Customer workaround for user-definable folders

This is a popular blog-article which is being highlighted for newcomers and Kindle-blog edition subscribers.  During my vacation I'm including the more popular tips and guides. Kindle-blog edition subscribers will not have had these on their Kindles before and the subscription (99c per month) allows offline-review of the last 25 blog articles.

Original blog posting was May 24, 2009
In general, E-Readers that double as portable libraries really require a customizable folder feature.  Amazon recently extended the folder concept on the Kindle 2 for 1) "Archives" (which are for Amazon-purchased books already read and deleted from the Kindle but re-downloadable, free, from the customer's Amazon library area at any time via a click on the title in the Archives) and for 2) non-current periodicals.  They've always had folders for subscription newspapers and magazines (though not usually for blogs).

 The Kindle 2 (and Kindle DX) also has options for displaying 1) only books, 2) only subscriptions, 3) only "personal docs" or 4) all items.  These are also then sortable by Most Recent, Title, and Author (and searchable with the last two).

  However, as with bookstores and libraries, Kindle users have wanted user-definable dividers for categories such as Unread, Finished, Mystery, Non-Fiction, Romance, Biography, Self-improvement, etc.

  While this could make the process slower for displaying all books or less direct than finding a title or author by typing the first alpha-character and pressing the 5-way button, there's no question that categorizing books is a primary organizational tool when you have a lot of books and magazines.

Until the day that customer-defined folders are offered, customers have been recommending workarounds by using the "add-note" feature available for Kindle books.  

CUSTOMER WORKAROUND
An official Amazon Customer Service Forum post on March 5, 2009 stated:

' Kudos to Kindle Community member Bufo Calvin for this tip!
  With the ability to add notes to your Kindle 2 content and search for specific words or phrases on your Kindle 2's Home screen, you can categorize content by genre or other personalized terms.

' Open up one of your books, select Add a Note or Highlight, and enter in a word (or words) you'd like to categorize by - genres such as history, fantasy, biography, etc.  Try putting your initials or a common letter such as "x" before the word, "cshistory" or "xfantasy" for example.  Save the note you chose to enter.

' Now go back to your Home screen and type in the word you just used for your note.

' Once you've typed it, move your 5-way controller to the right and click on "Search My Items."  You'll see the book you just added the note to appear.

'  If you've added that note in multiple books, each one will appear in your search results. '

Note that this method is called "tagging" your book or "labelling" it.  This simulates folders except that it's more flexible.

  If you want a book for which two tag-words should exist together, then you can search for both words.  Only those books tagged with both words would show up in the results.

 Mainly, you won't find a word like "xwhatever" in any of your books, so this brings up only the books specifically tagged by you.

This does work for the Kindle 1 also, but the older model may take a day to index the 'tag' additions so that they're findable.  The Kindle 2 takes only a couple of minutes to do this.

 Amazon customers discuss various aspects of this in a current forum thread.  Robin McLaughlin located customer service's recommendation of Calvin's suggestion; "Laura" points out she posted this workaround at the same time and that many customers have thought about this.  "Tillamook Bay / lg" cautions that this system does not work with books done in the special Topaz format, which uses specially embedded fonts and is not searchable (nor can we change the line spacing in these).  The file extension can be .tpz or .azw1 but is essentially the Kindle format with slightly different description fields.
  UPDATE 8/17/09: I just learned that Tillamook Bay (Larry Goss) was using this workaround in September '08 based on another forum note he read earlier.

Mild shortcut for general searching:
Normally, when reading a book, you can bring up the Search box by pressing the spacebar.  If you're at the "Home" listing page, press the Enter key instead.

When typing in a keyword for a search while the 'action' on the right side says "find my items" (the default) or if it is already on the action you want ('google' or 'Wikipedia' etc), you need only press the Enter-key under the DEL key.

Otherwise, you need to 5-way over to the right and then press down on the 5-way.
  If the action for the keyword is not what you want (google, store, wiki, dictionary) then 5-way right, through some more options until you find the one you want to search. Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
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A geographic-restriction glitch for non-USA Kindle book purchases - Update3

See UPDATES at bottom of this blog article.  Glitch is now fixed for most reporting in.

Customers on the MobileRead forums and Amazon Kindle forums reported that although they have, for a long time, been able to buy Kindle books while out of the country for Kindles Amazon had shipped to their given U.S. addresses, they received geographic-restriction rejections of the Kindle book orders, starting this weekend.

