New experiment: Amazon Kindle Wiki

Now that I am starting to get a hang of the Kindle, and my friends are slowly embracing it, I decided it was time to put together some kind of online reference.

The obvious candidate for this is some kind of wiki. I have setup a Google wiki at http://wiki.pedrovera.com to see how that goes. Right now the wiki only holds general information about the device, but it also has a section where you can download my two novels in the Kindle format, plus plain text and PDF.

The Kindle version is far from perfect, mostly because the conversion tool that I used is still in beta. I would really like for Amazon to release the full specification of their digital publishing platform, for example, the proper way to tag for title and author.

Flip Video Ultra

Now that we are more or less having family gatherings once per month, I thought it was worth it to take another shot at making videos, since there is only so much you can convey from photos.

I was hoping to score something flashy, but the kind of HD camcorder that caught my eye is still in the $1000 range, and that's too damn much.

Worse, most of these videos would eventually end at youtube, so HD was really a god damn waste of resources, even if it was worth it for archival purposes.

Almost by accident, I ran into the Flip Video series. By looking at the specs it did not look like much, a tiny camera, almost no zoom, and one hour of video capacity.

What the hell is that going to be good for?

I got sucked into the reviews big time: pretty much everyone loves the damn things.

Why? Because they are simple, and they work.

Two weeks ago I took delivery of a Flip Video Ultra, it was $117 at Amazon and shipping was free. And that's where the fun started: In two weeks I have shot more video than the total amount of video I shot during the year that I owned my previous camcorder, a JVC miniDV that I sold in pristine condition more than five years ago (it was a year old, yet it had not been used for a full hour of total recording time).

See some of my videos at Youtube.

The reviews are right, this thing is basically perfect for the job. The quality of the video is not stellar, it looks a bit washed out but I was able to clean it up a bit with iMovie 7. Everything else is great. I can take videos of PJ, plug it into my Mac Book Pro and in less than half an hour I have already edited the video and uploaded it to youtube. VLC doesn't like the audio codec, but that's the only thing I have seen so far.

I have seen the output of the camera as:

1. Youtube, web resolution. Looks as bad as every other youtube video, no surprise here.



2. Youtube, AppleTV. Looks much nicer.



3. Youtube, iPhone. Looks fantastic.



4. AppleTV, h264. Looks very nice, not as nice as Youtube for iPhone.

I haven't made DVDs yet, so I have no idea what it looks like.

So far the videos have been a hit, and even PJ likes to watch himself on youtube, which is kind of funny in a meta way.

The good:

1. Inexpensive (not "cheap", it feels very solid, a quality product, not a cheaply made piece of shit). < $120 is a lot of bang for the buck.



2. It does one job, and it does it well.



3. It's fun to use.

The not-so-good:

1. I am a moron, because I did not read the instructions booklet I missed that the battery compartment has a lock button, so I spent my first week constantly pulling out the damn door by mistake.



2. The record button doesn't give enough feedback, so it is hard to tell if it engaged unless you are looking at the LCD.



3. An SD slot would have been great, but I am not losing sleep over it.

Amazon Kindle

I was a very early reader. My mother taught me how to read by the time I was four, and I was reading Sherlock Holmes and Jules Verne novels before I was out of elementary school. At least in my school district this was a rarity, even in high school when a teacher wouldn't believe me that I had read a novel (I am sure it was by Isabel Allende) on my own, not because I was being forced to.

It got me out of my normal Spanish class and into the "lit" class for a week or so, which was nice.

In US Army basic training you are forbidden from reading anything that isn't published by the Army, and you are handed a paperback, the "Smart Book" (Tradoc Pamphlet 600-4). Whenever you are not doing anything, you better be reading that book.

I carried it on my left leg pocket of my BDUs. On the right leg pocket I carried Clive Barker's Imagica. From 6 feet away it looks about the same size as the Smart Book, and I never got caught reading it. I had the Smart Book since before basic training and was already bored, so I needed the novel just to keep me sane.

Years later, I am still reading nonstop. It doesn't even bother me the cost, since there is always a decent selection of discounted books at every chain bookstore you can think of. The problem is storage.

A book per week habit means a collection of hundreds of books, which basically eat up your living space since you are only reading one at a time. In our case, we have a full wall covered with bookshelves, crammed to the top with 14 years worth of book purchases. And this doesn't take into account the books ruined over the years by insects, water, etc. If we still had them all we would need a second full wall.

And here comes the Kindle. The Amazon Kindle is an e-book reader with prepaid 3G wireless connectivity, and integrated into Amazon.com. This means that, without even using a computer, you can browse the Amazon Kindle store from the device, pick the books that you want and they are delivered to your device in minutes. Want to read a sample first? No problem, you can download a sample and pay to turn it into a full version later, and it never expires.

It is being marketed as the iPod of the book world.

