Round up #162: compulsory sci-fi, Amazon Appstore goes global

Round up #162: compulsory sci-fi, Amazon Appstore goes global

The ILMK Round ups are short pieces which may or may not be expanded later.

Be careful what you wish…because it  might end up on the news

I don’t usually write about current events…I just don’t think this is really the place for it.

However, I did want to give kudos to Chuck Todd of MSNBC. During the recent events in Boston, someone on the phone started to give the contents of one of the suspects’ Amazon wish list (before things had gone very far). @Chuck Todd forcefully cut the person off, since it was preliminary at that point to presume guilt. I really thought that was responsible journalism: rather than just getting something first, it was clear that Chuck Todd was concerned about giving watchers that kind of personal information at that stage.

I always wanted to bring this up to get you to think about your own Amazon wish lists. If you make them public (you don’t need to do that), that can make public some information that you think about as personal. You may use your lists simply to remind yourself what to buy later (or even what to discuss). I would bet that potential employers (and dates) use Amazon wish lists in making decisions. Sure, your Facebook page more have more details, but I think that if people think you read (or watch or listen to or play) certain things, it could really prejudice them about you.

“I don’t care if you are in the middle of that Dostoevsky novel, you have to read your Heinlein first!”

Captain’s Log: We appear to have entered a bizarre parallel universe, where science fiction is respected and required reading in school. Head…spinning. Reality…warped, turning…upside down…

Honestly, I’m not quite sure how I feel about this

bill introduced into the West Virginia legislature

It would require that science fiction be taught “…in certain existing middle school and high school courses”.

One of the best classes I ever took was a science fiction class in high school. However, that was an elective…we weren’t being forced to read it.

I mean, after all this time getting science fiction to be mainstreamed in the movies and TV, nothing is going to make people hate it more than requiring it in school. 😉 I’m just kidding there…a good teacher can make required material something with which you wish to continue after your education ends…but it does take a really good teacher. Otherwise, especially for teenagers, there is a natural resistance to anything compulsory.

My teacher also liked science fiction. Can you imagine what a class like that would be like taught be someone who is being forced to teach it, and doesn’t respect it? The class might become all about the flaws…

Don’t get me wrong, I do agree with Arthur C. Clarke:

“Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.”

Well, sort of…as I think I’ve said before in this blog, I think they should read all three…and everything else. 🙂

I just am not convinced that this is the best way to go about it. Can’t you also just see those meetings where school board members argue about what exactly meets the science fiction requirement? I’ve been in discussions about that that have gone on for years, even decades…and that’s with people who are very well read in the topic.

For more information, see this

Blastr interview with the bill’s sponsor, Delegate Ray Canterbury

Publishers Weekly: “Penguin Close to Ending DoJ, EU Price-fixing Suits”

This

Publishers Weekly article

sets May 3rd as the next important date in the Department of Justice’s legal action against Penguin and the Agency Model. I thin that will go smoothly, and Judge Denise Cote (who acts commendably quickly) will approve the agreement.

That doesn’t mean Penguin prices drop the next day. I wrote about Macmillan settling on February 9th, and it wasn’t until April  6 that I confirmed that they were no longer setting the prices at Amazon (it probably happened the day before).

Still, this is good news, and we may see sales at Amazon on Penguin e-books by the hot summer reading season. Random House will also be bound by the agreement once the merger is settled. That deal was recently approved in Canada, and will probably happen before the end of the year.

American Libraries: “Report from Manhattan: Librarians Navigating the Digital Revolution”

You know, it seems from my reading lately that not too many organizations say, “Yay! I get to meet with publishers today.” 😉

Believe me, I’d be excited to talk to the bigwigs at Random House, or Tor.

Still, it was very nice to a respectful report in this

American Libraries (the magazine of the American Library Association) article

from Maureen Sullivan, American Library Association’s President.

The last time I wrote about Maureen Sullivan, the President seemed to me to be a lot more…well, let me switch that to “less reserved”.

ALA & AAP: the relationship between public libraries and publishers

The article definitely suggests that there is hope in working out better deals between libraries and publishers. It’s a positive outlook, something I like to see from a leader (a certain other leader of a book-related group might want to consider the approach). 😉

Amazon Appstore goes intenational…to almost 200 countries

This is a strong indicator that Amazon may expand the Kindle Fire to more countries…although the Amazon Appstore certainly sells for other devices.

Amazon press release

A bit weirdly to me, they make the point of mentioning Papua New Guinea and Vatican City…I have a hard time seeing the most famous resident of the latter playing Angry Birds… 😉

This will mean a lot more money for app developers.

You may actually see an app from me at some point. I think I have a good idea for one, and I could write it…but I couldn’t program it or distribute it. I’ve talked with somebody who is involved with that end, and we may do something in the future.

Pilot Season at Amazon

Look, it’s not easy to pick which TV series are going to succeed. Does anybody else remember The Barefoot Executive? It was a Disney Kurt Russell comedy (but not a Midvale High one) where a chimpanzee could pick the winners and losers.

Now, I’m not saying that Amazon Prime members are like chimpanzees (not that there’s anything wrong with that) 😉 but Amazon has turned to them to pick which TV series will be produced by its in-house studio.

Yep, just like Amazon has in-house publishing, they have in-house video.

You can see the pilots here

Amazon Original Pilots

and help Amazon pick.

There are some interesting possibilities, including one based on the movie Zombieland, and an Oz series.

What do you think? Are you soured on Penguin even if the prices do come down? Do you really not care who publishes the books you read? Have I got you worried about what’s on your wish list? How did you feel about the books you were required to read in school? Feel free to tell me and my readers what you think by commenting on this post.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Digital Public Library launches

Digital Public Library launches

I’ve written before (briefly) about the Digital Public Library:

http://dp.la/

This is an ambitious project to make works available for free online. It is funded partially by the US Federal government through the Institute of Museum and Library Services, although there are many private partners as well.

The DPLA went online yesterday; I wanted to wait to write about it until I’d had a chance to try it out some.

When somebody says “library” to me, I still think primarily of a place to borrow books to read. That’s what I expected here: a super-duper Project Gutenberg, where I could go in and get classic (public domain) books to read. I was particularly looking forward to obscurities that I couldn’t get other places on the web.

I have to say, at this point, I’m a little disappointed in how it met that image of mine.

I put “Tom Sawyer” into the search, and I would have expected The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer Abroad, and Tom Sawyer, Detective to pop up in easily downloadable links. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a lot of commentaries as well.

Instead, the first thing that appears is an image of some sort of metal plaque depicting Mark Twain.

Next came The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as text. I clicked on that, and it gave me a link to the file at

http://www.archive.org

Sure, that would still get me the book…but the DPLA is serving more as a search engine in that case than a library.

I looked back at it: the picture of the medal object also took me to another site…the picture wasn’t stored at the DPLA.

Glancing through the first page of the results, none of them were the other books…they were mostly images.

I could filter for text, and I did.

There were reviews, and a reader’s guide, and a picture of a movie theatre from the 1930s (showing a movie about Tom Sawyer)…basically, ephemera rather than the books themselves.

