Round up #103: Google sinks pirates, Send to Kindle for Chrome
The ILMK Round ups are short pieces which may or may not be expanded later.
Send to Kindle for Chrome
While I haven’t seen a press release yet, Amazon just added their Send to Kindle feature to Google Chrome:
If you haven’t used it yet in one of the other versions, it’s a nifty little feature. Since I surf primarily with Chrome, this is a nice plus for me.
The basic idea is that you get a little icon in your Google Chrome. When you are on a website, you can tap or click that button (or do Alt+K). Amazon then formats the page (pulling out advertising, for example) and sends it to your Kindle(s).
You get to choose which Kindles…and Kindle apps. You can select whether to use wi-fi or 3G…and that will impact which Kindles/apps are shown to you.
If you send it via 3G, there could be charges…there won’t be with wi-fi.
I tested it, by the way…you don’t need to select a device at all. You can choose just to have it sent to your archives.
You can choose whether or not to be warned if they think it may not look very good.
The other thing you can do is log out. If you were on a shared computer (at work, for example), you might want to log out so someone else doesn’t send things to your Kindle.
You can set them here:
Send to Kindle Browser Extension Settings
I’m not sure what will happen if you try it before you’ve installed the extension.
Installing it was easy. Using it was easy (although it took up to a couple of minutes).
The one thing I’d say is to watch out for memory use. You get a total of 5GB it’s your personal documents library, and I deliberately download one with a bunch of pictures to my Kindle Fire (I used http://www.imdb.com/). It looked to me like it was 144KB…that’s not huge, but still, seven of those or so equals a typical novel.
Update: several people (a couple on this blog, and in other places) have pointed out that there has been an extension available for Google Chrome called “Send to Kindle” for some time:
That’s not created by Amazon, the new one is. My guess is that Amazon may force the other one to change its name…even though Klip.me had it first. Amazon has done that before with other things involving the name “Kindle”. I think one of the biggest differences may be the ability to send the article just to your Amazon server-based personal documents library…that’s how I’ll use it most often, I think. There are also other products that do similar things, by the way.
Google sinks pirates…in search results
The Telegraph: “Google pushes pirate sites down the search rankings”
In my recent rotating post in The Writer’s Guide to E-Publishing (I’m the second Saturday of the month), I wrote about DRM (Digital Rights Management). One way that pirates benefit is that people who can’t find a book on their normal store’s website (Amazon, Barnes & Noble) will just Google the book…and may not even realize that the place they find it is distributing it without authorization.
For that reason, rightsholders have been asking Google to demote pirate sites in search results…keep them from being the first thing that appears.
The obvious question is, how does Google tell?
It has to do with “valid copyright removal notices” that the search engine gets from copyright owners. The owner will allege that a given site is infringing on their rights.
How many does Google get?
How about 4.3 million…in one month?
I wonder how much money it costs Google to deal with those…
Is this going to have a significant impact on piracy?
It depends on why the person is pirating. If it matters to them how many people download the book (because, perhaps, they are advertising supported…or they charge for the books), maybe. If they do it for philosophical reasons, it won’t matter. Some pirates do it to “free the information”, and others do it to get back at “big publishing”. Those will be unaffected.
By the way, there has been a lot of talk recently about these “take down” notices being used inappropriately to shut down a legitimate book lending site:
What is alleged to have happened was that authors/publishers sent take down notices to LendInk. The site was a lending coordination site…there are others. They coordinate lending between e-book users…lending which the publisher has already approved. Some books are “lending enabled”…the publisher agrees with Amazon or Barnes & Noble that the book can be loaned once for fourteen days.
So, a site which coordinates the lending between the e-book users is not distributing the book without authorization.
However, that may not be immediately obvious to a publisher when its book shows up “for free” on a site…perhaps in a Google search.
If you read that article, you’ll see that this story has an interesting narrative…again, I don’t know how much of it is actually accurate.
I spy with my Kindle Fire…
Okay, most of the apps I get are free (hey, I almost always get the Free App of the Day). However, I did pay ninety-nine cents for
Be careful of this one, because it could be an incredible time gobbler.
