Library resources online - explore your regional libraries for some amazing resources. Also, my Amazon ECHO arrived yesterday. Initial brief report.

LIBRARY RESOURCES ONLINE FOR MANY REGIONAL AREAS

  I've mentioned this earlier and am updating the info -- there is a treasure that many of us have at our fingertips without realizing it -- none of my friends knew we had the access I'm describing in this updated posting although we are all somewhat heavy readers.

One day, while looking for information on something, I wanted to access Infotrac which has articles going back to 1970s or so, in full text, for participant institutions like my city library.  I live in California, and the requirement for accessing my library's special online resources is California residence.

  To give an example of what may be available in your area -- the Berkeley and San Francisco libraries both give its members access to databases that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive for most of us.  And merely as a California resident, I am able to access both.  (I didn't look for others.)  Many of you will have similar access in your areas.

 Infotrac is one of the offerings and a more common one.
  See http://www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org/services_and_resources/online_resources.php for an example of what is often available through public libraries in the U.S.
.  I saw, on a web search, that many remote county libraries have the same access, so it's not just where a university might be.

  Besides Infotrac, I clicked on one of the gazillion links that came up on my screen, this time:
  http://0-proquest.safaribooksonline.com.www.berkeley-public.org/home
  This link will work only for people with a Berkeley Public Library card, even if California residence is all that's needed.  A similar link should work with your own public library's link, which you can google.  That'll depend on the state you're in.

Safari Books Online
To see, OTHERWISE, what Safari Books Online is like without the special public library access, here's their own site.  The regular situation (without library access) -- They have a free trial, but the monthly cost is, at $39/mo. for full access to all their books (see what's included, below) in the Safari "Bookshelf" option.  In this blog article, I'm describing the (free) "Library" option instead.
   I have no affiliation with Safari Books Online.  And, at $39/mo, or $399/yr for full access to all their books  (no limit on time spent online)  their regular offerings may be worth a look for any who need such books regularlyh for their work or study.

  The rest of us may have, though,  free public library access to what we need from that collection.

  The free library access version, if your library has it, is to almost all the current major computer/technical books that I've browsed at Barnes & Noble while lamenting that I couldn't justify spending that much money, since I wanted to read so many of them. It gives access to most of the current offerings I'd browse at the store.

 Included in the free Safari Books Online are O'Reilly Media, Prentice Hall, Addison-Wesley, PeachPit Press, New Riders, Sams, que, Adobe Press, and many others.

 It's all current -- books on items like Photoshop CS5, some on using Facebook :-) --  and so I tried it at the library (from home) for free to see what the various e-books are like, to read on my desktop or netbook.

 These offerings are FULL TEXT and speedy online reading if you have fast Internet access.  Every now and then a graphic image might not show up where it should but all the text is there as well as most of the graphic images. I did a tutorial on fixing photos from a book that normally costs $40 to buy.

I hope that most reading this will be able to find similar resources at their regional or state libraries.

Pennsylvania's Free Library of Philadelphia offers a library card for out-of-state-residents for $50/year (the link is to www.freelibrary.org/register/getcard1.cfm ).  No in-person visit required in Philadelphia.
  HOWEVER, while they do carry Infotrac and a myriad of other reference databases, they unfortunately don't carry Safari Online books.  They DO carry Overdrive for ebooks (for those of you who don't get Overdrive for easy Kindle book public library borrowing on Whispernet and need to rely on 3M instead but would prefer the easier to use Overdrive).

My Amazon ECHO arrived today
I ordered the almost vaporware Echo in January, and it actually arrived yesterday, after I had really lost interest.  But I'll report tonight on my initial explorations and I have to admit it's more fun than I had guessed.  After reading in the forums about all the things that didn't work quite right at first, from the paying beta-exploration customers who nevertheless related what they did like so far, I found that most of my instructions were working well (without doing the 'training' in my voice and enunciation), after the requested almost daily feedback to the Echo team who are adding features on a regular basis.  For example, lowering the volume while I'm doing something else, normally you'd say 'softer' or 'lower volume' or 'level 4' -- but I just said, naturally, "Alexa, not so loud" and it went down.  It's 'learned' from customer feedback.

Word on the street now is that Amazon has positioned itself ahead of Apple, who had to stall theirs for a while, and mainstream reviewers are more delighted than they'd expected to be.