Now, I’m a big fan of ephemera. I love looking at old things like that…playbills, fanzines, posters. It just isn’t what I expected the main focus to be in a library.

I first tried going there on my Kindle Fire with a different book…and what I got was a PDF. It wouldn’t display online on my Fire, and downloading it didn’t seem to work. That was on a different site. The file for that book is also on Archive.org, which would have worked better. I wonder if they are trying to find best links, or what the process is.

There are some cool features, which indicate that the future could be much brighter.

On the home screen, you have links for Exhibitions, Map, Timeline, and Apps.

The Exhibitions are special collections. Right now, we have

• Activism in the U.S.
• America’s Great Depression and Roosevelt’s New Deal
• Boston Sports Temples
• Bread and Roses Strike of 1912: Two Months in Lawrence, Massachusetts, that Changed Labor History
• History of Survivance: Upper Midwest 19th Century Native American Narratives
• Indomitable Spirits: Prohibition in the United States
• This Land Is Your Land: Parks and Public Spaces

I’m guessing it’s not a coincidence that two of the stories have to do with Massachusetts right now, but it might be.

Activism in the U.S. brought a number of sub-topics…and a sub-topic basically got me some text and a slideshow of images. It was a bit like something you would see on many websites, although the images were unusual.

I thought the Map might be fun. Without selecting anything, I was told there were 2,064,314 results. There may be more things in the library which aren’t able to be located geographically in the USA.

I’m in California, and at the initial zoom level, there was a circle (one of 13 total) over California and a bit of Nevada showing 14K (presumably, 14,0000 files). I zoomed in (and panned with my finger), and there were 12K in California, 2K in Nevada. Zooming in didn’t change the numbers, so I tapped the 12K.

As that point, it appeared I could scroll through those 12,000 items. Tapping where it said “California”, then I could see it a bit more manageably…and then umber became 13,254. That’s oddly a mismatch…perhaps the California search includes things about California?

I next used the searchbox for the map, and searched for my town. That gave me 2 results on my Fire…but I couldn’t seem to get them to show up. On my desktop, I got twelve results…and I could see those.

I used the Timeline, and scrolled back to 1939 (an incredible year in pop culture history). They listed 11,221 items. To refine the results, you click the “Show” button (I didn’t find that entirely intuitive).

The order of most results were: image; text; moving image; sound; and physical object. There was a click for more, which added: dataset; collection; software; an interactive resource.

Interactive resource appeared to be the timeline itself, and software told me that there were zero when I got there (but one before I clicked it).

The moving images weren’t actually theatrical movies (there would be ones in the public domain from them), but short subjects, sometimes they might have been from newsreels, sometimes they were more scientific.

Clicking on Federal Theatre at the World’s Fair took me to another site, where it played on my desktop (I didn’t try that one on my Fire).

The Timeline would be a lot more interesting with actual public domain pop culture items in it…I still like it, but I’m a bit geeky about that.

Unfortunately, I have to say that’s generally going to be the appeal here. I was hoping for something that would make a lot more casually consumed media available…books, magazines, movies, radio shows, that sort of thing. Instead, at this point, I’d say this is more of academic interest. That’s still really valuable, and I hope they digitize a lot more. However, it’s a bit like a library that only has a rare books collection, and no popular titles.

I’ve written before about my hope that the Federal government might start digitizing lots of stuff in the public domain (they have tons of copies of that stuff at the Library of Congress and making it available for free in universal formats online. That may still happen…but I’m guessing it was easier to get funding for something that is more of a prestige item like this. I’m still going to hold out hopes for dime novels, though. 🙂

I was going to finish there, but I did a

search for “Tarzan”

Eleven results..three were text, and one of those was book review. The original book wasn’t there (easily obtainable legally on line), and there was an image of a Tarzan lunchbox from the Smithsonian! Again, I do think that’s cool…but not what I expected.

Go ahead and check out the DPLA…feel free to tell me and my readers what you think about it by commenting on this post.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Round up #161: Mamet goes indie, Kobo’s new premium EBR

Round up #161: Mamet goes indie, Kobo’s new premium EBR

The ILMK Round ups are short pieces which may or may not be expanded later.

Um…they do know migraine sufferers get auras, right? 😉

I had a relative who got migraine auras, and it wasn’t a fun thing…that relative literally couldn’t identify the face of a person who was helping them when what amounted to temporary functional blindness set in. That’s probably just my association with the word, though. 🙂

Kobo has introduced a new EBR (E-Book Reader), the

Kobo Aura HD

In my predictions for this year, I said I thought we probably wouldn’t see anything “groundbreaking” in hardware for EBRs and tablets in 2013. “…This year [2012], we had the frontlit reflective screens, and that’s truly significant. I’m just not picturing something like that.”

While this new Kobo reader does seem to be a nice device, I’d say it doesn’t invalidate what I thought.

They compare the device to other EBRs (it’s frontlit, like the Paperwhite and NOOK GlowLight, and is wi-fi only). They cite some numbers on how it’s better in some things (20% better screen, 2.4 times better on a three foot drop test).

It has a 1GHZ processor, which probably means faster “page turns” (although Amazon doesn’t tell us that for the Paperwhite).

It has a physical on and off switch for the light. 🙂

One evolution (not revolution) is that you can change the sharpness and weight of each of the fonts. You can also set the margins.

It comes with 4GB onboard memory (that’s a lot nowadays for a reflective device), with a micro-SD card slot that can hold up to 32GB.

They are pushing something that tracks your “reading life”, and lets you post it to your Facebook timeline.

They also have double-tap to zoom in on PDFs.

Here are the file formats:

• eBooks: EPUB, PDF, and MOBI
• Images: JPEG, GIF, PNG, and TIFF
• Text: TXT, HTML, XHTML, and RTF
• Comic Books: CBZ and CBR

Bottom line here, I do think this is probably a superior device in some ways, but I don’t see a lot of people switching to it as their main reading device and leaving their Kindle libraries behind. For people who are already Kobo users (for one thing, that might be a lot of my Canadian readers), they’ll welcome the changes the next time they upgrade or buy another device. For somebody who’s never gotten an EBR…well, in the USA, it’s hard to fight the Amazon and Barnes & Noble names for booklovers. Even though this comes with chess and Sudoku, it’s a book reader.

The retail price in the USA and Canada is $169.99. That’s about $30 more than the non-ad-supported Paperwhite.

From NYT Bestseller to Indie: David Mamet

New York Times:

New Publisher Authors Trust: Themselves

When you say “David Mamet” to me (you say “David Mamet” to people, right?) ;), my first thought is playwright. However, when you look at

Davd Mamet’s Amazon Author page

you’ll see quite a range of works, including this recent NYT bestseller:

The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture

So, it shows the evolving marketplace that Mamet is going to independently publish some upcoming works.

What’s really fascinating for me in the article by Leslie Kaufman, is that the “deal” was set up by ICM (International Creative Management), one of the best-known homes of literary and talent agents.