This occurred even with People using U.S. credit cards (rather than gift certificates which can be used internationally).  Kindle owner and author Bufo Calvin started an Amazon forum poll to try to find out the circumstances of those affected before making assumptions and gathered already some good information.

A reassuring response came from customer Eliza Bennet, from Canada, who responded to Bufo with this information:

' I just (an hour ago) spoke with a kindle CS rep and he informed me that "something went wrong" with the amazon server and many techies had been called in over the weekend to fix the problem vis à vis the "geographic restriction" message.  I live in (Ottawa) Canada and gave him the name/billing address of the credit card attached to my account (which belongs to a friend living near Boston), and he made no comment about it not being my own card.  He also had no adverse reaction to my saying I paid for books with a gift card.  Certainly hope that he knew whereof he spoke! '

BlogKindle had an earlier article today in which he suggested a workaround if needed, using US proxy servers.

This weekend's problems are likely due to changes made in connection with an anticipated launch of the Kindle in the UK, which has had digital book restrictions also, and programming changes, too often, have untoward effects on other areas of similar code.

When you have questions that other customers can help with, a visit to the Amazon Kindle Community forums can be helpful.  There are also some amusing threads there too that I've pointed to before.  The forums are for sharing of information between customers and can also be playful (sometimes a tad rough) and is a good community with lots of new people everyday needing help.  Now they finally have a forum-search mechanism so that helps quite a bit.

UPDATE2 10/5/09   - Original Posting was 10/4 at 3:52 PM
  (Update1 was incorporated above.)
Julia of the forum-poll thread above added a written response from Customer Service tonight, which was another example of customers with U.S. credit cards and address being affected by the problem as well:

' I'm sorry for the trouble you had when trying to purchase Kindle books outside U.S using a payment method issued by a U.S. Bank with a U.S.billing address. I've reported this to our technical team, and they're working on taking care of it.

Please try again over the next few days. Errors like this are usually
corrected shortly after they're reported... '

They've been corrected for some customers, so far, as reported in the forum thread.

UPDATE3 10/6/09, 3:15 PM -  Original Posting was 10/4 at 3:52 PM
Caroline Wong has made a second, updated poll at the Amazon Kindle forums, to monitor how the fixes by Amazon are going.  Many are reporting they can once again order as they did before.  And in the original poll by Bufo Calvin, some who had problems have been reporting they are once again able to order/buy from Amazon as before and have received non-boilerplate email from Amazon Customer Service representatives who have been following up on the problem.

 At MobileRead forums, 'mgmueller' describes how he has been buying books from Germany as an Amazon-US customer and that it is working for him.  Earlier than his post is one from 'Dharmabum' who was unable to buy e-books this weekend unless using an IP# workaround but can buy again today using his regular method, which is like mgmueller's and those of others reporting on the Amazon forum threads.

  The glitch is obviously being fixed for many, including some who were/are skeptical about it being a technical glitch.  Various workarounds over the weekend had been Hotspot Shield, VPN to US, and UltraSurf 9.5 - the latter has been reported to be not entirely safe due to processes noticed in it, reports which I can link to later; it could also be due to processes meant to confuse authorities in China who are banning Net access to many to various sites, but I opted not to test it due to some reports.

UPDATE4 10/12/09
On October 7, one day after the International Kindle 2 announcement, Customer Service wrote to Bufo Calvin's poll thread at Amazon forums to say that they felt they had resolved the problem and that all affected were able to receive books again, with the gift certificates they had been using. Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
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Bits and pieces - 9/8/09

Library w/o books
Re the Library Without Books story. A quick run of news column comments like the ones at Mashable indicate that many familiar with school libraries feel this is likely an ok decision because students today use the school libraries as a place to relax with their notebooks and they really don't use the stacks much.  People tend to feel differently if this had happened with a public library though.
And, it seems the coffee areas will be profit centers :-)

Google settlement
Alternet, quoting AFP's Roddy Thomson, reports that Google "will remove all European books currently on the market from a US agreement to digitise and sell online books that are out of print in the United States."  They'll have to negotiate agreements with European publishers and authors.

To see a good summary of the issues that have been problematical for other companies in connection with the much-discussed Google Settlement, see Bufo Calvin's article on this from Sunday.