I'll blog on this tonight when I get back. It's been interesting to see my own reactions to using such an odd duck but also I was surprised at why I like certain aspects of it. A sort of weird but fun experience I'll explain later tonight.

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Check often: Temporarily-free recently published Kindle books
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.  Liked-books under $1
UK-Only: recently published free books, bestsellers, or £5 Max ones
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.

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


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Kindle News: Children's illustrated classics-narration+music at $0.99 each. Kindle Fire Reading View. Big3 publishers ending Agreements with Apple? Dilbert+Doonesbury Exclusive. Kindle Fire Best E-Reader? Amazon gets Digital Gift patent. Borrowing from the Library. Nook Classic converts "Kindled" to "Nookd" in text. UK review of Kindle Touch. UK Bookseller tries to ban Kindles. - UPDATE on Dilbert book

(Apologies for the long title, but rather than do many blog entries which could get the blog credit for many more website views -- and for lots of blog entries -- I put what I found into one lengthy entry.)

Note: Kindle Edition blog subscribers can use Menu/Article Mode to read the stories more easily when clicking through the news links.

47 CHILDREN'S CLASSIC EBOOKS FOR $0.99 each - for a limited time
47 children's classic e-books for Kindle for $0.99 each, on a limited time basis, from Rabbit Ears, normally sold for over $7 each.  The Kindlepost blog did not say when the offer expires though.
  They are illustrated and include music and narration by various celebrities.
  While these are for Kindle Fire, SOME of them will work with the Kindle for Android app as well.  You can check the latter on the product page under device availability near the top.

I see a review showing Robin Williams narrating Pecos Bill, but this doesn't show up in the product description for some reason.

KINDLE FIRE'S WEB BROWSER "READING VIEW"
As many know, when you're reading a web page on the Kindle Fire, and you want to read a particular story, clicking on it, but find the type too small or there's too much junk surrounding it, you can look at the bottom status line and probably see the "eyeglasses" icon which, if you click on it, will put you in to Reading View mode.  It is very slick.

I just read a review of the Kindle Fire which said that the new Reading View "doesn't stitch together multiple pages of a story into one, instead only yielding a large-type ad-free version of the current page."
  I explained the following in a comment:

' It does, though. You just swipe up to read the rest of the piece below.  It's actually very smooth.  I had chosen to use Dolphin HD browser instead of Amazon's Silk, but with this new Reading View, I've switched to Silk because it's very effective. '

THREE OF THE BIG6 PROBABLY TERMINATING THEIR AGREEMENT WITH APPLE
Good E-Reader's Mercy Pilkington points out that the three publishers who settled with the DOJ and various state class action lawsuits will have, "pending a wait period," just "one week to terminate their agreement with Apple on how much ebooks will cost."
 Pilkington says "the coming month is when the 60-day wait period on the settlement will expire" and soon there are likely to be discussions between retailers and the publishers about changed pricing for eBooks -- and few expect the pricing would go up :-)


DILBERT AND DOONESBURY ANNIVERSARY SETS EXCLUSIVELY ON KINDLE FIRE


These are two new anthologies marking anniversaries (Dilbert's 20th, Doonesbury's 40th): the Dilbert 2.0 set of four books and the Doonesbury Retrospective set of four.

NOTE: The Dilbert strip shown above stresses that you need to double-click on a strip frame to enlarge it for readability.  Then you tap the right edge to move to the next frame.   To normalize the strip size, double-click on the current frame to toggle the resizing off.
  Having said that, I noted that the Dilbert strips leave margins on the sides and top and so they could be larger.  Needing to enlarge them can halt the flow of reading, but these short strips are readable as-is unless you need very large fonts.
  The Doonesbury images enlarge to leave no margins, and from what I saw in the Sample (no actual strip was shown which means I won't be buying one unless they make a sample that shows an actual strip), they make better use of space when enlarging the images.

  ALSO, I did buy the Dilbert The Dot-Com Bubble and found that there is NO BOOKMARKING of pages or table of contents with links.  In fact Scott Adam's history of his experiences for the years covered by this volume, takes up about 25% of that book and the only way I could get to the cartoons was to find the starting location and press MENU/GoTo and type in Location 1325 to get to the starting cartoon in that book.
  It does keep track of the last page read though.