The idea of literary agents repping authors who are independently publishing seems a bit odd…it sounds like they would help the authors negotiate with themselves. 😉  However, many of the big agencies are offering the service, and it is part of the wave of the future.

If you are David Mamet, you don’t want to have to figure out the whole independent publishing yourself. You probably are just as happy going to the agent who has worked with you and tradpubs (traditional publishers) in the past, and just saying, “Set up that indie thing for me.” 😉

In this short excerpt from the article (which I recommend you read), Mamet is quoted as saying,

“Basically I am doing this because I am a curmudgeon,” Mr. Mamet said in a telephone interview, “and because publishing is like Hollywood — nobody ever does the marketing they promise.”

Agents have always been creative…tradpubs are going to have to keep up with the changing world (and I do think some of them will).

Publisher’s Weekly: “Despite Copyright Concerns, 1DollarScan Grows, Marks Second Year”

In this

PW article

Calvin Reid writes about the company that will take your p-book (paperbook) and digitize it for you.

I wrote about them in July 2012, and it’s interesting to see their success. I still have trouble (emotionally) with any destructive scanning technique. Heck, I practically have to avert my eyes if we are somewhere and someone has made “art objects” by destroying old books and combining them somehow.

There are two things I want along these lines. First, I want the Copyright Office (or case law, which is more likely) to say that digitizing books for your own use is okay. Second, I want a “magic box” where I can put a p-book into it, have it digitize the book for me, and the book emerges in the same shape as it was before. Maybe while it is in there, it could even spruce it up a bit, straightening out any wrinkles and removing stains. That’s just pie in the sky (or on the page) thinking, though. 😉

39 Steps…beyond!

A novel from 1915 has been turned into a next gen reading app by

The Story Mechanics

It’s not available yet in the Amazon Appstore, but honestly, I’m anxious to see it.

It’s based on The 39 Steps, and a search for

The 39 Steps at Amazon

got me 8,664 results!

I’ve read the book, and many of you may have seen the the Hitchcock version with Robert Donat.

It sounds to me like they may have done some really interesting things with the app…respecting it as a book, but adding new dimensions to it. It has built-in music, animations for backstory (not for the main story), and some innovative text placement techniques.

Is it a book?

Well, that’s always arguable. Once you get into “special effects” like bolds and italics, I feel like you are starting to cross the line. 😉 This is sold as an app, but it appears as though it may have all of the original text. There is some sort of scoring system, though, or at least awards.

I don’t think something like this will replace text-only books, but just like a movie or TV adaptation can bring something more to a work of literature, I think there may be a place for it. I think we’ll see it in the Amazon Appstore the few months, although I’m just guessing on that.

What do you think? Does Mamet going indie pave the way for other bestselling tradpubbed authors? Are you interested in the Kobo device? Are you just looking to it as a sign of what comes next from Amazon? What do you think the next revolutionary hardware changes will be? Feel free to let me and my readers know by commenting on this post.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Review: Burning the Page

Review: Burning the Page

Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading
by Jason Merkoski
published by Sourcebooks
this edition: 2013
size: 443KB (no page count listed yet)
categories: nonfiction; business & investing; history-world-21st Century; science-technology-general & reference
lending: no
simultaneous device licenses: six
real page numbers: no
part of the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library: no
text-to-speech: yes
suitability for text-to-speech: good
x-ray: no
Whispersync for Voice: no

“Those who read this years from now, please don’t forget that the future wasn’t always digital and that books weren’t always electronic.

Because without the ebook revolution, the future could never have happened.”
–Jason Merkoski
writing in Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading

I’m one of those people who is fascinated with the process of things.

I know a lot of people see a movie like The Wizard of Oz, and simply enjoy the end product…and there’s nothing wrong with that.

For me, though, I wonder about how it got there. I’ve been a manager, and I’ve taught Project Management, and I’ve lived around human beings. 🙂

Very rarely does someone come up with a plan, and then follows it exactly as expected, and gets the end result they intended…and if they do, they aren’t going to revolutionize the world.

The studio wanted Shirley Temple for the Wizard of Oz, but couldn’t get her. Buddy Ebsen (Jed Clampett) was cast as the Tin Man, but had a bad reaction to the make-up and was replaced. The suits thought “Over the Rainbow” should be cut, because it slowed down the action, and there was a song and dance number about the “Jitterbug” which was removed.

It took a lot of accidents, and a lot of compromise, to create the movie masterpiece that is the Wizard of Oz.

The Kindle has that same sort of magical feel for an end user.

Sure, there are flaws in it, but people love it.

So, I was really looking forward to reading Jason Merkoski’s insider story of the creation of the Kindle, Burning the Page.

I had seen some good press on it, and Merkoski no longer works at Amazon after shepherding the EBR (E-Book Reader) project, so I thought we might hear some really interesting stories about how decisions got made.

While I did find the book a worthwhile read, it really wasn’t the “here’s what happened” narrative I wanted.

There is some fun stuff about the feel of working for Jeff Bezos, but there was very little about how and why they decided to do this or that.

Some of that may be covered by an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement), I suppose. However, the book is much more about the past of books and speculation about the future than it is about the development of the Kindle.

Merkoski writes well. There was a nicely evocative section of imagining what it was like to work in Gutenberg’s workshop…it realistically suggests the social part of that, not just what it was like  getting that Bible done.

This, for example, was a funny line:

“Perhaps Amazon had previously shot itself in the foot so many times that it thought it had bulletproof shoes.”

I didn’t pick that quotation to suggest that the book is all anti-Amazon…this isn’t an exposé (very little does get exposed). Jason Merkoski appears to have liked working at Amazon.

We are alike in some ways, not the least important is our love of books. What comes through of that is really heartening.

However, in some ways it’s more like a series of essays (or better yet, blog posts), than it is narrative. I do think it would qualify as “narrative non-fiction” under Common Core, but if you think of a narrative as having a beginning, a middle, and an end, this isn’t it.

It’s well-researched and well-imagined, but it’s one thing here, then another thing, then another. That may, though, fit a lot of people’s reading style.

I did have some problems with the book.

Merkoski talks about putting on a “futurist’s hat”, but you can’t be a good futurist without knowing what current state is. Merkoski makes many suggestions for the future, including having a communication channel within books where you can talk to other readers, and having a way to restrict a tablet to just reading (which a teacher might do with a student).

Both of those are already here…in Amazon’s  Kindle Fire. In fact, the implementation of FreeTime is a lot more sophisticated than Merkoski suggests for a future device.

I wonder if Merkoski saw the Fire as a…perhaps betrayal of the reflective screen Kindle he created, and has just mentally blocked it from sight. The author does talk about iPads, but the Kindle Fire just shows up in three brief mentions, with nothing about its features.

This was also an odd statement to me:

“…theft of physical books is rare…”

That may be true from personal homes, but as a former brick and mortar bookstore manager, I can tell you that they have been commonly stolen. Our goal for “shrinkage” (theft, employee theft, loss to damage) was eight percent. That’s high in retail…if almost one out of every ten books was stolen, we’d still be on goal.

Now, some of you have read me saying that before, and you know I am proud of having been a bookstore manager.

