News scraps and Kindle tips: Kindle Convert software ... New features for Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick + availability in the UK and Germany ... Echo's new social network features and its If This Then That 'recipe' capability ... May's free contemporary Kindle books

AMAZON'S RECENT ACTIVITIES + SOME TIPS

The big news this week is what's happening with Amazon's Echo

But first, a couple of things that have happened with Amazon products in the last couple of months that weren't reported here yet + the regular beginning-of-month searchable links for free contemporary (non-classic) Kindle books:

May's free Kindle books (contemporary or non-classics)
    April 2015  May 2015.
    Also, all currently free non-classics sorted by:
    Publication Date   Bestselling    High ratings

  As ever, there are only a few shown on the first few days of any month, and these include pre-orders due that month -- most of these are listed as "free preview" of whatever chapters chosen, some are short stories, and a few (overnight) not-entirely-family-safe titles may show up.  Since this is May 3, the listing will not include more already available, full books.


Kindle Convert - new software
Amazon announced back in February -- in a Kindle Community Forum post -- new software that, for PC owners, will help you convert print books and printed personal documents into Kindle files that can be read on your Kindles.  The forum link just above is to a description of what the software, Kindle Convert can do.  The first paragraph:

' ... a new software application that allows you to convert scans of your most treasured personal books, documents and keepsakes into high quality Kindle books so you can digitally safeguard and enjoy them forever. Kindle Convert preserves all the things that make your books and documents unique, such as hand-written notes, autographs, photos and images, so you can maintain the look and feel of your printed books. '

The forum post explains more.
I didn't blog on this because initial reports and reviews cited difficulty of the process involved in doing this, and I felt later updates may improve the process.

  But I'm mentioning it here because there were a number of reports that "pdf files" did not convert well after all the effort.
  However, the software focus is on valued printed books and documents that you want to be able to read and keep on the Kindle.

  We already have an easy way to get PDFs converted to Kindle book format.  Amazon's own "Send to Kindle" programs works for documents from a web browser, an Android tablet, your desktop, and most of all, from your email.

  We all have Kindle email-addresses assigned to our Kindle devices.  It's in the format [you]@kindle.com and can be found at the Manage your Devices and Content page (formerly called "Manage-your-Kindle" page).

  There, under the image of each of your devices, you'll see the email address for your devices.  You can edit your device's email address name there to something that's easier to remember than the automatically assigned email address.

  Only you can send documents or books to that email address (which wind up in your Cloud area) so that no spam can invade your Kindle or Android tablet (my Windows phone doesn't get one of these addresses) and you can designate those whose email addresses can send docs to your Kindle (if, for example, doing a subscription not available from Amazon Kindle store).

  VIA EMAIL to your [you@kindle.com] Kindlebook-reading email address, you can send any personal text file or *.mobi book file (often an eBook in .mobi format acquired from a non-Amazon source) to your Cloud, to read in Kindle format, with annotations posible.

  Amazon converts these emailed documents for your Kindlebook-reading device.
  If you send a PDF to an email address for an e-Ink reader, it will arrive as a readable PDF on the Kindle and if you put the word "convert" in the Subject field of the email, Amazon will automatically convert the PDF to a searchable Kindle book format but the PDF's special layout of tables or charts and columns will be different.

  For a novel for and one-column docs, this usually won't matter and is free although the older Kindle Keyboard devices with only 3G wireless used will see a 15c fee for a novel-sized file.  It's cost-free for WiFi readers otherwise.

PDFs are easily readable on tablets via a number of PDF-reader apps.  Scanning print books to PDFs yourself can be an arduous task but likely worthwhile for very valued print books you want to have in eBook format.


Bew Features for Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick
In late March, Amazon announced the following new features for Fire TV and Fire TV Stick

' Amazon Fire TV adds expandable USB storage and private, wireless listening with Bluetooth headphones

Watch on the go—Fire TV and Fire TV Stick now support captive portal so you can connect to Wi-Fi at a hotel or dorm room that requires web authentication

Fire TV Stick now available in the UK and Germany — Amazon Fire TV already the #1 streaming media box on Amazon in the UK and Germany '

For now, I'll just link you to the Businesswire announcement for the details on all this.