Dilbert UPDATE - I should re-emphasize that the comics, once they begin in these books, are readable as-is, for most, and that the frame enlargements if needed are done by double-clicking on a frame and then pressing the right-edge to advance to the next frame while the rest of it darkens.

I think that a customer reviewer actually was referring to comics referenced in Scott Adams' introduction and personal history in which samples are shown but these actually are not readable and probably aren't meant to be.  (Those threw me initially but I found that the 75% main course is easily readable without the double-click enlargements --  I'd thought at first that they were the ones meant to be read.)  Other customer-reviewers are upset because the Dilbert 2.0 series is not available except on the Kindle Fire currently and they give it 1-star ratings as a result but weren't reviewing the book itself.

I'm adding this update because many Dilbert fans will very likely enjoy the author's personal history of the decade for each set in the series and I'm enjoying his comments on many of the comics chosen for the book - giving the reason he chose them and some facts behind the comic strip being shown.  Most will know he's pretty cynical about office life and it's a reason for the popularity of these.  Also check out the Q&A with Adams, which is part of the product page.

SIZE: Each of these books is about 90 MB, which is 90 times larger than the average novel.  In other words, each will take the space that about 90 novels would on the Kindle Fire storage space.
  I always have a Wi-Drive in my purse so I can just read them from there wirelessly at anytime, but if you don't use a solution like that, watch the storage space you have left.  A Wi-Drive unit is smaller than a cell-phone and can hold from 16-64 GB of files to be streamed and shared on several devices at the same time.

A "BEST E-BOOK READERS" LISTING STARTS WITH KINDLE FIRE
I was startled to see, in an e-reader comparison at Tech Goes Strong, the Kindle Fire listed in the top spot as an eBook reader since it's a hybrid tablet/reader and the Kindle line does have topnotch dedicated eInk readers.  However, I do sometimes take the KFire out instead of the KTouch, but if I'm worried about battery life that day, then I take the eInk reader, and of course book-reading on this is easier on the eyes but the Kindle Fire is surprisingly comfortable unless you're in direct sunlight.

The KFire is followed on this listing by the iPad 3, B&N's Nook Glowlight, the Sony Reader, and the Kobo one. These are actually summary comparisons.

AMAZON GRANTED DIGITAL GIFT PATENT
VR-Zone points out that there's a "twist to the patent," which would otherwise be silly, in that in addition to selecting a digital gift, sending a notification to the recipient, and having the recipient download the gift, "it also describes the ability for the gift-giver to DELAY PAYMENT for the item until the digital gift has been accepted.  If the gift hasn’t been accepted and downloaded by a specific time, the order can be cancelled and no payment will be made by the gift-giver."

 Amazon applied for the patent in 2008, so it's taken about 4 years.  Now let's see them actually implement the delayed-payment feature.

BORROWING EBOOKS FROM THE LIBRARY
This how-to by Clayton Morris for FoxNews was of interest to me in a couple of ways.  First, the header shows the first generation Nook from a couple of years ago, and second, it describes clearly how simple it is for Kindlers to borrow a book from a public library while detailing the steps necessary for the "bit more cumbersome" process used with the Nook.  It'll be useful for Nook owners new to the procedure though.

A NOOK EDITION OF TOLSTOY'S WAR AND PEACE CONVERTS "KINDLED" to "NOOKD"
VentureBeat's Sean Ludwig references the original blog that discovered this special conversion that applied the changes of the dreaded "Kindle" word to "Nook" throughout the classic, producing sentences like, "It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern…."   :-)

  (This could have been a very early anticipation of the GlowLight.)

  While some had wondered if B&N would go so far, it's almost surely caused by the publisher, ironically named "Superior Formatting Publishing" doing a Search and Replace when converting a Kindle book (created first) to the Nook platform and wanting to remove any Amazon Kindle references.

UK REVIEW OF KINDLE TOUCH NOW FINALLY AVAILABLE THERE
V3.co.uk's Madeline Bennett reviews it.  The long recharge time is caused by recharging it via USB connection to a computer, which takes much longer than using a power adapter.  A new Kindle with many new books being added to it will also use more battery power at first because each book is indexed for later keyword searches.

HAY BOOKSELLER'S CAMPAIGN TO DRIVE KINDLES OUT OF TOWN
This was just funny, though I can appreciate the worry.  The Guardian has fun with the story about Derek Addyman's remarks to the Daily Mail (which has many colorful photos) about the new gadgets that "have no soul."  He further explains, "Booksellers here definitely want them banned. You see people walking around with Kindles and they are like robots in another world.