That may be another thing Jason Merkoski and I have in common…a certain self-satisfied pride.

One of the important things Jason Merkoski wants you to know is how important Jason Merkoski is. 😉

“Almost no one in the company had exactly the right set of qualifications to help Lab126 and Amazon speak to and understand each other, with one exception: me.”

One other concern before I recommend the book (which I am going to do).

The author writes a lot about Reading 2.0 (Merkoski’s term), and how wonderful multi-media and social features will make books.

However, as you may have noticed at the beginning of this post, not much is actually enabled in this book. Yes, you have text-to-speech access, but a publisher doesn’t have to do anything to make that happen. There’s no X-Ray, no lending, no Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, no Whispersync for Voice. The author does these nice little discussion points, and invites readers to participate. The  discussions are in a box…but the box doesn’t really fit on a “page”, so it looks weird to me. It’s an odd graphic choice, affected by the font size you use. If you go to participate in one of the discussions, you have to sign in with Twitter or Facebook at an external website…it just doesn’t feel very integrated to me. There are no illustrations in the body of the book.

It simply doesn’t seem like the book takes advantage of Merkoski’s own ideas.

Still, I am going to recommend this book to you. There is some great writing, and some insight into the Kindle. The definitive story hasn’t been told yet…that may take an outsider, so we get something far more revealing and narrative like Stephen Baker’s Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything. Still, Burning the Page is a pleasant enough read, and Merkoski’s ideas will get you thinking about the future of reading.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Comparing Goodreads, Shelfari, and LibraryThing

Comparing Goodreads, Shelfari, and LibraryThing

There has been a lot of reaction to the announcement that Amazon is buying Goodreads, an independent review site.

When I first heard about it, I speculated a bit that they might shut down Shelfari (another social reading site which Amazon owns), and fold it into Goodreads.

However, I also said I wanted to investigate Goodreads more, and my hope now is that they don’t do that without combining features.

The two of them actually function quite differently…as does LibraryThing. Amazon owns Abebooks, which has, I think, a 40% stake in LibraryThing…but LT has emphatically said that they are not owned by Amazon, which I think is a reasonable interpretation.

I wanted to go through here and compare the three. This isn’t to say that you (or Amazon) have to pick one…you can use all three. Right now, though, that would mean entering your books into each of them (although there is some possibility of importing), so you’d have to think about it.

With any site with a social factor, you also have to consider the “social capital” you have to spend on it to be a “good citizen”. That’s why I don’t use Facebook: I know I couldn’t expand my energy and attention to the point where I wouldn’t anger people with non-responsiveness there. I already have “real life”, my job, this blog, my other writings, and the Amazon forums. People who e-mail me realize, I hope, that I won’t always get back to them quickly. Being on Facebook, too? I just don’t have the bandwidth.

Before I get started, let me say that I’m going to look at different aspects. One key question: do you use the site to catalog and analyze and share what you are already own, or to discover new things to read? You could certainly do both, but my immediate thought for a site like this is the former. I want to catalogue my books, and record information about them. That’s probably not why Amazon bought Goodreads. They clearly want sites like this to drive future sales. Understanding you is helpful in that regard, but they probably don’t care that you put five different versions of the same book on your “shelves” to reflect your paper collections.

That said, let me first give you an overview:

Goodreads.com

“The right book in the right hands at the right time can change the world”

• Members (all numbers per their website): 16 million
• Books added: 525 million
• Reviews: 23 million

Founded by Otis and Elizabeth Chandler, the site has been around for about six years.  The homepage emphasizes three key functions:

• Add friends and see what is on their “shelves”
• Rate books you’ve read to get recommendations
• Add books to your own shelves

Clicking on a book gives you ratings and reviews.

There’s no question that one of the attractions of Goodreads is its sheer size.

Shelfari.com

“read.share.explore.”

Shelfari doesn’t make a lot of their numbers available publicly. It was founded in 2006 by  Josh Hug, Kevin Beukelman, and Mark Williamson, and acquired in 2008 by Amazon.

The homepage has three tabs:

• Profile
• Books
• Community

LibraryThing.com

“What’s on your bookshelf?”

• Members: 1,666,713
• Books: 81,133,380
• Reviews: 2,146,228

Founded in 2005 by Tim Spalding, it’s actually the oldest of the three.

The homepage has

• Profile
• Your Books
• Add Books
• Talk
• Groups
• Local
• More
• Zeitgeist

Next, let’s compare a few specific books. After that,I’ll give you more of my sense of the sites.

A Popular Besteller:

The Hunger Games

I know this isn’t current right now, but it’s in the public consciousness. I also thought it was one where one could expect a lot of activity. I’m just doing the first book, not the series, for the sake of comparison. So, how does each site treat it?

Goodreads

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2767052-the-hunger-games

The average rating is 4.45 out of five stars. There are 1,499,207 ratings and 114,780 reviews.

There is a lot happening on this page!

You can click Stats and see a line graph of activity (how many times it was added, reviewed, and so on) for about the past six months.

They list 146 other editions of it.

You can buy it a variety of places, and look for it in libraries (through a link with WorldCat, which I’ve written about before).

If you’ve designated “friends”, you can see their reviews. You can see public reviews.

You can see lists in which Goodreads users have put it. You can see genres containing it. You can see other recommended reads similar to it.

There is an author profile (and the helpful note that there are other authors listed with the same name).

The reviews often contain pictures…in this case, there was a lot of parody stuff.

There are videos from readers (“It completely took over my life.”) with comments on them.

There are sections for trivia and quotations.

You can share the book through a number of social media.

Certainly,  if you wanted to see if you’d like the book, and you wanted to discuss it, it’s covered here.

Shelfari

http://www.shelfari.com/books/3987702/The-Hunger-Games

Weirdly, I”m not seeing an actual numeric average of the reviews, although I can see that on Amazon. It looks like about 4.5 stars on a scale of 1 to 5.  There are 22, 747 reviews, and I’m told that 110,324 members have it (I can see a list of members by clicking).

The first thing I see are the Book Extras: that’s where you can get a wiki type listing of details. Those sections include

• Description
• Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis
• Summary
• Characters (35 of them listed)
• Popular Covers
• Quotes
• Settings & Locations
• Organizations (in the book)
• First sentence
• Table of Contents
• Glossary
• Themes & Symbolism
• Series & Lists
• Authors & Contributors
• First Edition
• Awards
• Classification
• Notes for Parents
• Subjects
• Popular Tags
• Links to Supplemental Material
• Movie Connections
• More Books Like This
• Books Influenced by This Book
• Books That Cite This Book
• Amazon Customers Who Bought This Book Also Bought

There are also sections which are hidden by default: Errata; Books with Additional Background Information; and Books That Influenced This Book. I’m not quite sure why those are hidden. There is a “hide spoilers” checkbox which is selected by default (I really appreciate that!), but unchecking it didn’t make them show up.

In addition to the Book Extras tab, there are tabs for Readers & Reviews, Discussions, and Editions (Shelfari lists 258 of those).

You can buy the book, but it links just to Amazon or Abebooks (which is part of the Amazon family) for collectible editions.