NEW ECHO FEATURES announced this week
The Verge's Josh Lowensohn reported that the Amazon Echo, usually called 'Alexa' by its owners, will now work with Twitter, Gmail, and Evernote plus a few others, thanks to the newly installed feature of "If This, Then That" ("ITTT")

  Lowensohn mentions the recent updates already reported here, "things like Pandora, traffic reports, sports scores, and support for Belkin's WeMo and Phillips's Hue products" and describes the new features' capabilities:

' ... the IFTTT 'recipes' for Alexa let you send your shopping and to-do lists out to third-party services like Google Drive, Evernote, and Todoist

... There are 54 combinations in total.  Enabling them requires signing up for IFTTT, then linking it up with your Amazon account. You also need to go through the motions of activating the various third-party app channels, and approving your accounts there so IFTTT can link everything up behind the scenes. Some of the really good examples so far are:

. Adding your Echo shopping list items to Evernote
. Sending someone a short email with your voice
. Sending someone an SMS with your voice
. Adding Echo shopping list items to the iOS Reminders app
. Adding Alexa to-dos to Microsoft's OneNote '

See the Verge's full article for illustrations and more details.

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  For daily free ebooks, check the following links:

Temporarily-free books - Non-classics USA: by:    Publication Date      Bestselling   High-ratings UK: PubDate   Popular The Kindle Daily Deal What is 3G? and "WiFi"?       Battery Care Highly-rated under $1,  Newest: $1-$2, $2-$3

Most Popular Free K-Books U.S. & Int'l (NOT UK):    Top 100 free UK-Only:    Top 100 free USEFUL for your Kindle Keyboard(U.S. only, currently):   99c Notepad 1.1,   99c Calculator,   99c Calendar,   99c Converter

  *Click* to Return to the HOME PAGE.  Or click on the web browser's BACK button


Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

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PDFS on the Nook Touch and the Kindle 3

FROM E-READER CONFUSION THREAD AT MOBILEREAD FORUMS

I couldn't be here for most of the weekend, but am back and just saw a thread at Mobileread Forums about PDFs and how these are handled by the new NookTouch and the Kindle 3. Their message threads tend to be extremely informative and are often more technically focused than you'll see on most e-reader forums, but this one was just about which e-reader will handle PDFs better.  I've added my reply there and thought I'd include it here as well, while I catch up on other Kindle matters.

' From thuya1991

"Hi, everyone
I am just new to the e-reading community. I am thinking about buying below $200 e-reader with eink. Considering kindle but by reading all the threads here, I am so confused which one should I buy.

Reason to buy e-reader
- I have all of my books that I want to read in .pdf files (no need to access their stores or whatever)

  My other concern is that I could be able to copy my .pdf files to the e-reader and read it without buying them again."

[My reply]
1. ROTATION option
  The Kindle has a rotation option so you can read in Landscape mode, which makes most PDFs somewhat readable if they have special layouts, as the Landscape mode has more space and there is room to make the fonts larger and the margins are decreased as a Kindle feature for PDFs.

  For layouts in word, academic documents and for PDFs that are manuals or guides, the Landscape rotation mode is the difference between whether you can even read the document on a 6" screen or not.

2. PDF SCREEN CONTRAST ADJUSTMENT
  The Kindle 3 allows you to make the text darker, important because many PDFs are originally using color fonts for effect and these, and colors that are translated to B&W, can be almost too light to read -- in any case it can be very hard on the eyes.
  The Nook doesn't have this feature

3. OVERALL GRAYER B&W TEXT FONT
  In my viewing of a Nook Touch the other night, the fonts are too gray for my eyes, w/o the kind of screen contrast I'm used to with the Kindle 3 and DX. The crispness is missing. (I was surprised as I had not read any reaction like mine in press reviews yet, but today I was told of two (Len Edgerly and Instapaper's Marco Arment) who had noted it.