‘Books are sociable and people stop and talk to each other about them.  Kindles are just a phase and they won’t last. They are our enemy."

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Current Kindle Models for reference, plus free-ebook search links

US: Kindle Fire  7" tablet - $199 Kindle NoTouch ("Kindle") - $79/$109 Kindle Touch, WiFi - $99/$139 Kindle Touch, 3G/WiFi - $149/$189 Kindle Keybd 3G - $189, Free, slow web Kindle DX - $379, Free, slow web

UK: Kindle Basic, NoTouch - £89 Kindle Touch WiFi, UK - £109 Kindle Touch 3G/WiFi, UK - £169 Kindle Keyboard 3G, UK - £149   Keybd: w/ Free, slow 3G WEB

OTHER International Kindle NoTouch Basic - $109 Kindle Touch WiFi - $139 Kindle Touch 3G/WiFi - $189 Kindle Keybd 3G - $189   Keybd: w/ Free, slow 3G WEB

Check often: Temporarily-free recently published Kindle books
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.  Liked-books under $1
UK-Only: recently published free books, bestsellers, or £5 Max ones
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.

  *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.

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!

Library resources online - ask your regional libraries

LIBRARY RESOURCES ONLINE FOR MANY REGIONAL AREAS

  I've mentioned this before, but there is a treasure that many of us have at our fingertips without realizing it -- none of my friends knew we had the access I'm about to describe though we are all somewhat heavy readers.

One day, while looking for information on something, I wanted to access Infotrac which has articles going back to 1970s or so, in full text, for participant institutions like my city library.  I live in California, and the requirement for accessing my library's special online resources is California residence. The Berkeley and San Francisco libraries both give its members access to databases that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive for most of us.  And merely as a California resident, I am able to access both.  (I didn't look for others.)  Many of you will have similar access in your areas.

 Infotrac is one of the offerings and a more common one.
  http://www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org/services_and_resources/online_resources.php.  I saw, on a web search, that many remote county libraries have the same access, so it's not just where a university might be.

  Besides Infotrac, I clicked on one of the zillion links that came up on my screen, this time:
  http://0-proquest.safaribooksonline.com.www.berkeley-public.org/home
  This link will work only for people with a Berkeley Public Library card, even if California residence is all that's needed.  A similar link should work with your own public library's link, which you can google.  That'll depend on the state you're in.

Safari Books Online
To see, otherwise, what Safari Books Online is like, here's their own site.  They have a 10-day free trial, but one can take a month at a time, at $23/mo. for access to 10 books per month (the Safari "Bookshelf" option rather than "Library" option.  I have no affiliation with Safari Books Online.  But at $23 for one month, access to 10 books (no limit on time spent online) is worth a look who need such books for their work.

  The free library access version, if your library has it, is to almost all the current major computer/technical books that I've browsed at Barnes & Noble while lamenting I couldn't justify spending that much money, since I wanted to read so many of them.

 Included in Safari Books Online are O'Reilly Media, Prentice Hall, Addison-Wesley, PeachPit Press, New Riders, Sams, que, Adobe Press, and many others.

 It's all current -- books on items like Photoshop CS5, some on using Facebook :-) --  and so I tried it to see what the various e-books are like, to read on my desktop or netbook.

 These offerings are FULL TEXT and in speedy online reading if you have fast Internet access.  Every now and then a graphic image doesn't show up where it should but all the text is there.

I hope that most reading this will be able to find similar resources at their regional or state libraries.


Kindle 3's   (UK: Kindle 3's),   DX Graphite

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Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers. 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!

Library resources online - and a Twitter book - Update2

UPDATE 8/22/09 1:33 PM - Original posting 8/20/09 - 6:37 PM - Fixed links and added Safari Online info.

I had wondered for some time why people enjoy Twitter.  Looking at it, with my new personal account, I was perplexed.   It just looked like a wasteland to me, and it was slow too.   In December I typed to the void that maybe I should be doing something with it.  And then forgot about it until late March when I wrote an apology to the few there for not being active and then decided to start a Kindleworld Twitter acct.

