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Old 03-26-2009, 12:49 PM   #3
catsittingstill
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Posts: 643
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Join Date: Dec 2007
Device: Kindle 1.0.8, iPod Touch, Kindle Keyboard
Review of the Kindle 2 (K2) compared to the Kindle 1 (K1)--Part 3 of 4


Data Transfer:

SD card slot

No SD card slot. Bad 'Nuff said.

Kindle still shows up as a USB drive, like a thumb drive. Drag-and-drop still works fine as long as you remember to put the document in the documents folder. You can have all the subfolders you like, but they don't show in the home screen (though all the items in them do.)

Whispernet as per standard, except that it's now possible to synch content between devices linked to the same account. Turning Whispernet on and off is now a menu choice rather than a hardwired button. Actually, I kind of miss the button. USB has a different connector (micro instead of mini; a K1 USB cord won't work with K2 and vice versa).

Transferring Amazon books

When I first opened the Home screen on the Kindle 2 I had one item in the list marked "Archived books." Clicking on this opens a list of books purchased from Amazon (in my case for the Kindle 1) and not yet transferred to the K2. Clicking on one of the titles transfers it to the K2.

Transferring magazines

My Analog subscription was a different story. I have 10 issues of Analog in Kindle format, but only the last 3 were available to transfer over. I called Amazon support and reached a very nice, helpful person who tried everything she could think of to transfer the others; no dice. Oddly enough, though I expected the last 3 issues of Analog to disappear on my Kindle 1, since subscriptions are only supposed to go to one Kindle at a time, they didn't, or at least haven't so far.

Well, I was making bitter plans to learn how to strip the DRM off the other seven issues so I could put my own Analogs on my own Kindle 2, when I thought I'd try something else first. I hooked up both Kindles to the computer and just copied the Analog .azw files over from the old Kindle to the new. They worked fine. The Kindle issues of Analog don't have DRM.
Now if the Amazon customer support person had just known that, it would have saved both of us a lot of time. Furthermore, if she had known that, she could easily have kept me from finding out; all she would have had to do was say "Okay, I can't transfer the other seven from here because I don't have them available for download anymore. But if you give it a few minutes—say ten minutes to be safe, I can authorize your other Kindle to read them. Turn the EVDO on for me. In ten minutes you'll be able to copy the files across." I would never have known the difference. Oh well, an opportunity lost.
In the meantime, if you have a Kindle and want to buy Analog issue-by-issue, feel free. As of three months ago it had no DRM. (If you want a year's subscription, Fictionwise has a better deal.)

Transferring mbp files

For every e-book/document/whatever on the Kindle that you have actually opened, the Kindle has a little file with an .mpb extension that appears to contain information on where you are in the book, what spots you've bookmarked, what you've highlighted and what annotations you have made. I wanted to transfer one for On The Origin Of Species, because I was ¾ of the way through it on the Kindle 1 and Darwin, while a great man in many ways (and a pretty good writer too) is not a shortwinded kind of guy. I was a bit concerned about that, because I got my copy from Manybooks.net (I think) and thus the book (and the accompanying .mbp file) wasn't on the Kindle servers. Turns out to be no problem; I just copied the .mbp file across and it worked fine. I have not tried copying an .mpb file for an Amazon book across; just a sec… Oh, duh—if you copy an Amazon book across instead of re-downloading from the Amazon server, you get a "the selected item could not be opened" error. And presumably if you re-download from the server, you get the .mbp file as well… just a sec… Yes, you do. I suspect this is how the synch function works. However when I read a little farther in the book on the Kindle 1, and made an annotation, the .mbp file for the Amazon book can be deleted from the Kindle 2, then moved from the Kindle 1 to the Kindle 2 without any problem. The result is that the book on the Kindle 2 has the same reading location and annotations that it did on the Kindle 1. (Which also answers my simple question about annotations—are they synched when the pages are and the answer is yes.)

Synching multiple Kindles.

I happened to have an Amazon book (His Majesty's Dragon) on both Kindles, so I turned on Whispernet for both, and picked "sync and check for new items" from the menu on the Kindle where I'd read less of it (the K1). My position in the book didn't appear to change as a result. (If you're wondering how I knew this, on the home screens of the Kindles, each title has a row of dots beneath it. The length of the row gives a rough idea of the length of the book; the amount of the row that is bolded gives a rough idea of how far through the book you have gotten. The amount of the row that was bolded didn't change when I synched, so it looked like the synching hadn't worked.) However, when I clicked on the book, I got a message saying that the farthest read in the book was to location such-and-such in Hypatia (the other Kindle); did I want to open this book there? When I picked yes, the book opened to that location.

But it takes time for Amazon to realize you've changed places in a book, and you have to have Whispernet turned on, and it has to be an Amazon book. The quick-and-dirty method of synching would be to just transfer the .mbp file for the book from one Kindle to another using a computer and the USB cords. (Note that this probably won't work for an iPhone/iPod Kindle app; people apparently have much less access to their files from these.)

Transferring non-Amazon material

This you have to copy across yourself, using a computer and the USB cords in the standard way. I did make a point of downloading the MobileRead Mobipocket Download Guide and Feedbooks Kindle Download Guide and they work fine with K2.
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