Asus' coming dual-screened color e-reader
A lot of ink on this one. Endgadget discusses a prototype displayed at CeBIT last March (lots of photos from CeBIT).  In the comments to the first article, commenters question battery life, comfort in holding and using 2 screens at time in a portable -- but at the price of only about $160 and with color available, even if using more eye-straining LCD screens, this will be attractive to many.  They may offer budget and premium models once they release one of these end of the year.  No details yet. Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
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Amazon's sharing policies confuse its own reps - Update

UPDATES added near the bottom Original posting 7/17/09 - 10:16 AM - It was a system error, now being "fixed" per staff.

The Net has seen some heated writing about Amazon's DRM (Digital-Rights-Management) policies in that a first-tier customer service representative had told a customer-blogger that there was a limit as to how often we can re-download an Amazon-purchased book when the Amazon ads blare that a Kindle owner will be able to re-download a book at no added cost anytime the book is needed again when the customer has deleted it to save space.  Also re-downloaded with the book would be your highlighting and notes if you allowed Amazon to back them up.

The actual quantity limitation by Amazon is on the number of devices on which one Amazon-purchased book can be be simultaneously accessed under one person's account.  The limit that Kindle forum participants are used to mentioning to new members is "up to 6 devices," usually meaning Kindles or Kindle-compatible units like the iPhone and iPod that use the Kindle App.

Here's the Amazon FAQ statement in reply to the question: "How many Kindles can I use to access titles in my library?"

Most books and other non-subscription items you purchase from the Kindle store may be simultaneously accessed for your personal use on to [sic] up to six Kindles (or Kindle compatible devices) [emphasis mine] registered to your Amazon.com account.

If you reach the device limit and wish to replace one of your current devices with a new one, you must first deregister and delete the content from the device you wish to replace before you can access the content in question from your new device.  Please see the "Registering Your Kindle" section of our Managing Your Kindle Settings Help page to learn how to register/deregister your Kindle.  There is no limit on the number of times a title can be downloaded to a registered device.  [Emphasis mine.]

Subscription content can only be downloaded to one Kindle at a time, and only the seven most recent issues will be available for redownload from your Kindle or from the Manage Your Kindle page. '

  My own addition to Amazon's statement is that you don't really have to "deregister" a Kindle to do this -- you just have to Remove or Delete the book from that Kindle.  I've done this many times as I have many Kindles so that I can write with first-hand knowledge of the models.

There's now an Amazon forum thread about the finding that those who use Amazon's self-publishing books feature ('DTP' or Digital Text platform) have wording in their product-info areas that the number of digital devices able to share the book simultaneously is '5' rather than '6'... that's been confirmed by a few Kindle book authors.

It's possible that an error was made when placing this info with the DTP books and that someone meant to put "up to 5 other devices" (Bufo Calvin is asking Amazon about this), but maybe Amazon, which is the "Publisher" in those cases, wanted to have a lower device count for those, but that would be very strange and a confusing inconsistency it really doesn't need.

Karen of Books on the Knob also points out that Wiley had a limit of 4 devices months ago, apparently mentioned in the product description.

 She reminds forum readers that we can download a book "hundreds of times (costing Amazon 12 cents or more, each time)" so is puzzled (as are any of us) why Amazon, as 'Publisher' would choose 5 devices for authors who publish under Amazon's DTP publishing area.  Perplexing, but she also notes that it's been evident that most customers don't appear to care that much that they might be able to share books with only 4 other Kindles under their accounts.

---

UPDATE 7/18/09 - see Karen's update in her comment to this post.  This seemed to have been an error on the part of a staffer who may have posted the number without authorization.

UPDATE 7/18/09 #2 - Here is the forum page on which the Amazon staffer ("dtpadmin") responds to Bufo Calvin's question about the 5-device limit:

" Hello,

We have identified an error in our system. We are fixing the problem to remove the device limit for DTP titles. We apologize for this error.

Thanks!"

---

I find that most people just want to be able to read a book.  The ability of a family or very good friends to share books on the same account paid for by one of them is considered a nice feature.

But Amazon has to get clearer about the policies, if nothing else, and wiser about them if they would keep a better focus on the customer experience.  I enjoyed a description of the Kindle the other day as a "vending machine" for products Amazon needs to sell us.  The long-term relationship needs more clarity and less fear that the customers want to steal books.  Most of us have had very good experiences with Amazon's customer service but there needs to be a way to give all the customer service representatives the same policy information and to place in the online-support areas more detailed and consistent information.