You can share the book on social media.

There is a sidebar where members can ask questions, and get answers (by people voting yes or no).

Recent editors are shown.

Members, Group, and Lists with this book are linked.

You can read the first chapter for free.

This page has more of the geeky kind of detail about the book I find interesting than the Goodreads page. I’d say that Goodreads feels more modern and more shallow (outside of reviews), and Shelfari feels more scholarly, in a pop culture sort of way.

LibraryThing

http://www.librarything.com/work/4979986

It’s rated 4.43. There are 2,358 reviews, and 29,350 members with the book.

Outside of the cover image, there are no images beyond icons on this page.

I see a ranking of 25 for popularity, but I’m not quite clear what that means. When I clicked on it, it said

“Popularity is position on a rank-ordered list of the number of copies of a works cataloged during a given period.”

It looks like it is the ranking out of the top 100,000. In 2008, The Hunger Games was #1,785: in 2012, it was #2.

I see

• Members
• Tags
• LibraryThing Recommendations
• Member Recommendations
• Will you like it? (I haven’t rated enough books to get that to work yet)
• Member Reviews (in a number of languages…you can narrow by language, which is nice)
• Published Reviews
• Other authors (these are contributors: translators, illustrators)
• Work-to-work relationships (contained in, parodied in, reference guides/companions
• Common Knowledge

Common Knowledge is like the Book Extras at Shelfari. The sections include

• Series (with order)
• Canonical (official) title
• Original title
• Alternative titles
• Original publication date
• People/characters (30 of these)
• Important places
• Important events
• Related movies
• Awards and honors
• Epigraph
• Dedication
• First words
• Quotations
• Last words (with a spoiler screen…click to reveal)
• Disambiguation notice
• Publisher’s editors
• Blurbers (including Stephen King)
• Publisher series

Then there are sections for

• References
• LibraryThing members’ descriptions (amusingly, this includes haiku summaries)
• Book descriptions (including Amazon’s)
• Library descriptions

In the sidebar, there are

• Quicklinks (including purchasing and getting it at the library through WorldCat)
• Current Discussion
• Popular covers (159 listed)
• Ratings (broken down with numbers for each number of stars)
• Audible
• LibraryThing Early Reviewers Alumn (it’s a program where you can get pre-publication copies)
• Is this you? (an author program)
• Advanced

There aren’t as many reviews here, and I would describe the feel of this page as funky. 🙂 The “Common Knowledge” seems more fun than the Book Extras, but hasn’t been completed as much (a lot of things were blank).

Next, let’s just compare a couple of stats on a

Popular Classic

Pride and Prejudice

I went with one that’s a perennial bestseller. I’m curious as to whether it being an older, public domain titles is going to change how the different sites treat it.

• Goodreads: Rating: 4.23; 942,848 ratings; 27,542 reviews (about 24% the number as The Hunger Games)
• Shelfari: Rating: roughly 4.2; 4,818 reviews (about 21%)
• LibraryThing: Rating: 4.46; 762 reviews (about 32%)

Based on that, LibraryThing seems to be the friendliest to classics.

The Somewhat Obscure

The Platypus of Doom and Other Nihilists

• Goodreads: Rating: 3.5; 20 ratings; 3 reviews
• Shelfari: no reviews or ratings, but the book is listed and eight members have it
• LibraryThing: no reviews, but two ratings (averaging three stars): 38 members have it

Goodreads was the winner there.

Well, that’s actually probably enough for this post! If people are interested, I’ll do another one of these looking at features besides just the book listings.

Feel free to let me and my readers know what you think by commenting on this post.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

How important is it to remember what you read?

How important is it to remember what you read?

We may need a new measure of reading success.

During my morning Flipboard read, I ran across this

Salon.com article

It originally appeared in Scientific American, and talks about studies showing that we don’t retain material as well when we read it as an e-book compared to reading it as a p-book…paperbook.

I certainly believe that’s possible.

One of the arguments that is made is that we remember the content better in paper because reading it is more irregular.

In my “day job”, I’m a trainer. Getting people to remember things is a big part of my job, and I can honestly say I’m pretty good at it.

One of the key things about remembering is that we remember what is different.

We build up patterns of expected things, and then remember what varies from those patterns.

Let’s try this:

5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 8 5 5 5 5 5555

What number is different from the others?

Now, if I were to test you later, you would be more likely to remember that there was an eight that was different from everything else than to remember that the other numbers were fives.

If you are reading a p-book, there are things that are different…a wrinkle on a page here, the thickness of the unread portion, the position in which you were holding the book and what was behind it, and so on.

With an e-book, the experience of all of the words is much more the same…so, it is logical to me that you are less able to remember the words.

That sameness also limits the context clues.

We tend to remember things in context. There was a great study where they had a group of people standing in water, and a group of people on dry land. They had them both remember a set of numbers.

The people who had been in the water had better recollection when they were in water than when they weren’t.

The people who had been on dry land had better recollection on dry land.

I had a student (these are adult medical people) who suddenly couldn’t remember how to do something. I was in that person’s office. I asked if anything had changed in the office…yep, a picture, visible on the wall above the computer, had been moved. That change of context was enough to lose the memory.

I’ve mentioned this in the blog before, but here’s a trick. If you hear a website or a phone number you want to remember while you are driving, slap your leg and say it out loud.

When you want to remember it later, sit down again (simulating the car ride), and slap your leg. It will help you recall it.

So, I can accept that we retain less well what we read in digital form than in physical form.

What I was thinking, though, was this: is that inherently worse?

What if we engage more with digital (that can be measured too)? What if we read more with digital (I believe that’s likely to be true for most people)? What if what we read in digital format still helps us make better decisions, even if we can’t consciously recall it?

People are often impressed because I remember all sorts of odd things…I’d do well on Jeopardy. I remember lots of old trivia.

That’s just me, though. There’s no more reason to be proud of that than to be proud of having blue eyes or being two meters tall.

Yes, I do think people can be taught to remember things better, and I used to think I was hot intellectual stuff because of my memory, but I’ve thought about it. I didn’t really earn that memory, it’s just there.

I have a relative, for example, with the classic eidetic memory. This relative remembers everything that they ever read.

We’d gotten to a point where we were going to sell childhood comics. I picked up an obscure one and said, “I remember this guy!” My relative said, “On page seven, in panel three, he says this,” and quoted it verbatim.

That’s a comic book that person had read once, decades earlier.

Does that make my relative smarter than me? If it does, it makes my Kindle way smarter than me. 😉

Now, my memory isn’t the same as it once was. When I watched a Star Trek episode years ago, I could tell you the name of every character in it whose name was mentioned (no matter how small a part), and repeat a lot of the dialog.

Now, I don’t remember the names of the characters in TV shows I watch. I’ve been watching The Walking Dead: I’d be hard-pressed to give the first names of five of the characters.

I just wanted to think about this. If we don’t retain as much when we read e-books, is that a good measure of how valuable they are?

