Quote:
Originally Posted by karunaji
I bought Kindle WiFi because it was cheap and had the best Perl e-ink screen. After several months of use I find it quite inconvenient to deal with conversion of other file formats to mobi format every day.
Initially I thought that it will not be such a big issue because it is a WiFi device but I buy only 1/3 of my books from Amazon (1/3 are epubs both DRM and non-DRM, and 1/3 are my personal documents).
Greatest inconveniences with e-mailing via Amazon servers are as follows:
1) e-mail conversion sometimes fails for unknown reasons
2) there is an annoying delay of more than 1-2 minutes (it depends on file size)
3) conversion is not perfect, sometimes you get margins that are close to 50% of the screen size, sometimes encoding is garbled, or all the text becomes italic or bold
4) You need to be online for this function to work (3G is not an answer as personal document transfer costs are too high for me)
Using calibre conversion has the same faults – it also takes time, you need a special WinSCP software to transfer the files directly to Kindle, usually you see the problem only after transfer etc. And I won't even mention PDF reading issues.
When using USB cable for transfer, it is also annoying that after disconnecting from the computer it takes some time to rebuild the database.
Before Kindle I used Palm device for reading mobipocket books and although I also used to transfer books and new documents mostly via USB cable, it seemed to work quicker and more reliably in conjunction with Mobipocket PC. Apart from superb screen, Kindle software is still quite immature.
In short: Kindle works very well with Amazon books but it is a hassle to use with outside sources. My next device will not be Kindle anymore.
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I can only say that my US based experience is completely opposite of yours. I use wifi on my K3 for receiving books that I email from within calibre. I've only had one email failure, and that was because the ebook was too large (44.9 MB) to email, so I had to sideload that one. I just send them via calibre, minimize the program while it does its thing, and when I get around to it, I'll enable wireless on my K3 and get all the books I've sent. I need to spend some time with the calibre plug-in to put some order to my collections.
My experience getting books from sources other than Amazon has been totally painless. Here is a list of my sources for ebooks thus far:
I don't list Amazon as I just have my Amazon books sent directly to my K3. I need to make a folder for my Amazon books, d/l them and strip DRM from them for safekeeping.
There are sources I haven't even tapped yet, and I currently have enough ebooks stashed on my K3 to last me a loooong time.
Either I'm not picky about margins or I've not experienced any problems yet. I'm happy with all my conversions thus far.