Reading Free Books on the Kindle

in Amazon Kindle, e-books, Literature | August 17th, 2009

Even though we some­times give Ama­zon’s Kin­dle a hard time, the device is undoubt­ed­ly handy for read­ing e‑books. The Kin­dle lets you seam­less­ly down­load books straight from Ama­zon in a mat­ter of sec­onds. And, even bet­ter, you can load the Kin­dle with thou­sands of free e‑books from sources such as Project Guten­berg. (Few peo­ple know this.) This guide will show you how to down­load a free book from Project Guten­berg, and then read it on your Kin­dle. You can also find many free ebooks for the Kin­dle in our Free eBook col­lec­tion.

Step 1:

Go to http://www.gutenberg.org and search for a book you would like to read.

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Step 2:

Once you’ve found a book that you want to down­load, down­load it in MOBI for­mat if pos­si­ble. If no MOBI for­mat exists, then using plain text works as well.
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Step 3:
After your down­load is com­plete, plug in your Kin­dle to your com­put­er’s USB port. The Kin­dle will show up as a USB Dri­ve.
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Step 4:
Go to the Doc­u­ments direc­to­ry on your Kin­dle.
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Step 5:

Copy the e‑book file to the Doc­u­ments fold­er. You can option­al­ly rename the file to some­thing more mean­ing­ful if you’d like.
Step 6:

The sil­ver cur­sor on your Kin­dle will begin to spin. When it stops, the Kin­dle is fin­ished sync­ing. Now you can eject and unplug your Kin­dle and enjoy your free ebook!
Fred Hsu designed the handy Open Cul­ture app. Give it a spin. It’s free and it’s good for you.

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Top Ten Reasons Why the Kindle Won’t Be an iPod for Books

in Amazon Kindle, Books, e-books, Most Popular | August 11th, 2009

A lit­tle side­bar to our pre­vi­ous post that won­ders whether Ama­zon’s Kin­dle can rev­o­lu­tion­ize the book indus­try…

1) When you buy an iPod, you can trans­fer all of your cur­rent music onto it. With Kin­dle you have to start buy­ing all new books.

2) The paper-form book (aka “dead tree ver­sion”) is still the best tech­nol­o­gy for read­ing: ful­ly portable, a nice thing to own and put on shelves, great for shar­ing, good in bed, at beach, etc. If you lose it or get it wet, no big deal—easily replace­able.

3) Music has con­stant­ly found new for­mats that improve on the old. Same for the iPod. It’s unques­tion­ably bet­ter than that big­ger, skip­ping CD play­er. Books haven’t been able to improve on the form for cen­turies.

4) Hold­ing 100 albums in your hand is great. Hold­ing 100 books? Not as much.

5) How often do you real­ly go away for so long that you need 10+ books? (Book­stores are every­where.)

6) Kin­dle is too expen­sive (see #1) and too big.

7) Books take much longer to con­sume, don’t work well in indi­vid­ual (shuf­fled) parts, and we often only read them once.

8.) Now that you can car­ry music on your phone, and the iPhone has bun­dled music, email, inter­net, and tele­phone in one small size, is any­one real­ly will­ing to buy a big­ger iPhone or Kin­dle just to read books on it?

9) Most of us spend more time lis­ten­ing to music than read­ing. We just do; it’s eas­i­er to do while we’re involved with oth­er things.

10) Books: they’re bet­ter!

Seth Har­wood pod­casts his ideas on the pub­lish­ing indus­try and his fic­tion for free at sethharwood.com. He is cur­rent­ly fig­ur­ing out how pub­lish­ers should best approach the new, emerg­ing e‑book mar­ket. Hear his ideas in his lat­est Hot Tub Cast™ and read them here soon. His first nov­el is JACK WAKES UP, in stores now.

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Will Amazon (or Apple) Cut Publishers Out of the Loop?

in Amazon Kindle, Apple, Books, e-books | August 11th, 2009

If you’re won­der­ing where the book/publishing mar­ket is head­ing, then you’ll want to give this insight­ful arti­cle a read.  Fast for­ward five years, here’s what you’ll like­ly find: Ama­zon, using the Kin­dle and on-demand pub­lish­ing, starts work­ing direct­ly with authors and cut­ting tra­di­tion­al pub­lish­ers out of the loop. It will dom­i­nate the book/e‑book mar­ket, much as Apple does the music mar­ket. The only thing stand­ing in Jeff Bezos’ way? Steve Jobs. Why? Because Apple can pro­duce an e‑book read­er that actu­al­ly appeals to a mass mar­ket, and Ama­zon can’t. And guess what? Apple is rumored to have a new device com­ing out this year. More on that here. Thanks to Seth Har­wood for send­ing this along.

