Kindlepedia has been a remarkable success since we launched it at the beginning of June. Since then, hundreds of readers have requested articles in pristine Mobipocket format, perfect for reading on the Kindle, and, by the beginning of August, we topped 1,000 articles served. The list of created articles reads like a roadmap of the human mind–just see the Wordle I made from the topics folks selected above, courtesy of www.wordle.net.
Pierre Gorissen has produced a nifty video on how to use the Kindlepedia tool from EduKindle to create reference articles for you Kindle or any other ereader that supports the Mobipocket format.
In addition, Pierre has written a little script that allows you to make a bookmarklet in your browser (works fine in my Firefox) that will automatically send any page you are on at Wikipedia to the Kindlepedia engine and return the article for download, perfectly formatted with a linked table of contents and live links throughout. He demonstrates how to set this up in the video.
I am posting the video here, and you can see more of Pierre’s handiwork at the EduKindle Community site.
I have been working on getting texts properly formatted for the Kindle lately and thought I would experiment with short articles on topics of interest to educators. The first ones are now available on the “Downloads” page. One is a brief overview of the NCLB legislation that was sourced through Wikipedia, and another is the text of a press release about Secretary Margaret Spellings and her final regulations for the implementation of NCLB.
Of interest to Kindle afficionados is the fact that the first article was formatted, with great labor and perseverance, through Amazon’s “free” email formatting service. It was tough to get the HTML just right so that Amazon would accept it, and, as you will see, the formatting is pretty basic at that. I will see about going back and linking the endnotes, for example.
The second file is an “ebook” or Mobipocket file. This one was much easier to produce as the Mobipocket Creator (free download here) converts from a text file pretty easily. A little light HTML coding to get the headers right, and it is ready to go. Looks great on the Kindle, and will work on other ebook readers as well.
A shout out and special thanks for helping me with this process goes to Joshua Tallent at KindleFormatting. Joshua is an ebook formatting veteran, and he can get these files running smooth as silk on the Kindle. I look forward to learning more from Joshua and recomment his formatting service highly.
