iberlibro.com abe books.com abe books.fr amazon.com amazon.fr Barnes & Noble abe books.it Google play amazon.it O’Reilly Safari junglee.com Powells Kobo Sony eBooks other stores
Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock. Try looking for it with a bookfinder.