Quote:
Originally Posted by cHex
...Last night we, along with most other San Diegans, suffered a long-lasting power outage. I was easily able to find news about the outage via my Kindle's web browser (Internet was out at work and home...routers need electricity). I found the light built into my Kindle's cover worked great.
Some negative observations:
- I find navigating with buttons kludgy, making a touchscreen seem more attractive. But I also find I accidentally hit the page turn buttons more often than I thought I would, and wonder how often I'd be accidentally hitting hot spots on a touch screen. Hmm.
- With all the talk about how e-ink screens don't suffer from glare like backlit screens do, I thought there would be less glare.
- I'm frustrated at how complicated it is to create content for the Kindle, and how complicated it is to convert documents. I'm doing all kinds of google searching, downloading, trying to find instructions for using tools, etc. Please share info on your favorite HTML wysiwyg+code view editors!
|
I was living in North Alabama this spring when we lost power throughout the area for almost a week. I didn't have a Kindle then and no way to access the internet for news and email. I felt very isolated. That was a big reason why I decided to get the Kindle with 3G. It would have made a huge difference to have internet access during that ordeal, especially with a device that has such a long battery life. (Plus they sell chargers that work by solar or hand crank.)
When I got it, I was extremely frustrated by the page turn buttons and it took quite a while for me to stop accidentally turning the pages. Now I really like them and where they are located because I read in bed on my side with the Kindle turned to landscape view and hold it at the top or bottom while one edge is balanced on the bed.
It took me the whole 30 days to decide to keep it because I thought I might return it and wait for a touch model. I was frustrated by the lack of new about that too. Ultimately though, I don't think the touch screen will work well for me due to the way I hold it, lying on one side or the other, if it turns out that one side of the screen has to be tapped for forward and the other side for backward. I think that would make it very awkward to turn the page with one hand when I'm lying on my side.
Also wanted to mention that the Kindle 3G with Special Offers has saved me a huge amount of money already... so if you're on the fence about waiting for the next model, it may be worth while to get one of these now, enjoy reading with it and save enough money to justify buying the K4 later if you're not satisfied with the K3.
CHex, I also was very surprised at the amount of glare off the Kindle. Shocked even. But I eventually learned to set my light a certain way to minimize that. Now I really love reading with it.
I recently downloaded Sigil to edit my ebooks and was surprised how easy it was to use. I procrastinated about using that program after reading something that made it sound too complicated... but it really wasn't, even though most of the technical stuff about ebooks discussed on this site goes over my head.
You have to convert your book to Epub before using Sigil to edit it. I used it to add a table of contents to a book I made. This book started as a RTF first, and I had to open it in Open Office Writer and use that to save it as a HTML in order to keep all of the pictures in the finished book. Then I dragged it into Calibre and converted it to an Epub, which I was able to open in Sigil and edit. I am no expert at this process - not by a long shot - but even though it was a little frustrating to have to go through all these steps, it was pretty straightforward.
I used this tutorial which helped a lot:
http://code.google.com/p/sigil/wiki/BasicTutorial
The beginning of this tutorial gives instructions to convert to EPUB, which should work fine if your book only has text. (Like I said, mine had photos so I had to take extra steps and use OpenOffice.)
There is a whole forum here on mobileread dedicated to Sigil if you need help.