I recently tweeted this:

“eMentia = the inability to remember simple things, like phone numbers and birthdays, because a gadget is remembering them for you”

Maybe we don’t remember e-books as well because we know we can search them more easily than we can p-books. It isn’t necessary to remember the details, because we can get them again easily, so why waste the synaptic storage space?

I don’t know that that is it, though…

I guess my basic question here is this:

Is retention the best measure of the value of a book?

Let me ask you…are you impressed with someone with a good memeory? Do you think that person is smarter than people without as good a memory? Is it possible to get value out of a book without retaining the details? If we read more, but retain less, is that a worthy trade-off?

Feel free to let me and my readers know what you think by commenting on this post.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

To Kill a Mockingbird e-book at B&N, but is it legal?

To Kill a Mockingbird e-book at B&N, but is it legal?

You can go to

eReaderIQ

and list books to have them notify you when they are released in Kindle format. This is one of the great free services offered by that site, which is perhaps the most valuable Kindle resource on the web.

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is the most watched book right now, and typically has been.

Why isn’t it already legally in e-book form?

Well, my understanding is that Harper Lee doesn’t like to talk about TKaM, and even perhaps wishes it was never published in the first place (for personal reasons).

Rather than being specifically opposed to e-books, my sense is that no one wants to approach the author about the issue, and while that unfortunately makes the book unavailable, I can respect that.

So, it was quite a surprise when I was alerted to this listing at Barnes & Noble:

To Kill a Mockingbird e-book

Thanks to Meya, one of the Kindle Forum Pros, for that heads-up!

If this was a legitimate edition, done with permission of Harper Lee, I would have seen it announced six ways to Sunday (even though this is Sunday). It would be as big a coup as when the Harry Potter books went to e-book (although somehow, I don’t think “Harpermore” would be as fun) 😉 and if a publisher got it, they’d trumpet it.

I checked first to see that it was the book, and not a guide book or something. They have a “look inside” feature, and it appears to be the full work.

Then, I looked at the publisher listed. It says it is from “Micro Publishing”. A quick search doesn’t show me a publisher with that name.

Harper Lee has been with HarperCollins (I believe HarperCollins and Harper Lee are just  coincidentally similar) as a publisher for some time, so I checked their site: no evidence of an e-book.

Actually, that’s a good path for me: I’ll probably send HarperCollins something to give them a heads-up.

This could be a legitimate version, but I think that’s unlikely. You usually can’t complain about infringement on behalf of someone if you don’t have a personal stake in the book: it would make it too likely for nuisance removals, which is apparently what happens at YouTube.

Anyway, if this an authorized edition and Amazon also gets it, great. I think the most likely thing, though, is that this is someone using Barnes & Noble’s independent publishing platform to infringe).

What happens if you buy it as a NOOK book and it turns out it is infringing? You won’t be legally liable for anything…it’s the distribution that’s the problem. The Supreme Court has ruled that having infringing copies isn’t the same as having stolen goods (infringement and theft are two different crimes, for one thing). Amazon famously removed infringing copies of 1984 from Kindles, and said they wouldn’t do that again in the same circumstances (that was overstepping the bounds…as I mentioned, having the book wasn’t illegal). I would hope, though, that people would voluntarily delete it.

If I hear more, I’ll let you know.

Update: it appears to be gone from Barnes & Noble this morning. It’s possible that the post here and/or my contacting HarperCollins had something to do with it.

I suspect some people probably wish it was still there, but if it was infringing, I’m happy to see it gone.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Round up #160: good news for authors, Jeff Bezos writes a letter

Round up #160: good news for authors, Jeff Bezos writes a letter

The ILMK Round ups are short pieces which may or may not be expanded later.

Burning the Page

Just wanted to let you know that I’m currently reading Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading, by Jason Merkoski. I’ll write a full review when I finish, but Merkoski was the Product Manager during the development of the Kindle, and no longer works for Amazon.

That’s definitely allowing the author to give us the inside scoop on what it was like, and there are some interesting tidbits so far. It’s good that Merkoski can really write…I loved the evocative speculation of what it might have been like working in Gutenberg’s place back in the old days. 🙂 Please don’t comment and give away anything until I’ve finished, but I thought some of you might want to read it before I wrote about it. 🙂

PW: “What was the first book that made you love books?”

This was an interesting

Publishers Weekly article

in which the staff lists books that first “made them love books”.

I couldn’t come up with something…I can’t ever remember not loving books. 🙂 It would be like asking, “What was the first air that made you want to breathe air?”

I suspect that’s because my parents read to me before I could read…and I have older siblings, so reading was modeled for me.

Reading was valued and important in our house.

I could name some important books to me, but not the first one.

Hollywood Reporter: “Literary Agent Roundtable: ‘Even the Bad Movies Sell Editions'”

Do you have much of an image of a literary agent? I’m guessing most people don’t. I certainly think there would be a possibility for a movie (or even TV series) featuring an agent…perhaps there has been one. Remember, I’m saying literary agent…Jerry Maguire doesn’t count. 😉

For the reason that most people don’t really know agents or what they do, I found this

The Hollywood Reporter article

fascinating.

It’s literary agents discussing selling books to be turned into movies or TV shows, but it is more than that…it also talks about how the business is changing, and how the newer generation of agents finds things in the new media world (blogs and such).

I’m working on something that I think could actually make a good movie, although I’m not holding my breath on that. 🙂

Me: “Fun or money?”

It’s the second Saturday of the month, so I have my rotating post in The Writers Guide to E-Publishing:

Fun or money?

Those posts are aimed at authors, and I talk there about how I’m a bit torn about writing something that is fun for me, but isn’t like to make much money, or writing something that isn’t as fun, but that will.

The Scholarly Kitchen: “What the heck does a book cost?”

I think it’s often confusing for people the way that libraries purchase books. For example, some publishers restrict sales of e-books to libraries…how does the publisher even know who is purchasing the book?

Well, this

The Scholarly Kitchen article

goes into a good description of the options…but it may make your head spin.

The article by Joseph Esposito is inside information…it’s just that it’s complex stuff.

Jeff Bezos: “… our energy at Amazon comes from the desire to impress customers rather than the zeal to best competitors”

I like Amazon and Jeff Bezos a lot, and tend to trust what the say.

I do find it hard to believe that some of their actions weren’t taken in response to the actions of other companies, but simply from an internally driven desire to provide the best for their customers.

Barnes & Noble dropped prices on devices; Amazon followed. Barnes & Noble had a frontlit reader; Amazon followed. Barnes & Noble had a limited borrowing system; Amazon followed. Apple introduced the iPad; Amazon eventually introduced the Fire.

Amazon even has price-matching: tell them about a lower price elsewhere (with the specifics) and they’ll typically match it.

That said, this

letter from Jeff Bezos

to Amazon investors is really worth reading.

I absolutely agree with Bezos’ assessment of Amazon as being atypically proactive in helping customers. For example, a customer may get a refund without even reporting a problem…that’s cool!

I also appreciate that they started paying royalties for Kindle Direct Publishing books monthly…that’s very unusual.

Bezos’ also addresses the criticism by investors (and perhaps more pointedly, by non-Amazon-investors who write about investing) that Amazon simply gives away too much.