It is also ugly as murder, since it is not an Apple product people will bitch and moan about how ugly it is, but the truth of the matter is that once you are reading, you don't pay attention to the device, all that you do is look at the screen and it looks perfect.

People also bitch about the price: $359. What everyone seems to be missing is that this device comes with prepaid 3G cellular connectivity, which is expensive. My iPhone 3G costs $30/month to access the same kind of connectivity. With the Kindle, you pay $359 and off you go. I am sure that at least $200 out of the $359 is due to the prepaid connectivity.

Now, here is the smart thing that Amazon did, that Apple didn't: Amazon stores all of your paid content for you, and you are free to re-download as many times as you wish.

Fried your Kindle? You can pull all of your purchases with your replacement unit, no charge. You can't do that with iTunes and an iPod.

Ran out of space and are too cheap to buy a $8 2GB SD card? Delete some of your books, you can always pull them down again. You can't do that with iTunes and an iPod.

I also like that I can add my own content to the device. I can either plug the Kindle to USB, or I can remove the (optional) SD card. If I plug the Kindle to USB, both the internal memory, and the SD card, show as two separate storage units. There is no science as of how to add content, you simply drag files in the allowed formats into the documents folder in the Kindle or SD card and off you go.

If you want to convert your files to the AZW format, then you can try Stanza, which so far rocks.

Still, there are things that could be better:

1. The previous/next buttons need more resistance, to account for accidental hits.



2. The wheel button eats the battery if the device is asleep and the cover is closed.



3. The retention tab for the cover is a joke.



4. The rear door opens too easily. At least it needs a lock button.



5. The two most important buttons, the power and wireless buttons, are in a really stupid place if you are expected to use the cover.



6. Search sucks.



7. It doesn't allow you to arrange your books as folders. I added a few dozen files and it drove me crazy trying to figure out what was what.

Those are all minor nags, and Amazon is rumored to be already working on version 2. I would expect Amazon to address some of the usability issues, but one thing is for sure is that there is no way in hell Amazon is going to show up with a $99 Kindle, that is, unless it comes with a cellular service contract for $X/month.

Don't tell me it is free and then ask me to pay for a different thing as a condition

Lulu.com is advertising a "limited offer" for a distribution package that includes a free ISBN. ISBNs are usually $125 when you buy them one at a time, and you can only buy them in batches of powers of ten. I thought that it sounded too good to be true, after all, I had to buy my first two ISBNs.

Well, the reason that it sounded too good to be true is that there is no way to get this free ISBN unless you purchase a hardcopy of your book from Lulu.com. If you don't buy the hardcopy, you don't get to move to the final step, where the ISBN is submitted to bowker.com.

No free ISBN for you.

Why not just advertise the package for whatever it costs to print one book? Th end result is the same, but you are not lying to people.

Now available in the Amazon Kindle Store

Both of my novels are now available at Amazon's Kindle Store:

Book #1: Shining Star, first published July 2004

Book #2: Pulling Strings, first published January 2006

If you are either published, or self published, and you are interested in publishing your books through the Kindle, all you need to do is join the Amazon Digital Text Platform. It is free, you retain full ownership of your work, and the royalties are no worse than what you can get elsewhere. I did it because I can't turn down the opportunity to open one more sales channel for my books.

From the technical standpoint, the process is very simple. For each of your books you do the following:

1. Fill a section with the ISBN (as far as I can tell, it isn't mandatory) and a few more details about the book, including five categories plus a list of keywords. You also upload a cover image.

2. Upload your final copy of the book, they accept most common formats. I tried with MS Word, HTML and PDF. I got more control by using PDF. Amazon provides plenty of documentation for those that would like more control of the formatting.

3. Use the book preview utility to verify that the book is rendered the way you want it to.

4. Enter your sale price.

5. Hit publish.

You are done. From the moment that you hit publish, to your book first showing in search results you can expect anywhere from 12 to 72 hours. One of my two books made it to the search results in ess than 24 hours, the second one is up and running but it is not showing up in searches yet.

A cool thing I noticed is that since HTML gives you the most control, you don't really have to waste time agonizing over your layout and then generate the perfect PDF. I was using Open Office 2.4 (had to downgrade from 3.0, it ran like shit even on this Mac Book Pro 2.33) and I remember how much trouble it was to get the stupid formatting of the headers, footers, pagination, etc. done right. Now I know this is trivial, so I can go back to writing and not having to worry about formatting.

Things I did not like:

1. Some things are done with AJAX functionality that actually works better in Safari than in Firefox, a first for me. Uploads in Firefox worked maybe half of the time.

2. The cover upload failed about half of the time.

3. I did not see a way to buy an ISBN. ISBNs can be bought directly from Bowker for $125. You can get them as cheap as $50 from other sources, but then you won't have control over the publisher name listed with the ISBN. I got my two ISBNs through Lulu.com, it was less than $100 each.

Except for those three things, it is pretty nifty.