It’s really quite simple: it’s live feeds from webcams around the world.
Looks to me like there are well over 1,500 of them. You can search by:
- Category (Animals, Beach, Sports, and so on)
- Country
- State
- City
as well as entering your own keywords.
You can also very often control the cameras! You might have to wait your turn on that, though. They do tell you how long you have to wait…I’ve had it be as short as twenty seconds. Then, it’s a gestural interface (pinch and spread to zoom, swipe to move), although not all cameras will have it or have zoom, of course. When you search you can limit it to PTZ (Pan-Tilt-Zoom) cameras, if you want.
One of the first things I tried was the Toledo Zoo Hippo Cam…and yes, a hippo swam right by very quickly!
It’s going to vary by time of day what works well…it’s late in the evening here, so I have on the a zoo in Mutsu, Japan (I do like looking at animals).
You can also look at things by random choice, top rated, most recent, and favorites.
One other cool feature: you can take a screen shot. I tested that, and it showed up easily in my Fire’s Gallery.
Plugged in, at home, on wi-fi, I think I’ll be using this. I’d write more about it, but I’m watching some sharks in Sweden. 
This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.
August 15, 2012 at 3:36 am |
Send to Kindle for Chrome is not new, I’ve been using it for at least 6 months. It works superbly. I use it mainly to capture recipes and it seems to understand which parts of the page it needs to capture … it’s magic.
August 15, 2012 at 1:02 pm |
Thanks for writing, Harold!
I think you are referencing a different extension, not made by Amazon. That’s going to be confusing for a lot of people. The one that’s been around is from klip.me…and is called just “Send to Kindle”. The official Amazon one is “Send to Kindle for Chrome”, I believe.
I think it’s possible Amazon will force Klip.me to change the name of theirs, even though it was around first. Amazon has gotten people to change their website names and such for including “Kindle” in the domain. This is different, but we’ll see what happens.
I’ll update the article to clarify that…other people are mentioning that.
August 15, 2012 at 4:20 am |
I found the article linked below very interesting, concerning the rise of the paperbacks and their influence on hardbacks. The effect of higher volume distribution on price is telling, and historical effects can be extrapolated to the future market when paperbacks are supplanted to a large degree by eBooks. Again, the hardback books could become the more “elite” purchases, and the “middle ground” trade publications are replaced by eBooks. Paperbacks might still hang around as super-cheap options for luddites.
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/137715
I always enjoy reading about your views on physical books, especially considering your experience with book selling. Keep up the good work!
August 15, 2012 at 5:43 am |
Re: Send to Kindle/chrome — the naming is unfortunate/confusing as there already is a SendToKindle extension in the chrome store from klip.me. This extension is invoked from the Amazon site — not the Chrome extensions store as with virtually all other chrome extensions. However, this one does seem better suited to the kindle environment than klip.me (sendtokindle).
Personally I use Pocket which does what send to kindle does, but stores it on their own web site without the 5GB limitation, and it has some useful categorization and tagging capabilities of the stuff you save — it also lets you keep track of read/unread status. Pocket is a chrome extension on the chrome side, and works in conjunction with a Pocket app on the Kindle Fire side (yes, it only works on the KF, whereas the Amazon extension works with any kindle or reading app.)
One big thing that Pocket let’s me do is right click on links within a page, and save what’s “behind” the link — very handy for processing emails or web pages which are largely lists of links to possibly interesting articles that you might want to read later.
Pocket also works with Google Reader to let you save items in RSS feeds to be read later.
Once an article is read on pocket, you can leave it on your Pocket account in perpetuity, or share it out to some other (usually social networking) site, or send it via email to another destination of your choice. The Pocket approach also has the advantage of only using KF memory sufficient to hold just the article currently being read — all long term article/document storage is in the cloud on the pocket site. Send to kindle keeps stuff in personal documents, many of which could at any point in time be downloaded on your kindle and consuming thereby scarce memory.