RIP Kindle

[Ham]

Should your Kindle prove to be no more, pushing up the daisies or bloody snuffed it, the good news is that if you buy a replacement (and why wouldn't you?) all your previously installed reading matter will be in the Kindle archive ready to be downloaded. Guess how I found this out?

Though it is a pain in the wossname putting all your fresh downloads back into their proper collections.  I believe there is a Calibre plugin which can take care of this nonsense though I have yet to try it.

My ears pricked up there, but it looks like it isn't straightforward at all
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=244202
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=186305

I only installed it yesterday but suspected it might be horribly complicated.  I seek, apparently in vain, a Kindley equivalent of mp3tag which allows you to jibble metadata, location etc. to your heart's content.

I'm just trying it, and markedly underimpressed. Had to jailbreak, which appears to have screwed a few things around. My main interest is to have a workable collection manager that can be driven from a PC, as I share (=pay for) Mrs & Miss Ham's devices. This means I am in extreme danger of being polluted with non-macho books.

[Pingu]

I once managed to bat my iPhone 4S over the side of the Severn Bridge.


An impressive effort as your is, I believe I am still one up

That certainly beats my Cateye Astrale in the Lee Navigation effort.

And my Cateye in Furryboottoon harbour 

[Mrs Pingu]

Should your Kindle prove to be no more, pushing up the daisies or bloody snuffed it, the good news is that if you buy a replacement (and why wouldn't you?) all your previously installed reading matter will be in the Kindle archive ready to be downloaded. Guess how I found this out?

Though it is a pain in the wossname putting all your fresh downloads back into their proper collections.  I believe there is a Calibre plugin which can take care of this nonsense though I have yet to try it.

My ears pricked up there, but it looks like it isn't straightforward at all
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=244202
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=186305

I only installed it yesterday but suspected it might be horribly complicated.  I seek, apparently in vain, a Kindley equivalent of mp3tag which allows you to jibble metadata, location etc. to your heart's content.

I'm just trying it, and markedly underimpressed. Had to jailbreak, which appears to have screwed a few things around. My main interest is to have a workable collection manager that can be driven from a PC, as I share (=pay for) Mrs & Miss Ham's devices. This means I am in extreme danger of being polluted with non-macho books.

If you're buying from Amazon don't you just get the books sent straight to the desired kindle instead of faffing with calibre?

[Ham]

If you're buying from Amazon don't you just get the books sent straight to the desired kindle instead of faffing with calibre?

Sure I get the books from Kindle, but the library holds all of our books, no identifier to whom they "belong" to. Further when they are on the device, the arrangement for putting in collections is cumbersome to the extreme, made worse by the latest "upgrade" to cloud collections. Call me simple if you like, but I find it difficult to identify books by title, for example if you have a few by one author, which ones you have read, which you would recommend to others etc - book covers and colours help. Add to that the multi user dimension and you have the source of major annoyance.

[pcolbeck]

Patient responding well. Working now except the buttons stick. Prognosis good.

[Vince]

Can I ask what it was that was so engaging you couldn't stop reading it to brush your teeth?

[Mr Larrington]

What Ham said.  Especially if you have content by an author who has had the temerity to write more than one series for e.g. Peter May, Ian Rankin, Graham Hurley, Val McDermid ect. ect.

Bah!

[pcolbeck]

Can I ask what it was that was so engaging you couldn't stop reading it to brush your teeth?

The Turing Exception (Singularity Book 4) - William Hertling

It's the last in a series about the Singularity. Good fun with some inside jokes if you work in the computer industry, though he does get some stuff wrong such as a Cat10 fibre optic cable, yes its a few years in the future but CatX is a copper cable standard whereas fibre optic cables use OMX.
Good page turners though with an interesting idea about how AIs would govern themselves.

Hertling was a co-founder and Director of Engineering at Tripwire, and a web strategist and software developer at Hewlett-Packard. Tripwire are a well respected security company that developed a lot of the ideas used in modern intrusion detection systems for networks.

[Biggsy]

I am torn between wanting my old friend to recover and the desire to fondle a new Kindle Voyage. Should I be feeling guilty ?

The Voyage is nice indeed.  Got one for my Mum's birthday yesterday.  Massively better than her original Kindle (well, a lot less mass, actually, but with the same screen size).

[pcolbeck]

The patient has made a full recovery

[Vince]

 

[fhills]

Happy for you.

Impressed, very.

Would that the £400 plus digital camera i wrecked on a very wet ride had been as tough.

[PloddinPedro]

It's probably telling Granny how to suck eggs, but when I ventured into the world of e-books I chose the old non-backlit Kindle Keyboard rather than the newer blingy versions. I wanted the sleep-inducing quality of black print on pale paper effect instead of the bright (even when turned down) backlight (is it the uv bit that apparently disrupts the reader's sleep tendency?) This is because I wanted the thing to send me to sleep more than I wanted to actually read the books!