Amazon is a company that seems to have a lot on the plate.

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Hachette backs Amazon's use of Text-to-Speech

Publishers Weekly reports that Hachette backs the use of Text-to-Speech in the ongoing controversy over the Authors Guild insisting on Amazon's disabling that feature, for fear a very mechanical voice that doesn't even pause at end of headings or chapter endings will take revenues from their professional human reader editions (this is so myopic I can hardly believe it).  Hachette's statement protects its own audio book group while supporting use of the text-to-speech with the "vast majority" of its books.

Jim Milliot, who wrote the story July 2 explains that the Hachette Book Group

'issued a statement outlining its position on the text-to-speech question.  Text-to-speech arose as an issue earlier this year when Amazon’s Kindle 2 added the capability; the Authors Guild challenged TTS, saying Amazon was taking an unauthorized audio right.  Groups representing the visually impaired then charged that the Authors Guild was being insensitive to its needs.  Amazon, after first saying it had no plans to kill the function, changed its position and said it would do whatever the rightsholders wanted.

Hachette pretty much follows the Amazon position, saying that unless its authors object, it has no issue with adding TTS for the vast majority of its books. The only exceptions, HBG said, would be for 'books that fall within our audio publishing program or specialized circumstances like memoirs, where the author or character’s voice is an artistic element of the work.  Under such circumstances HBG reserves the right to request that the functionality be disabled.'

...Hachette further noted that TTS  'technology is likely to be a feature on an increasing number of devices in the coming months, and HBG recognizes the value of such functionality to individuals with impaired vision or similar disabilities.' "

Related blog articles
Here's a prior entry on 'Tom' the voice of Kindle 2, reading a personalized script.

Also, the first article here about the Authors Guild and the Kindle 2.

More Background:
1.  Copyright Advisory Network's web article on the Authors Guild Kindle 2 Proclamation...
2.  A detailed summary by Bufo Calvin to the Amazon forums recently.
2.  Small Kindle book ($1) The Disabled Deserve to Read: The Controversy Over the Amazon Kindle's Voice (revised), by Bufo Calvin. Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
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Len Edgerly / Bufo Calvin - recommended books

I recently came across a couple of books that I want to recommend to readers.

A Poet's Progress at Bennington - Vol 1, a mix of commentary on other poets and some of his own original poetry, by Len Edgerly, host of The Kindle Chronicles Friday podcast.

I just recently met the author in connection with his very popular podcast but have listened to his newsy and varied podcast for some time, as it's a great way to keep up with the Kindle scene.  I downloaded the book because I like the way that Len handles the podcast and the quality of his interaction with others during these weekly sessions.

  After being intrigued by the insights in his poetic output and in his thought-filled commentaries, I wrote him about things I remembered as a result of reading his often dream-like rendering of some experiences that had a rather profound impact on him.  I see that Len has written a summary of his book -- how it came about, what it contains, etc.  I highly recommend this rich collection of reflections which costs only $1  !

  I also bought his short book Cold Turkey in Paradise: Twelve Days Off the Internet at Maho Bay" which has an excellent review by Edukindle's William DeLamater, who offers the ultra useful Kindlepedia.
  An account of a grand effort to stay off the Internet while on vacation is something obviously of interest to me and since it was by the Internet-active Edgerly, I downloaded it on the spot and find that it's a very entertaining book.  I overidentified with it.  But then I do the opposite of what he chose to do -- I enjoy my vacations and then enjoy them even more when I can find the Internet at night :-)

---

Frequently Asked Kindle Questions by Bufo Calvin, a regular at the Amazon forums who is much appreciated for his thorough answers to, I'd say, constantly-asked Kindle questions, or CAKQ :-).

Bufo, a professional educator, has put his comprehensive answers to all these questions into a book readable on the Kindle and makes an effort to cover the Kindle 1 and 2 as well as the Kindle DX.  Although I'd like to see some indentations in some of the answers to see the subject matter more easily, the answers are quite complete, even covering what he feels or knows are the reasons for some of Amazon's decisions, including policies described in Kindle guidelines such as book and account sharing and current limitations on international purchases.  Any Kindle owner should get a copy of this book, especially when all this comes for only $1.

