EduKindle

The PDF conversion is better than advertised in my experience. I converted a 400+ page PDF and it reads beautifully on the Kindle. The limitations are that 1) the converted document does not offer a Table of Contents that the Kindle recognizes and that 2) the navigation aids in the original document, like section indicators, are missing. The converted document is easy to read but difficult to move around in. I set some bookmarks as I scanned through the text to make it easier to find my place.

Half of what I lug with me on a plane or train is stuff from work that I have to read. Much of it is Word documents, some PDFs. My goal was to see how much of this paper I could convert for the Kindle.

This is as easy as it gets. You just email your document to the folks at Kindle and they will convert it and send it back to your Kindle wirelessly, all for the exorbitant fee of ten cents. That’s right, a dime. You can send a Word document and certain kinds of PDFs to yourname@kindle.com and they will shoot it back onto your Kindle in a jiffy (really, mine was there as soon as I checked for it a minute or two later), or you can send the document to yourname@free.kindle.com, and they will email the converted document right back to you at no charge. Just connect the USB and drag it into the “documents” folder on your Kindle.

So what, you ask, is the difference between Kindle software Release 1.04 and 1.08? Apparently, less that you’d think. According to the Kindle Help page, “There is no difference between these software versions.” Go figure.

There is, however, apparently a difference between these two (er, one) versions and Release 1.0. Kindle users report that battery life management improved when they upgraded from 1.0 to 1.04 (or to 1.08 for that matter).

What release is your Kindle running? Go to “home,” scroll to “settings” and click. At the very bottom of the settings screen you will see the version of the Kindle software you are running. If it is 1.0, go here to figure out how to upgrade to 1.04 (or 1.08, for that matter).

And another thing about the Kindle battery: I only charge with the wall socket adapter. I plugged the USB cord into my computer and let it charge while in sleep mode one day, and it actually ran out of power while it was supposed to be charging! Maybe this approach to charging would work if the Kindle was in the “off” position, but it was discouraging to see the battery go dead while connected to a power source under any conditions.

Oh, yeah, even plugged in to the wall, I find that my Kindle charges faster when in the “off” position. That’s recommended (by me).

The rule of thumb is that if you are not 1) using your Kindle like an iPod, 2) using an SD card with a couple thousand books on it, or 3) leaving the whispernet on all day, then anything short of three or four days on a charge is abnormal and should be reported to the authorities immediately.

From what I hear, they will replace the faulty battery for you.

The different experiences that people have with battery life on the Kindle has led to a bunch of theories:

1. that turning the Kindle off saves more battery than sleep mode
2. that “indexing” of the books on your Kindle goes on in the background and drains the battery
3. that playing music on the Kindle drains battery life more quickly than reading

What do we know? First, sleep mode and “off” mode drain precious little power. I can’t tell the difference, and I don’t have to wait for the Kindle to boot when I want to start reading, so I go with sleep mode. Second, it seems like the phantom “indexing” comes into play the more “junk” you have loaded onto your Kindle, particularly if you are using an SD card for additional storage. It makes sense that the more file management you require, the more the battery will drain. Finally, who plays music on the Kindle?

My experience, with lots of sleep mode every day and no SD card, is that I charge the Kindle twice a week. Since most of my little freeze-ups and other funny outputs seem to come with a single bar showing, I charge the minute the third bar disappears.

What you can count on: me forgetting to turn the whispernet off after downloading the Journal every morning noticeably reduces battery life.

Recently I noted that there are some blogs that format for the Kindle beautifully and that carry content worth paying for. Stanley Fish’s Think Again blog in the New York Times is a good example.

But I found that, even with this erudite and text-driven blog (as compared to Street Use, which makes its point through images), I needed a “computer assist” to access an important part of the blog–the comments.

Major bummer. If you are going to write a substantive and relevant blog post, people are going to comment on it, predictably. So, in order to experience the richness of the blog, I must fire up the ol’ PC and read the comments online.

To be honest, the pictures at Street Use look better in color on the ol’ PC as well, but that’s not the point. Blogs like Think Again should show the comments inline, so we can take advantage of the Kindle for the whole experience, not just part of it.

After canceling out of the blogs I’ve been reviewing before the “free trial” ended, I signed up for another batch.  One I find to be very interesting, Stanley Fish’s blog Think Again from the New York Times.  It looks like Fish, a professor at Florida International University in Miami, and whose book Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost I read as an undergraduate, posts once a week to this blog, which carries the subtitle “Stanley Fish and the Analysis of Reasoning.”

When I fired up the Kindle this morning, the first post that appeared was Fish discussing a question of genuine interest to educators: should teachers be permitted to wear campaign buttons while they are at work?  The New York City Board of Education, apparently, says no.  In Illinois, college professors are banned from displaying bumper stickers that signal political preferences.

As seems to be his habit, Fish deconstructs the issue point by point.  It is worth the read just to see how he juxtaposes first amendment claims against the right of an educational institution to “maintain good order and discipline” in their schools.

More to the point: the reading is even better at font size #4 in my big comfy chair rather than sitting at the computer, thanks to the Kindle.

I have been loading more periodical content onto the Kindle lately, with The Wall Street Journal, at ten bucks a month, being the best of a bunch of very good deals.  Currently I have Newsweek and U. S. News and World Report downloading wirelessly for a couple of bucks a month each, ditto Slate.  But what about blogs?  Amazon offers scores of them, and I have been evaluating them as “Kindle-worthy” for the last few weeks.

First, lots of folks disdain the idea of paying anything for content that they can access for free over the web, even if it is a buck a month.  Fair enough.  Others, who like to do their reading on the Kindle whenever possible, have come up with work-arounds using RSS aggregation services like Bloglines to scoop up the content and then access it using the basic web browser built into the Kindle.  Again, not a bad idea.

But what I like about reading a blog on the Kindle is that the offerings, for the most part, provide full text posts rather than links, and, as with all things Kindle, that content is resident on the Kindle so that I can read it on the airplane or anywhere else when I want to, whether a web connection is available or not.

Some of the blog offerings that interest me the most, though, do not necessarily display very well on the device.  The Data Mining blog, for example, uses lots of charts and graphs, which seem to be a weak spot for Kindle’s display (text too small, colors in the original image muddy when shown on the e-ink screen), and the number of links the blog provides in posts always makes me feel like I am missing something.  (I certainly don’t want to have to fire up the browser to follow them–too slow and clumsy.)

My favorite blog to date is the Street Use blog, which has very short posts accompanied by amazing pictures of “street” improvisations from around the world–wooden bicycles, military applications for the Segway, kids improvising “steerable” toy trucks in Cameroon and Gabon.  The photos seem to display better than the muddy charts and graphs.  the only problem with this blog is that it hasn’t been posted to since August.  I guess that can’t be blamed on the Kindle!