Report: Not one, but several Kindle successors in the works!

[daffy4u]

Originally Posted by RickyMaveety

Daffy,

It turns out that you can purchase as many Kindles as you want ... HOWEVER, you can only have six Kindles registered to any one account.

So, if you owned twelve Kindles, you would have to have two accounts at Amazon and you would have to authorize and deauthorize the Kindles between the two accounts in order to read the various books that were purchased on each account.

That contradicts what the other Amazon rep said (one of the reasons I required it in writing). My original inquiry covered the scenario you just laid out.

If you're writing them anyway, ask the question again and let them know that contradictory answers are being given. I'm going to go with what I have in writing (not that I think you aren't being truthful).

[RickyMaveety]

And, never mind .... I just got off the phone with Amazon Kindle support (again), and the gentleman there told me that I "should" be having problems doing what I had been doing because, if you own more than one Kindle, what you "should" have to do is create a separate backup folder for each Kindle and download all of your books, for each Kindle you own, into its own backup folder.

Although, he also told me that in the event a previously purchased book was pulled off the digital shelves and out of a user's Media Library, Amazon would refund the purchase price of the book on request by the user. I suppose that's only fair .... but as I told him, once I purchase a book, I'm likely to read it more than once (assuming I like the book) and I wouldn't so much want my money back as I would want the book I purchased.

So .... since I now have three Kindles, I will be creating three backup folders for all of my Amazon purchases and doing three sets of downloads to the computer and etc., etc. ....

[RickyMaveety]

Originally Posted by daffy4u

That contradicts what the other Amazon rep said (one of the reasons I required it in writing). My original inquiry covered the scenario you just laid out.

If you're writing them anyway, ask the question again and let them know that contradictory answers are being given. I'm going to go with what I have in writing (not that I think you aren't being truthful).

Sorry .... I called rather than writing. But, I will let them know that people are getting contradictory answers. Although, I do think that the six Kindles max registered to one account makes sense ... as far as management of purchases in any event.

[RickyMaveety]

Ahem .... ok, so the first guy I talked to was wrong ... but in a practical sense he was right. Let me explain.

I talked to the supervisor. He said that you could register an unlimited number of Kindles to a single account. So, Daffy, what you got in writing was correct.

However .... and this is why I say that in a purely practical sense the other guy was correct too .... say you have 12 Kindles. You purchase Moby Dick from Amazon. It has six licenses and you download it to 6 Kindles. There is no way to remove those licenses from those Kindles .... so there is no way to read Moby Dick on the other Kindles except to purchase another copy of Moby Dick. If you deauthorize one of the Kindles, then it won't have access to any of the purchases on that account .... although you would be able to then put the additional deauthorized license on one of the other Kindles. So, really, the only practical way to share books in that case would be to physically swap Kindles around.

However .... and this is why I think the other answer, while technically wrong was a more elegant solution. If you limit the number of Kindles on any one account to six .... say you have a "Robin Hood" account and a "Moby Dick" account. You purchase one set of books for one set of Kindles and another set of books for the other set of Kindles, then you just authorize and deauthorize the sets between accounts in order to share the various books.

Although, no more than six Kindles could be reading (or storing) any one book on any one account at the same time.

Whew.

He did mention that some books have less than six licenses. Which prompted me to ask him if that information was given to the purchaser prior to purchase. He said that at present it wasn't. I told him to tell the powers that be that it should be made available to the user ... and very clearly, and prior to purchase, because that would factor into the purchaser's actual cost of the book ... and that they would eventually get some really loud, angry and valid complaints about that information not being made available up front.

I also told him that these issues were getting a LOT of discussion on the Mobileread Forum, and that it was extremely important that people from this site be given all of the information, also very clearly, so that we didn't accidentally mislead other people who come to this forum (1) trying to decide what to buy or (2) troubleshooting problems.

He agreed with me ... because if the members of the Kindle Community don't have the right answers, then we end up doing a disservice to the rest of the community.

Although, since the backups are keyed to the serial number of each Kindle .... if the book went off the shelves, as in no longer available, you would not, I repeat NOT be able to play the authorize/deauthorize game to get that book on one of the Kindles it was not originally authorized for.

OK .... now my head hurts.

[daffy4u]

My head hurts too! I think they probably haven't had to cross that bridge yet and will have few reasons to (for a while any way).

I think they should create a special license that would allow more Kindles to share a particular book. The account holder would pay an increased cost for the book in question on a graduated scale depending on how many Kindles would be involved.

I only have one Kindle, so my life is very simple.

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by RickyMaveety

So .... since I now have three Kindles, I will be creating three backup folders for all of my Amazon purchases and doing three sets of downloads to the computer and etc., etc. ....

Ricky,

Wouldn't it just be easier to strip the DRM and store that as your backup?

BOb

[RickyMaveety]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

Ricky,

Wouldn't it just be easier to strip the DRM and store that as your backup?

BOb

Yes, I'm sure it would, and I'll probably do that, although I'm not sure you can for anything in the Topaz format.

However, I agree that it would be the sensible thing to do.

[voop]

Originally Posted by nekokami

I use my iLiad in my doctoral program constantly. At the level of courses I'm taking now, most of the readings are journal articles, which I download in PDF form from JStore, etc. I make notes on the PDF files (I've never been one to write in books, but I did have a habit of writing on printed PDFs),

<SNIP>

and that could lead more publishers to try textbooks in ebook format, leading to undergraduates using a unit like this as well. Of course, there are also open-source textbooks from Wikimedia and others, but I think most universities are too tied to faculty-authored (or at least faculty-selected) textbooks for these to quite take over the market. Yet.

That's the case where I teach graduate courses: pretty much everything I hand out is self-authored, or authored jointly with other faculty. I've provided those in pdf and for free to my students for a while now. Pretty much all my colleagues do the same.

PDF is fine -- but I'd love to be able to also offer a real "ebook" format such as mobi or epub for my students.

We're in a technical field, and write all our stuff in LaTeX. If only there was a mobi or epub output from LaTeX, it'd be a piece of cake to essentially overnight ensure that our department would be "e-book-supported".

(In case anyone knows, is there a latex2ebook anywhere that works "out of the box"???)

However: for this to take off, price has to be right. We've been providing, for free, hard-copies of lecture notes since forever, and since quite a few years, also pdf's. Last year, I stopped distributing hard-copies in my classes, but only the pdfs. Essentially, our students have a "zero book budget" -- so requiring a 750 USD Illiad would likely not go down well. I'd suppose that the price has to be well below 200 USD, and some "killer feature" available, before we could assume that the students would be willing to invest...

And, before you ask, we're in the EU, not the US

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by voop

(In case anyone knows, is there a latex2ebook anywhere that works "out of the box"???)

There is tex4ht and tex2xml, which can produce HTML or XML output. That's not directly an ebook format, but converting HTML to ePUB should be easy.