  Bufo has other Kindle books available, including one with ready-links to free books for the Kindle and advice on navigating some of the sites involved, and another that advocates for customers with disabilities -- explaining the controversy over publisher/author-disabling of obviously computer-voiced text-to-speech (proceeds for this one go to purchasing Kindles for non-profit organizations). Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
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Disabling of Text-to-Speech by Random House has begun

Bruce S. Woodcock has alerted us to a MobileRead Forum notice by KarlB that Random House (Knopf) has begun disabling the Kindle-2 text-to-speech feature, which is computerized speech that has almost no appropriate affect, often mispronounces words, and doesn't pause between paragraphs, headings, or chapters on its Kindle books - and it's unclear whether or not the author gets a choice in this disabling.

 The above link takes you to Bruce's announcement and the forum discussions on this.  While forum members are a small percentage of Kindle owners, they tend to know other Kindle owners and there has been a resulting resistance to Random House's policy, in the form of plans to not buy Random House Kindle books while they are doing this.  They also proposed using the Amazon tagging system to add a "No tts" tag to alert other customers to an author who chose disabling this feature.

The disabling of TTS on a book hurts the disabled most, since most Kindle owners use the computerized voice only for brief periods (while cooking or commuting in the car) and they don't buy the book to 'listen' to it, especially not via a monotone voice.

Does Random House appreciate the fact that the Kindle owner has purchased the book to read?  Do people who buy hardcopy books to read THEN go buy the audiobook ?  Where is their loss on this?  Kindle owners can't share their Kindle books except with someone ON their account, so just what is the problem for Authors Guild and Random House?

There is a Kindle book titled The Disabled Deserve to Read: The Controversy Over the Amazon Kindle's Voice, by Bufo Calvin, for 80 cents.
  The product description says: "The author's proceeds will go towards purchasing Kindles to donate to non-profit organizations."

  From what I remember, the Authors Guild has proposed tests they will put disabled people through to see if they 'qualify' for getting a computerized voice reading to them.  To me, there's something quite dark about that.
_______
  Related blog article on "Tom," the Kindle-2 voice Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
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Kindle 2's voice reads a personalized script

UPDATE 5/1/09 - Engadget's interview with Tom Glynn - "the Voice of the Kindle 2."

  (Also see later UPDATE on Tom Glynn's latest interview and voice technology.)

Below text originally added 4/27/2009 06:18:00 PM
  On a fun Amazon Kindle-forum thread titled "Tomisms" for odd events in the Kindle voice's (mis)reading of various words (some of these are hilarious), Bufo Calvin, author of Free Books for Your Kindle as well as the heartfelt The Disabled Deserve to Read: The Controversy Over the Amazon Kindle's Voice, offered forum members the personal script he wrote for his Kindle 2's voice to introduce himself.

 I modified, with his permission, that amusing intro for my own Kindle's Tom to use, and you can hear that here if interested in hearing what the K2 voice does with a personal text file.

The Kindle 2's text-to-speech technology is courtesy of Nuance.com and if you heard the mp3 above, you'll recognize Nuance's "Tom" in Nuance's official demo.  Bufo Calvin was the first forum poster to notice the similarities of the Kindle voice to Nuance's.  I don't personally know Bufo, but he's a very alert guy :-).

On an Engadget blog entry about my original posting at Kindleboards which Harvey Chute blogged, there used to be a 2nd page of comments that included some interesting details from a Mike Spa, who commented that he used to work with Tom.

"I use to work with this mystery Tom -- the voice talent.  He's a great guy to work with.  You have *no* idea how awful bad voice talents can be to work with until you have to record 2,000 voice prompts for a automated speech recognition system.  I used to design the user interfaces for those systems.  I have since moved on once I realized how much everyone hates them so."

Mike pointed us to Tom Glynn's page, where there are linked feature articles about Glynn and his work -- in The Boston Globe, The New York Times, Washington Post, etc.

Now, that's a kind of voiceover work that I'd never thought of.

For the interested, here are all of Nuance's demo voices for several languages.

UPDATE 4/28/09 - Lynn Mostafa posts on this thread that

"Astonished when Tom read *ASAP* out *as soon as possible* and pronounced *1-(831)-xxx-xxxx* as *area code 831* etc.  The tiny dude inside my Kindle is pretty smart.  Guess that's because he reads so much."

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