A school district in Utah has recognized the “simple market forces” that make the Kindle a viable alternative to print text today. A recent article in the Salt Lake Tribune details the purchase of 147 Kindles for teachers to work with so they can familiarize themselves and uncover ways to promote literacy using the device:…
Sym is for Symbol on Kindle: Special Characters
by Will DeLamater
Not sure why I couldn’t figure this out but I finally got my answer on how to place hyphens and underscores into URLs that I was typing into the Kindle’s basic web browser. Hit the SYM key (right next to the HOME key in the bottom row and a list of symbols pops up along…
Harvard Medical School Puts 20,000 Courses on Kindle
by Will DeLamater
John D. Halamka, MD, Chief Information Officer and Dean for Technology at Harvard Medical School, reported on his blog last week that HMS has “recently implemented Kindle support for all our 20,000 educational resources at HMS.” It’s more than cool or innovative: with an annual budget of $50,000 for printing course materials, Dr. Halamka and…
Converting PDFs for the Kindle
by Will DeLamater
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,…
Uploading Your Documents to the Kindle
by Will DeLamater
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…
Kindle Battery Life and Release 1.04 (and 1.08)
by Will DeLamater
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…
More Kindle Battery Advice
by Will DeLamater
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…
Kindle Battery Life: Fact vs Fiction
by Will DeLamater
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…
A Limit to Reading Blogs on the Kindle
by Will DeLamater
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…
A Thinker’s Blog for the Kindle
by Will DeLamater
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:…