Kindle Selling Sample Chapters

News from Kindleville - Stephen Windwalker is selling an excerpt of his forthcoming book: How to Use the Amazon Kindle for Email and Other Cool Tricks.  The exerpt is available as a Kindle download - quelle surprise!

Kindle's Hidden Features Discovered

I'm not recommending that anyone try to reverse engineer their recently acquired Kindles, but it was just a matter of time before someone started messing around with this new device. The latest easter eggs - a basic photo viewer, a minesweeper game, and a rudimentary GPS feature. See Crave: the gadget blog

For the New Year I Want an eeeKindaPod

After trying out all the new gadgets at home and at the Library, I decided that I want one device that does it all and I'm calling it an "eeeKindaPod". Now I just need a New Year's miracle to get Amazon.com, Asus, and Apple to work together to create it.

My device would not only download ebooks from Amazon in less than three seconds, but it would also allow me to browse Amazon's entire website for other stuff as well. While I'm at it, I'd like to be able to check my e-mail and view any other website that strikes my fancy with Amazon's free wireless Whispernet.

I'd also like to be able to access web based applications like Google Docs, while I'm listening to music or audio books that I've downloaded from iTunes or the Library.

I really don't think these are unrealistic expectations. The Kindle, eeePC, and the new iPod Touch are all pretty remarkable devices. Each have unique features:

• Amazon.com's The Kindle - uses Sprint's EVDO broadband network for mobile phones
  
• Asus' - direct links to Google Docs and wikipedia; can also be installed with either Linux or Windows OS
  
• iPod Touch - has Safari built in and enough memory to store a ton of music, TV shows and audiobooks

Come on guys - show me the magic!

Not your father's ebook

Bill Ray in The Register suggests that Amazon's use of a 3G telephony network rather than WiFi is a whole new experience for users. Books and magazines have the potential of becoming interactive. He goes on to say, "Authors could update their books while you're reading them; responding to reader feedback, litigation, or even whim. A book could be updated daily, or chapters added when the author has time - readers might subscribe to a book rather than buying it outright."

YouTube review of Amazon.com's Kindle

Benjamin Higginbotham of Technology Evangelist has a good five minute critique of competitive ebook readers on YouTube. It's really worth viewing if all you've seen are the promotional videos on Amazon.com. What's awesome - what's not so awesome?

Inform or Discuss

At 1:00 am. this morning I came up with the idea of creating a blog for our technology staff to inform our public about new technologies in libraries and/or to answer any tech questions within our scope of knowledge or collective experiences. Well, in my post-Thanksgiving stupor - it sounded like a good idea, so here goes...

For the past several weeks I've been hearing about Amazon.com' s new wireless Reading Device, the Kindle, and how it will or will not revive the struggling ebook world. I guess I'm going to have to wait a while to see it for myself - Amazon's Kindle has completely sold out at $399.00. Darn those early adopters.

What makes this device different from the old Rocket book and other ebook readers? The display is supposed to look and read like real paper; it's wireless - so connecting to a PC is not necessary; and it's supposed to have a long battery life. Amazon promises that there are 80,000+ titles available and that it has 100 current bestsellers and more new releases available for $9.99 a title.

Top newspapers (US & international), magazines, and blogs are also available by auto-delivery throughout the day. Is this too good to believe? I've placed a back order and will let you all know after our staff has had time to evaluate it.