    The Kindle Chronicles: nooktouch-pell
    Marco.Org: Nook Touch review

  However, anyone who's not used other Pearl screens probably won't notice any problem at all, and basically, the fonts are clear. Just not dark enough for me.

4. ZOOM IN - Yes, with Kindle, No, with Nook Touch
  The Nook Touch can't Zoom in on an image. Illustrations cannot be zoomed.

  With the Kindle, you can move the cursor to the center of the photograph, which gives you an option to click on it and zoom to full screen. On -higher- resolution images, this can be invaluable, especially for maps or diagrams.

  [ I should have added that Kindle PDFs have zoom-in boxes
    although I often find them awkward. ]


5. RE PDFS THAT ARE JUST BOOKS IN ONE COLUMN
  Portrait mode will do fine with those, with either the Nook or the Kindle.


You can also see my Features comparison: Nook Touch and Kindle 3 '

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For ongoing free ebooks daily, check the following links often:

Temporarily-free books - Non-classics - USA: by: NEW:  Apr  May  June 2011    Publication Date   Late-listed    Bestselling   High-ratings UK: PubDate   Popular What is 3G? and "WiFi"? Highly-rated e-books under $1

Most Popular Free K-Books U.S. & Int'l (NOT UK):    Top 100 free UK-Only:    Top 100 free USEFUL for your Kindle (U.S. only, currently):   99c Notepad,   99c Calculator,   99c CalendarPro,   99c Converter

Kindle 3's   (UK: Kindle 3's)   K3 Special ($114)   K3-3G Special ($164)   DX Graphite

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Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

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(Older posts have older Kindle model info. For latest models, see CURRENT KINDLES page. )
If interested, you can also follow my add'l blog-related news at Facebook and Twitter
Questions & feedback are welcome in the Comment areas (tho' spam is deleted). Thanks!

The Test-Run at Univ of Washington with Kindle DX's

Seattle's KOMO Newsroom reports on the test run of the Kindle DX being done by the University of Washington, with 40 graduate students participating in using the Kindle DX in place of both textbooks and classroom reading materials this semester.

They need to see how well that might work.  Seven universities are taking part, and the University of Washington students will be among the first to actually get the Kindles.

  This is the fundamental question posed:
"How would you have to change a device that was designed as a personal pleasure device to turn it into a learning device?"

  Professor Dan Grossman says, "We want to be able to annotate and highlight and flip back and forth and have that physical experience," he said.
  But on the other side, he says, "We want to be able to search and look up and have massive amounts of information on one lightweight device." - a strength of the Kindle.

PILOT PROGRAM BLOG
seattlest.com reports on the University's blog of results so far as noted on the UW Kindle Pilot blog by the Computer Science & Engineering Dept.

If you follow the link, you'll see they want to annotate PDFs, but since this can't be done under the current licensing with Adobe, the University is converting the PDFs to the Kindle's own format instead, in order to be able to annotate the text, but since the textbooks include engineering materials, there is multi-column material as well as equations, the layouts for which tend to be lost or mangled when converted to the normal text-oriented formats.

Seattlest.com's article interpreted the blog comments as reports that the PDFs themselves were not being shown correctly, with multi-column format changed to single column format only and the math "messed up."

CONVERTED FILES (no longer PDF)
However, it's actually the converted files (in Amazon format rather than PDF) which are not showing correctly.  A number of us have written about this since May, before the DX was released when we saw in the early User's Guide for the DX that they were not offering PDF annotation features (which normally requires a fuller Adobe license for support).  I wrote a comment at Seattlest.com to try to explain that the DX can read and display PDFs accurately but that the problem involves converted files in another format that don't interpret the PDF layout correctly.

WORKAROUND FOR THE TIME BEING
In the meantime, the school's Kindle Pilot blog details a workaround they're trying, using a PDF to WORD converter such as Nuance's and then using Word to reformat the document to single column (this will often not be appropriate) and then sending the single-column'd WORD doc to Amazon's converter to put it into the Amazon format.

The school is of course asking Amazon "if these things can be improved."