  Even then, it wasn't until late June that I decided to produce one mild 'tweet' from Kindleworld and discovered at the same time that there were some news people, on Twitter, whom I'd always liked reading or hearing.  Now I was able to get their updates from whatever assignment they're on.
  WeFollow is a directory of interesting people active on Twitter and you can search by category or name.

  My Twitter Home page became a mild stream of really interesting short thoughts (sometimes alerts) that come in more spontaneous, informal style, before they hit the broadcast news, dressed up and more cautiously phrased.  I appreciate the more human sounds of these newsprint and tv news beings when they're sleepy or less guarded without scripts or bosses approving every word.
  I also like getting their immediate reactions to reports by other news organizations too.  So I decided to keep the Kindleworld account for digital and int'l news and use my personal account for local friends (though most of them don't use Twitter yet) and online ones.

  In other words, I came to like using Twitter, probably too much.  Still, I do want to know more about it -- the social rules (not that much maybe, except to credit others for info we're passing on and not to deluge others with every passing thought), what certain symbols and abbreviations mean, what level of activity is considered okay, or annoying.

  I decided to get a book about the culture,  so I went through about 15 product pages of books on Twitter and the associated customer reviews.

LIBRARY RESOURCES ONLINE
  Then I remembered the treasure that many of us have at our fingertips without realizing it -- none of my friends knew we had the access I'm about to describe though we are all somewhat heavy readers.

One day, while looking for information on something, I wanted to access Infotrac which has articles going back to 1970s or so, in full text, for participant institutions like my city library.  I live in California, and the requirement for accessing my library's special online resources is California residence. The Berkeley and San Francisco libraries both give its members access to databases that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive for most of us.  And as a California resident, I am able to access both.  (I didn't bother to look for others.)

 Infotrac is one of the offerings and a more common one.
  http://www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org/services_and_resources/online_resources.php.  I saw, on a web search, that many remote county libraries have the same access, so it's not just where a university might be.

  Besides Infotrac, I clicked on one of the zillion links that came up on my screen, this time:
  http://0-proquest.safaribooksonline.com.www.berkeley-public.org/home
  This link will work only for people with a Berkeley Public Library card, even if California residence is all that's needed.  A similar link should work with your own public library's link, which you can google.  That'll depend on the state you're in.

UPDATE 8/22/09: To see, otherwise, what Safari Books Online is like, here's their own site.  They have a 10-day free trial, but one can take a month at a time, at $23/mo. for access to 10 books per month (the Safari "Bookshelf" option rather than "Library" option.  I have no affiliation with Safari Books Online.  But at $23 for one month, access to 10 books (no limit on time spent online) is worth a look.

  The (free) library access, if your library has it, is to almost all the current major computer/technical books that I've browsed at Barnes & Noble while lamenting I couldn't justify spending that much money, since I wanted to read so many of them.

 Included in Safari Books Online are O'Reilly Media, Prentice Hall, Addison-Wesley, PeachPit Press, New Riders, Sams, que, Adobe Press, and many others.

 It's all current -- books on items like Photoshop CS4, some on using Facebook :-) --  and so, today I tried it to see what the various Twitter books are like.

 These offerings are FULL TEXT and in speedy online reading if you have fast Internet access.  Every now and then a graphic image doesn't show up where it should but all the text is there.

 I was able to go through The Twitter Book at length.  The Amazon customer feedback reviews are positive and well-written.  I wound up buying this one because although I can get read it free online, I like having it as a reference on my Kindle, which I can read anywhere without looking at the LCD screen.  I use the online resource for learning (Photoshop) a chapter at a time.

I hope that most reading this will be able to find similar resources at their regional or state libraries.


ADDED ITEM 8/20/09, 11:25 pm - Original posting at 6:37 pm same day
  Twitter rage affects airlines, with complaints tweeted from airplane seats.

' ...airlines are discovering that fuming passengers who have been stranded, delayed or just plain piqued are increasingly letting their undiluted rage fly around the Internet, often from the confines of their cramped airplane seat...

 Billy Sanez, who manages social media for AMR (American), said social media enable better dialogue with customers... '

Don't miss the youtube video & song "United Breaks Guitars" which was a big Internet hit and brought an apology and contribution from United.

---

I use Twitter to keep up with unusual items in the news, mostly for this site,
most of the alerts not posted on this blog.
  -   If interested in the added news items, visit the site page at http://twitter.com/kindleworld.   Thanks! 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!