They spend a lot on us customers. That doesn’t translate into big profits, and while a lot of traditionalists thought that eventually it would, that’s not really clear. Amazon can sell the heck out of something, can make people into very loyal customers…but that doesn’t mean that they make a lot of money.

Don’t invest in Amazon expecting them to say, “Today’s the day we put profits first!” 😉 Just as Amazon takes the long view in development, you have to take the long view in them making money.

That, though, is part of what makes me think they’ll be around for a long time…

All Things Digital:

I’ve written before about Google GLASS, and I think they will affect how we do a lot of things, including reading. Of course, before the Segway was released, we were told that cities will be rebuilt around them, and that just hasn’t happened. 🙂

This

All Things Digital article

is a nice lengthy piece by  Jan Chipchase that really looks at the societal issues.  Might be a good one to send to your Kindle to take the time to go over it.

One warning: it does use the “F word”. I do recommend the article, but wanted to alert you to that.

Good news for authors: take that, Scott Turow*! 😉

Barnes & Noble and Amazon are both introducing services that improve things for independently-published authors.

B&N introduced

NOOK Press

which is essentially an upgrade of PubIt!

Take a look at the services offered.

This is the NOOK equivalent of Kindle Direct Publishing, and they have brought some nice features.

One is the ability to edit your book in a browser. It is a bit clunky to have to go to a file just to make a couple of changes (maybe typos reported by readers), and then re-upload the file to a website. This sounds like it will make that process much simpler.

They also are introducing collaboration tools that will make it possible for others to help you with your work. You might think writing is solitary, but it really isn’t…especially as we enter a world of more multi-media type books.

I give credit to B&N for making these improvements.

Amazon’s new feature is one I’ll certainly consider.

As regular readers know, I’m not a very visual person. Quite simply, the covers my books are unattractive, or even generic.

Amazon has now introduced

KDP Cover Creator

It says in it’s beta (test mode), but I have played around with it.

It’s a huge step forward! For one thing, you can choose from a bunch of stock images…you don’t have to upload one of your own.

It looks like the design part is pretty easy…

Yep, things are looking better for authors!

* I recently wrote about author Scott Turow (the President of the Authors Guild) op-ed bemoaning the “Slow Death of the American Author”. I tend to be pretty upbeat: I think the world is generally better than it was, and is likely to get better in the future (not that there aren’t risks and darksides, especially for some people). I remember being shocked when I had that discussion with some employees of mine when I managed a bookstore. These were young people, and they all thought the world was worse than it had been. I pointed out to them how much worse their lives would have been a hundred and fifty years ago…some of them would not have been legally allowed to learn to read, for example. Somehow, that wasn’t convincing. 🙂 When our now adult kid was young, and said, “This is a bad day!” I made it a rule…you could only say, “Up until 10:30 (or whatever time it was then), this has been a bad day.” You couldn’t decide that the rest of the day would be bad before it happened. So, I’m happy to point out these good things for authors…now Turow can cheer up. 😉 I know, neither of these are for traditionally published authors like Scott Turow, but still, for authors as a larger population, these are good things.

Have any comments on any of these stories? Feel free to let me and my readers know by commenting on this post.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Menu map: Kindle Paperwhite 5.3.4

Menu map: Kindle Paperwhite 5.3.4

In the Menu Maps series of posts, I take you through the menu options on a specific Kindle device. That will make it easier for you to find things, and may make you aware of things you didn’t know your Kindle could do.

This time, I’m going to run through the menus on the home screen on a Kindle Paperwhite 3G + wi-fi (with Special Offers). This is based on firmware version 5.3.4.

I’ll add comments where I think that’s appropriate. Do feel free to comment on this post if you have more questions.

What is a menu?

It gives you options, just like a menu in a restaurant. You select a menu (you might be tapping, clicking, arrowing and hitting enter…depends on the device), and see a series of choices. You pick one (if you want), and that “launches” (starts) something on your device.

You “wake” a Paperwhite by first hitting the power button (or by opening an “autowake” cover…something I find very convenient, especially with the new power buttons on Kindles which can be hard to locate), and then swiping (holding your fingertip or stylus on the screen and sliding it a couple of inches) it.

At the top of the screen, you’ll see what I call the “icon ribbon”, where there are a number of symbols

• A house returns you to the homescreen
• A left facing chevron “<” takes you back to your last activity
• A light bulb (although I find this one a bit abstract looking) lets you control brightness
• A shopping cart takes you to Amazon to shop
• A magnifying glass lets you search
• * My Items (just on your device)
• * Kindle Store
• * Dictionary (I wonder how many people realize this is there? It does work pretty well…finding the word, not just any word that has that sequence of letters)
• * Wikipedia
• A menu (horizontal lines…we see this symbol a lot on Kindles, sometimes in a box, sometimes not)

Within the menu, we get

• Shop Kindle Store
• View Special Offers (if you are subscribed to Special Offers)
• Cover View (switches the display of your books on the homescreen…it will say “List View” if you are already viewing the covers)
• Create New Collection (I believe your Kindle has to be registered for this to be active)
• Sync and Check for Items (if you’ve purchased something and can’t find it on your Kindle, try this)
• Settings (I’ll address this separately below)
• Experimental Browser

Within the Settings menu

• Airplane Mode (turning this on turns off wi-fi and 3G connectivity…on  a device with other forms of activity, Airplane Mode also disables those…Bluetooth, GPS. I think that’s why they use the term, for compatibility with other devices. Many people have both a tablet and this sort of Kindle)
• Wi-Fi Networks (you can tap this to scan and to manually enter a network)
• Registration (it shows you who the current registrant is even before you tap it…that might help you get your Kindle back, and might be useful if you chose to purchase a Kindle from an individual)
• Device Options
• * Device Passcode
• * Parental Controls (note that when these are on, you can’t deregister or reset the device)
• ** Web Browser (require a password to use)
• ** Kindle Store
• ** Cloud (this is how you can have, for example, books of adult interest on the account without your child who has a Paperwhite seeing them)
• * Device Time (you can set the time manually and switch between setting automatically or manually)
• * Personalize Your Kindle
• ** Device Name
• ** Personal Info (you can add a free text note here…you might put contact information in case someone finds your Kindle, and offer a reward, if you wanted)
• ** Send-to-Kindle E-mail (you can’t edit it here, but it is displayed…this is the address you use to send personal documents to this device
• * Language and Dictionaries
• Reading Options
• * Annotations Backup (this is on by default…it’s what allows you to share your notes, your last “page” read, and to import your Collections between devices on the same account)
• * Popular Highlights (on or off…when this is on, you see underlines in your books that other people have made in theirs…I think it takes at least three people having underlined it before it appears)
• * Public Notes
• * Page Refresh (you can force a screen refresh every page turn…which will take more battery charge)
• * Social Networks (you need to be connected to wireless for this…you can link your Twitter and Facebook accounts to the device, so you can share the fact that you read a book, notes, and that sort of thing…it doesn’t allow you to share the entire book)

While you are in the Settings Menu, you can tap Menu again to get another set of choices:

• Shop Kindle Store
• Update Your Kindle (this will only be active if an update has been downloaded to your Kindle, either by you or by the device, and it hasn’t been applied yet)
• Restart (if your Kindle is acting oddly, this is a good choice…unplug it from power sources first. This is a “soft restart” ((using the menus…the software)) as opposed to holding in the power button for thirty seconds, which is a “hard restart” ((using the hardware))…Amazon says this is better)
• Reset Device (this is a radical move, and should be used rarely. It wipes everything off your Kindle except for Kindle software updates that wasn’t on your Kindle when you got it…you’ll have to redownload books afterwards, you’ll lose personal documents, wi-fi networks, and so on)
• Device Info (this includes your serial number, firmware version, and the amount of space you have free)
• Legal (274 pages of text that can’t be enlarged or use with text-to-speech…you would think the latter might be a problem for Amazon)
• Sync and Check for Items

Hm…I’ve got enough room here. I’ll go through the basic menu in a book. Tap towards the top middle of the book to get the menu to appear.

