New forum member -- Kindle 3 user

[marst]

Taking the moderators' advice to stop in here and say hello: I'm a relatively new -- since Christmas 2010 -- Kindle 3 user. As a former typesetter (and book paginator via microcomputer software, after the world of photo-typesetting ended with a whimper), all the while I was thinking about this purchase I wondered if I'd end up burning with shame for "betraying my people." :-) Of course, there aren't any more phototypesetting-machine operators (that I know of). Would I be betraying "my people" who are die-hard book lovers? I'm certainly one of those...

Nope -- no betrayal in sight. I can enjoy using this device and still love books, will wonders never cease. :-)

Actually, there are a lot of trade books about which I think it's reasonable to say: "So what's to love, anyway?" The number of typographical errors and badly composed pages -- argh, it's all pretty appalling. While people don't buy e-readers to be wowed by award-winning typographic design -- not the purpose of these devices! -- there doesn't seem to be much "QA" in trade books these days, either -- let alone award-winning typography.

I once bought a re-composed copy of Jan Tschischold's The Form of the Book containing some ugly page-composition problems. Egad! Even that one! Of all the books for a compositor to have fouled up! Is anyone minding the typographic store?

Well, so it goes. On to the forum: what is the "tips and trick" thread for the Kindle? I discovered an interesting trick on my own but I'm reluctant to post about it if it's already been discussed a gazillion times. (Not sure how I'd search for it.)

[Valmore Daniels]

welcome to MR

[GeoffC]

Welcome to Mobileread ….

Do pop into the Kindle Forum for all the tips and tricks.

[marst]

Thanks for the welcomes. A forum-etiquette question, if I may. Someone posted a question in the Kindle forum. And got a reply saying that such questions "should be posted in the Kindle support forum (down the screen a ways)."

Ok... maybe I'm just blind as a bat, but I looked "down the screen a ways" and haven't yet seen a sub-forum title suggesting that it's specifically for Kindle support (as opposed to other Kindle-related discussions). What am I missing?

[neilmarr]

Good to have your company, Marst. After a lifetime in print publishing and as a dedicated paper book reader, I likewise soon swallowed any remorse or sense of 'treason' I may have felt at embracing ebooks. Good on ya. Sorry I can't help with your question above (I'm a Sony man), but I'm sure you'll get advice from one of our many Kindleers soon. Happy Kindling and very best wishes. Neil

[marst]

Originally Posted by neilmarr

Good to have your company, Marst. After a lifetime in print publishing and as a dedicated paper book reader, I likewise soon swallowed any remorse or sense of 'treason' I may have felt at embracing ebooks. Good on ya. Sorry I can't help with your question above (I'm a Sony man), but I'm sure you'll get advice from one of our many Kindleers soon. Happy Kindling and very best wishes. Neil

Thanks.

I itch to help publishers fix their problems with EM dashes in these e-books! Argh!

I'm certainly not abandoning books in print entirely. For one thing, there are a lot of them that haven't made it to e-book format or that might be mighty overpriced for that format. (What? Not one e-book version of work by Solzhenitsyn -- at least for the K3? Grumble -- but I'm a firm believer in copyrights and won't download "bootleg" copies of anything.)

I suppose it's possible that books of remarkable photographs, such as those by Steve McCurry, might look ok on the screen of, say, an iPad. But egad, at what cost? Better to benefit from the fruits of someone's meticulous book-preparation labors in that case! And for all I know, even the priciest e-reader technology still can't yet accurately represent the carefully prepared typography of a well designed book.

Perhaps a moderator will ask me to move this next part of the post to some other forum within this site, but I'm still not sure which one. So: here's the interesting trick I ran across on the K3, entirely by accident. There's no "copy/paste" functionality that I know of, but what if you want to search for a word without having to retype it?

Press the "five-way" and move the cursor to highlight the word -- but don't complete the highlighting by pressing the "five-way" again. That is: the word is still white-on-black and not yet underlined. Press the space bar. For some reason, this causes the highlighted word -- and not a space -- to appear within the search box. Now you can use the usual-and-accustomed controls to highlight "Find" and off you go. Cuts down on the button-pushing. Doesn't seem to work with phrases -- only with individual words -- but I'm grateful to have the button-pushing reduced a bit.

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by marst

Thanks for the welcomes. A forum-etiquette question, if I may. Someone posted a question in the Kindle forum. And got a reply saying that such questions "should be posted in the Kindle support forum (down the screen a ways)."

Ok... maybe I'm just blind as a bat, but I looked "down the screen a ways" and haven't yet seen a sub-forum title suggesting that it's specifically for Kindle support (as opposed to other Kindle-related discussions). What am I missing?