[Biggsy]

The back light (actually a front light) with the Kindle Voyage is right off when at its lowest setting.  Isn't the same true with the Paperwhite?  The LCD when unlit is a slightly lighter shade of grey than early Kindles', though not as white as I was expecting.  It's interesting how helpful the light is even in daylight, while being amazingly power-efficient as well.

[Ham]

The back light (actually a front light) with the Kindle Voyage is right off when at its lowest setting.  Isn't the same true with the Paperwhite?  The LCD when unlit is a slightly lighter shade of grey than early Kindles', though not as white as I was expecting.  It's interesting how helpful the light is even in daylight, while being amazingly power-efficient as well.

Yes, the Paperwhite does turn off

[contango]

I once managed to bat my iPhone 4S over the side of the Severn Bridge.


An impressive effort as your is, I believe I am still one up

A guy I knew a few years back managed to drop his Garmin Oregon off the side of a boat into Poole Harbour. He knew roughly where but needed another GPS to navigate to the coordinates to look for it. It was several days later he managed to source a GPS and navigate back to the general area and retrieve his Oregon. The Oregon still worked just fine.

[Morat]

I accept that this might get me a stoning from some Kindle Zealots, but I find the Kindle App to be excellent when teamed with a suitable phone. The advantage being that some phones are waterproof (Sony Z series, for example). Sadly I lost my most excellent Z1 compact which was great for a read in the bath although the Note3 was always the better reading screen due to OLED black being actually black.

[Vince]

I use the Kindle app on my phone (Galaxy S3) and the Reader app on the PC, but still prefer the original Kindle.

[pcolbeck]

And now it really is dead. Dropped it five feet onto a Yorkshire stone flagged patio (off the steps form our house). Screen has broken diagonally though the galls on the front looks OK. It permanently has the screen-saver picture on one half. Oops. Oh well the battery has never been right since it got dunked and some of the buttons were iffy. Farewell loyal travelling companion.
I'm going to get a Paperwhite as I cant bring myself to spring the extra for a Voyage.

[pcolbeck]

Just to say if you are worried about the lack of physical page turn buttons on the Paperwhite don't be. I really wanted the Voyage because of the buttons but couldn't justify the cost. Within five minutes I had got the hang of one handed page turning on the Paperwhite.
Also the official Amazon case for the Paperwhite is excellent much better than teh one on my ancient Kindle. It has a rubber bumper right round the Kindle to protect it and the whole Kindle snaps into it rather than it being attached via hooks on the spine of the case.

[Piemaster]

Thats it then. My kindle keyboard is dead after 5 over years of service. Was working when standing in the looong immigration queue at the airport, but not at the hotel. The screen has a patchwork effect, some of the screensaver not changing at all - looks like a couple of fine cracks but they must be in the e-ink as the screen surface is fine.

So..is the voyage worth it? I've always like the buttons for page turning and a backlight has appealed since it was introduced, rather than the clip-on thing I use so SWMBO is not disturbed from her slumbers.
I  won't be bothering with 3G this time - was hardly ever used anyway.

[Biggsy]

It's worth it.

The Voyage 2 will be out very soon, so perhaps Voyage 1's price will drop soon, if you want to save a few quid.

[Piemaster]

It's worth it.

The Voyage 2 will be out very soon, so perhaps Voyage 1's price will drop soon, if you want to save a few quid.

Thanks for the info. Think I'll hang on a bit then, I've got some of those paper/ink things to read in the meantime.

[andrew_s]

My gen 1 Paperwhite expired of a cracked screen a couple of weeks ago, so I have replaced it with the current generation 3 version with the higher resolution screen. The screen is noticeable sharper, but it's otherwise much the same.

As a result of this, I have discovered that...

Buying from Amazon results in getting a Kindle that's already registered to your Amazon account. I bought a book for delivery to it whilst it was still in transit, and the book downloaded as soon as I'd connected to my WiFi.  (SPQR, since you ask)

If you select a book from the "Cloud" section of the Kindle's home page (i.e. previous purchases), it downloads fine, but what you get isn't necessarily the same as what you had before. Some are in Kindle's new format (see New Kindle Format topic), and some have had the title changed so Calibre doesn't recognise they are the same book as is already in its library. They can be matched up manually, but it's a bit of a pain if there are many of them that don't match.
Looking on "Manage your Content and Devices" on the Amazon home page, I see a number of other books that are showing as "Update available", which I can select to update the books I have on the Kindle (if the old Kindle which they are on was still working).