THE FUTURE?
I imagine they are!  While I think the tech team has done a really good job with these units and the study tools for the regular books, the Kindles are early consumer-priced versions versus the expensive iRex models (already here but $800+) and Plastic Logic model due in early Spring with good PDF annotation features and more file formats supported but which will cost quite a bit more while not offering web access for reference and research.

I think the DX screen at 9.7" is the smallest students could use for PDFs meant to display on a full letter page, and the landscape mode usually does help quite a bit in enlarging the fonts.  But for university use, I don't understand how students could enjoy not being able to highlight and add notes to their PDFs.  I'm puzzled why Amazon hasn't moved on this aspect of PDF use in academic settings for the coming Fall session as so many of us asked them to in May.  I'm hoping they find a way since they've chosen to run the college studies.

As a consumer-category customer not having to make notes for courses, I really enjoy reading on my DX (I find the screen beautiful to read from) and even highlighting and notating normal books, but if there is no other change coming, the one change they should make is to get the Adobe PDF annotations feature for the DX (and add the ePub format for all Kindles). Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

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(Older posts have older Kindle model info. For latest models, see CURRENT KINDLES page. )
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iRex DR1000S 'Paper tiger?' - DX size $989 US

First, I ran across a few more interesting stories and they're linked at my Twitter page, so if you're interested in additional news items that I don't expand on here, you can get them at twitter.com/kindleworld where we're limited to 140-character alerts but can still link you to the full stories.

The iRex Digital Reader DR1000S is reviewed by Bill Ray, of Register Hardware, and he subtitled it "Paper tiger?" which sums up his appraisal, amplified by the 55% Rating he gave it.

  Expectations can be high when the suggested price of this unit, somewhat larger than the Kindle DX, is more than twice the cost of the DX -- at $989 US (£599) for the iRex DR1000S vs the DX's $489, often referred to as "too expensive."

  He says it's not exactly comfortable for reading books due to its size, but I thought I'd feel that way about the DX and have come to find the size just fine.

  The screen is 10.2 inches (in diameter, I assume) with the same 16 levels of gray as the DX, and he finds that it "excels at rendering an A4 page, ideally from a PDF file" and describes it "a joy" and slim enough so that it feels like a clipboard.

As with the iRex iLiad (reviewed by AlexOnLinux after a year of use), it uses a stylus which has slight lag time.  While calling the hardware "superb," Ray writes that the interface is a "mess" with "appallingly designed processes" and:

" Take this scenario: imagine one has finished reading a PDF document and wishes to close it and then delete it. Closing the document involves nine key presses, in the correct order switching between side and bottom buttons, deleting the same document takes another eight: get one wrong and you're back to the start. We've not seen interfacing this bad for a very long time..."

The battery is affected by the capacitive screen if not much by the e-ink display and "would rarely allow 10 hours of reading."  On the other hand he was "using complex PDF files. and taking lots of notes"

For e-books, it supports Mobipocket but he says the model is "not intended for reading books."
  What?  The iRex iLiad (normally $850) deals with all kinds of file formats, so I don't know what he means, unless he means the device is mainly for pdfs, excel sheets and office documents. He adds:

" The value of this class of device is in the ability to make a load of scribbled notes onto a PDF file and then merge those notes into the PDF file for viewing elsewhere. "

 The iLiad model is open and has encouraged hackers to create apps that strip out pages with no notes and which change all notes into red marker -- really useful for ultra long documents.  But this model won't do that, for now.

His "Verdict"

" Despite the disappointing software and outrageous price this is, quite simply, the most effective way to read and make notes on long documents.  If you have to do that regularly, then the RD1000S is the best tool for the job, but try to get the company to pay for it. "

See the article for far more details and many photos. Below are ways to Share this post if you'd like others to see it.
-- The Send to Kindle button works well only on Firefox currently.

Send to Kindle

(Older posts have older Kindle model info. For latest models, see CURRENT KINDLES page. )
If interested, you can also follow my add'l blog-related news at Facebook and Twitter
Questions & feedback are welcome in the Comment areas (tho' spam is deleted). Thanks!