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The New Yorker Knocks The Kindle

in Amazon Kindle, e-books, iPhone | July 30th, 2009

It’s not often that The New York­er does the gad­get review. But here we have one — Nichol­son Bak­er break­ing down the Kin­dle. The upshot? He’s not a big fan. Why? Let me give you some of the mon­ey quotes. And also note the iPhone/iPod Touch rec­om­men­da­tions at the end (where I added some use­ful links):

“The prob­lem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had real­ly been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The prob­lem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a green­ish, sick­ly gray. A post­mortem gray. The resiz­able type­face, Mono­type Cae­cil­ia, appeared as a dark­er gray. Dark gray on paler green­ish gray was the palette of the Ama­zon Kin­dle [DC note: This is why I returned my Kin­dle].”

“Despite its smoother design, the Kin­dle 2 is, some say, hard­er to read than the Kin­dle 1. “I imme­di­ate­ly noticed that the con­trast was worse on the K2 than on my K1,” a review­er named T. Ford wrote. One Kindler, Eliz­a­beth Glass, began an online peti­tion, ask­ing Ama­zon to fix the con­trast. “Like read­ing a wet news­pa­per,” accord­ing to peti­tion-sign­er Louise Pot­ter.”

“Ama­zon, with its list­ma­nia lists and its some­times inspired rec­om­men­da­tions and its innu­mer­able fas­ci­nat­ing reviews, is very good at sell­ing things. It isn’t so good, to date any­way, at mak­ing things. But, for­tu­nate­ly, if you want to read elec­tron­ic books there’s anoth­er way to go. Here’s what you do. Buy an iPod Touch (it costs sev­en­ty dol­lars less than the Kin­dle 2, even after the Kindle’s price was recent­ly cut), or buy an iPhone, and load the free “Kin­dle for iPod” appli­ca­tion onto it.”

“There are oth­er ways to read books on the iPod, too. My favorite is the Euca­lyp­tus appli­ca­tion, by a Scot­tish soft­ware devel­op­er named James Mont­gomerie: for $9.99, you get more than twen­ty thou­sand pub­lic-domain books whose pages turn with a volup­tuous grace. There’s also the Ice­berg Read­er, by Scroll­Mo­tion, with fixed page num­bers, and a very pop­u­lar app called Stan­za. In Stan­za, you can choose the col­ors of the words and of the page, and you can adjust the bright­ness with a ver­ti­cal thumb swipe as you read… Forty mil­lion iPod Touch­es and iPhones are in cir­cu­la­tion, and most peo­ple aren’t read­ing books on them. But some are. The nice thing about this machine is (a) it’s beau­ti­ful, and (b) it’s not imi­tat­ing any­thing. It’s not try­ing to be ink on paper. It serves a night-read­ing need, which the light­less Kin­dle doesn’t.”

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Free e‑Book of Chris Anderson’s “Free”

in e-books, Economics | July 8th, 2009

Chris Ander­son, the Wired Mag­a­zine Edi­tor who is best known for The Long Tail, has pub­lished his lat­est book, Free: The Future of a Rad­i­cal Price. You can buy it on Ama­zon, or read a free ver­sion on Scribd. As you may know, this book has already gen­er­at­ed some con­tro­ver­sy. To begin with, Ander­son has had to answer charges that he pla­gia­rized mate­r­i­al from Wikipedia. And then Mal­colm Glad­well (the author of Out­liers, The Tip­ping Point and Blink) gives Free a rough review in The New York­er.

PS You can now down­load an audio ver­sion as a free zip file here.

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6 Lessons One Campus Learned About E‑Textbooks

in Amazon Kindle, e-books, Education | June 11th, 2009

A quick heads up: Jeff Young has an infor­ma­tive piece in The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion on what hap­pened when one uni­ver­si­ty deliv­ered all text­books to stu­dents elec­tron­i­cal­ly. It’s def­i­nite­ly worth a read. Mean­while, on a relat­ed note, Walt Moss­berg, the Wall Street Jour­nal’s tech guru, does­n’t like the new Kin­dle DX very much. Ama­zon designed the super­sized e‑book read­er (see it here) to bring porta­bil­i­ty to text­books, news­pa­pers and oth­er peri­od­i­cals. If you get one, let us know your thoughts, whether pro or con.

via Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Press on Twit­ter (Find us on Twit­ter here)

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Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature

in Books, e-books | June 9th, 2009

Ear­li­er today, Seth Har­wood wrote about a new chal­lenge for writ­ers — mak­ing sure books get dis­trib­uted through as many dig­i­tal read­ing plat­forms as pos­si­ble. His think­ing dove­tails nice­ly with Wired’s list of the “Eigh­teen Chal­lenges in Con­tem­po­rary Lit­er­a­ture.” Here are some of the Wired items that mesh or flirt with what Har­wood is talk­ing about…

2. Ver­nac­u­lar means of every­day com­mu­ni­ca­tion — cell­phones, social net­works, stream­ing video — are mov­ing into areas where print­ed text can­not fol­low.

4. Means of book pro­mo­tion, dis­tri­b­u­tion and retail desta­bi­lized.

5. Ink-on-paper man­u­fac­tur­ing is an out­mod­ed, tox­ic indus­try with steeply ris­ing costs.

8. Long tail balka­nizes audi­ences, dis­rupts means of canon-build­ing and frag­ments lit­er­ary rep­u­ta­tion.

11. Bar­ri­ers to pub­li­ca­tion entry have crashed, enabling huge tor­rent of sub­lit­er­ary and/or non­lit­er­ary tex­tu­al expres­sion.

Get the full list here. Thanks to Ed Finn for giv­ing us a heads up on this list.

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Writing in the Digital Age: It’s All About the Platform

in Audio Books, Books, e-books | June 8th, 2009

A cou­ple of weeks ago, crime writer Seth Har­wood wrote a very pop­u­lar piece here — How I Sold My Book by Giv­ing It Away. Now he’s back and telling us about the new chal­lenge of writ­ing in the dig­i­tal age. Take it away Seth (and check out his new book JACK WAKES UP )…

The num­ber of ebook read­ers and read­ing devices is grow­ing rather than shrink­ing these days. We’re enter­ing a world where indi­vid­ual read­ers will decide not only what books they want to read, but how they want to read them. And here there’s some­thing to think about for authors: As read­ers choose the read­ing plat­form they like best, they’ll see a cer­tain set of books in that space. Dif­fer­ent books show up at Wal-Mart than at your local inde­pen­dent book­seller. On the Kin­dle there are dif­fer­ent books—with dif­fer­ent prices—than on the iTunes App store. And even with­in the iTunes store, you’ll find dif­fer­ent books in the Audio­books sec­tion (owned by Audible.com), the Podcasts»Arts»Literature sec­tion (where many of the titles are free), and in the App store.

As an author, I want to be wher­ev­er a read­er can look. On every plat­form and every new plat­form, I want my book to be avail­able. My nov­el JACK WAKES UP start­ed out as a pod­cast (via iTunes, RSS Feed, & MP3). Peo­ple liked it. It got to print on demand, and Ama­zon sold it in print and Kin­dle for­mats. Guess what? It did pret­ty well. Now, it’s out from Three Rivers Press, a divi­sion of Ran­dom House, and read­ers can find it at all the online out­lets, as well as brick and mor­tar book­stores nationwide—both big box and indy. But that’s still miss­ing part of the mar­ket: soon more and more peo­ple will be buy­ing their books on their iPhones as Apps—both audio and text—or on Kin­dle, Scribd, eRead­er and who knows where else. All I can do is work toward mak­ing JACK WAKES UP avail­able in as many places and ways as pos­si­ble.

At the Pub­lish­ing 3.0 pan­el ses­sion dur­ing April’s LA Times Fes­ti­val of Books, the experts spoke about the prob­lem of pub­lish­ing in the 20th cen­tu­ry being demand—how do you gen­er­ate the inter­est in your book and get peo­ple to buy it—and that the new prob­lem in the 21st cen­tu­ry is sup­ply. With so many books pub­lished, many will fail. There’s lit­er­al­ly just too much, a glut of books that no one has a good idea how to fix.

The oth­er sup­ply-side issue is plat­form. As the pub­lish­ing game steams quick­ly toward dif­fer­ent plat­forms, vir­tu­al­ly unlim­it­ed choic­es for read­ers, dif­fer­ent pric­ing mod­els, read­ing expe­ri­ences, and pref­er­ences, my duty as an author now involves mak­ing sure my work is offered on as many plat­forms as pos­si­ble to ensure my book is an option for the great­est num­ber of read­ers.

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