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Sunday, October 25, 2009

Summary of new Kindle capabilities

For International Kindle owners in the countries that have wireless enabled (including Europe), new features enabled or announced this week and mentioned here earlier include:
. Free access to Wikipedia on the Net even when web-browsing in general is not enabled
. The ability to read our Kindle books on Windows PCs (next month) and on Macs soon (info was linked in earlier posts).  Also, "Batman Jr." added information in the Comments section here that this will also be true for Kindle books on the Blackberry.
  Advantages listing:
' * Purchase, download, and read hundreds of thousands of books available in the Kindle Store
* Access their entire library of previously purchased Kindle books stored on Amazon’s servers for free
* Choose from over 10 different font sizes and adjust words per line
* Add and automatically synchronize bookmarks and last page read
* View notes and highlights marked on Kindle and Kindle DX
* Zoom in and out of text with a pinch of the fingers (Windows 7 users only)
* Turn pages with a finger swipe (available in a future release for Windows 7 users) '
The Kindle for PC will also be compatible with Windows XP and Windows Vista.

So far, no other e-reader coming this next year is slated to offer direct free access to Wikipedia for added info

The new app for PCs (and, later, Macs and Blackberrys) will allow Kindle book buyers to have the ability to read their Kindle purchases on their computers even when w/o their Kindles.  This last is rather huge, since there had been worry that owners would lose the ability to access their purchased books without this capability.
  As many of us have said previously, competition is a very good thing, even when announced without working samples yet.
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2 comments:

  1. AnonymousNovember 30, 2009 at 11:54:00 AM PST

    I'm a singer, and would like to transfer my personal song-book, (which, at over 400 pages/song's has become heavy), to the kindle. Is this possible, by typing in the song's, and having an alphabetical list?
    The font style I like, is NYT, and the size, between 16 & 18. Could I have the font and style, as I currently do?
    Thanx!

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownDecember 1, 2009 at 3:16:00 AM PST

    Anonymous,
    Type in the songs? I guess you don't mean music notation though (which is graphics-intensive and creates huge files).

    Do you mean just lyrics then?

    If you just mean lyrics, yes, you could type them in (or copy/paste them) to Microsoft Word in as large a type as you like and in the font specified.

    I am not sure that Amazon, in their conversion of this to the Kindle format would be able to keep the font appearance exactly what you specified though. You could try with a small sample.

    What you would do is make yourself a booklet, and with Microsoft Word, make a forced page break after each song.

    Then send a copy, via the email address you use in normal correspondence with Amazon, addressed to [you]@free.kindle.com (this kindle account must be set up at top left of http://www.amazon.com/manageyourkindle, and Amazon would convert the document for you and send it back to your regular email address at no cost.

    Good luck on this.

    - Andrys

    ReplyDelete

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