Beneath the icon ribbon we saw on the homescreen, you get

• Aa (you can choose font size, font, line spacing, and margins)
• Go To (the beginning, a page or location, a chapter, the end…I think this varies a bit with different e-books)
• X-Ray (background about the book)
• Share (you can, for example, tweet about a book and a llink will be included to the book at Amazon)

The menu (horizontal lines in your top right corner):

• Shop Kindle Store
• Book Description
• About the Author
• Landscape (or Portrait) Mode
• Sync to Furthest Page Read
• Add Bookmark
• View Notes & Marks
• Reading Progress (you can choose what is displayed by default…location left in book, Time left in chapter, Time left in book…when the menu is displayed, you see all three. If a book has “real page numbers”, I think you see that choice as well)
• Settings (that’s the Settings menu above)

There you go!

—

Bonus note:

I found this just recently:

Kindle Features By Country

It’s a nice table! It’s interesting to me that Japan, for example, doesn’t have Popular Highlights or Public Notes…is that technical, societal, or due to regulations?

They list “Sina Weibo” on the table under Social Media and Device Features…but don’t show that any current device has it! That’s a Chinese microblogging website…this seems like a clear indicator of more Amazon/Kindle involvement in China in the future. That might be a bit of a scoop here. 🙂 I did a Google search, and while there were matches for “Kindle Sina Weibo”, I don’t think it was about this as a legitimate future feature.

Hope this post helps! I include the Features By Country partially for those who don’t have a Paperwhite…I know some people think I may cover the Fire too much, so this post provides a bit of balance to that. 😉

If you have questions or comments, feel free to comment on this post.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Round up #159: cats vs. dogs, Welsh words

Round up #159: cats vs. dogs, Welsh words

The ILMK Round ups are short pieces which may or may not be expanded later.

nownovel: “Is there money in e-books?” infographic

This is an interesting

infographic

I’m going to try embedding this here, which I don’t usually do:

Is there money in e-books infographic

Let me know if embedding it caused you any problems in display, and if so, on which type of device you were reading it.

While the trends are interesting, I think many of you will spot right away what I did, and what makes me call the whole infographic into question.

In the Author Revenue section, the split for Amazon for books $2.99 to $9.99 is listed as 75% for authors, 30% for Amazon.

Um…that’s 105%…talk about turning it up to 11! 😉

If the publishing industry can figure out how to make more items produce 105% revenue, their problems are over! 🙂

The correct figure should be 70%, not 75%.

That makes me question the infographic not because of something that could be a simple typographical mistake, but because it suggests that accuracy may not be the primary goal. I would think that the nownovel.com may simply be trying to encourage people to sign up with them.

They also list the number of e-book titles in the USA at 950,000. There are 1,928,615 in the USA Kindle store thi smorning…unless this is due to a difference in what is being counted (active content, for example), the information is at best outdated.

Nid Amazon yn cefnogi llyfrau Cymraeg*

I think I’ve mentioned before that my adult kid is a linguist, and I do have some interest in languages.

Wales Online article

has an interesting perspective on Amazon not allowing books in Welsh.

Right away, you might think that’s because of character sets, but I don’t think that’s an issue with Welsh.

You might think it’s because Amazon doesn’t have Welsh-reading employees who can review the material before publication (we’re talking about books going through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing).

That doesn’t appear to be it…because they did allow them for a while.

There’s actually a petition to get Amazon to change the policy:

http://www.deisebelyfrau.org/main.php

My guess is that they will get this worked out…I think they did get concerned about perhaps not being able to determine the content. For example, let’s say that somebody translated Harry Potter into Welsh and published it through the KDP. A translation is considered a “derivative work” (at least in the USA), and it would infringe on the copyrights. Allowing publication in a language that they perhaps can’t read opens them up to more liability.

While I’ll admit that my closest personal connection to Wales is probably through watching Torchwood 😉 I still find this interesting.

The ability to deal with local languages is a challenge for Amazon…it certainly gave the Infibeam Pi reader an advantage over the Kindle in India.

Bookish dogs, webby cats

There has been some interesting response to this

Slate article

by Daniel Engber.

It’s a great piece, that actually does the research to show that cats are favored as web subjects over dogs, and dogs are favored as book subjects over cats.

As an animal lover, book lover, and a person interested in the human mind, I do find that fascinating.

The question is, “Why?”

You can go a lot of ways with this. The first thing is to think about the difference between reading a book and seeing something on the web.

I suspect that’s the key factor…although one could argue that cats may have become more popular in recent decades due to declining living space, and the web is a more recent invention than books, so there is a logical correlation.

I’ll start with this:

The web shows things in short pieces, books are long pieces.

Cats do more interesting things in a short time span than dogs.

A cat is a pounce predator, and as such, can have very fast (and sometimes, very bizarre) actions. Domestic dogs are really more omnivorous scavengers…it may simply take them longer to do something interesting than the few seconds we watch web videos.

I might also argue that dogs think more like people do than cats do. I should say, I’ve typically had both dogs and cats, like them both, and think I understand them both pretty well. That said, all cats are crazy. 😉 No, that’s not really true, but one of the great joys of having cats is that you are dealing with an alien intelligence.

Dogs have evolved to interact with humans. You can point with your finger, and a domesticated dog knows what you mean…not even wolves do that. Point with your finger with a cat, and they are likely to swat your finger. 🙂

So, when a writer needs to sustain the inner life of an animal for a hundred pages, it’s easier to write a dog than a cat.

Quick! Name five famous cats from literature.

Now, how many of them were anthropomorphized? How many of them spoke to humans, wore clothes, and so on? I’m guessing you might have named the Cat in the Hat, the Cheshire Cat, and so on.

If you named five famous dogs from literature, it might have included Toto, and Buck from Call of the Wild. While they may not act entirely like dogs (Toto changes quite a bit over the course of the Oz series, but I’m talking about the first book), they aren’t walking on two legs.

I suppose one might also argue that the dogs are more likely to be affecting the plot, at least where humans are concerned. A dog may be acting in the human’s interest much of the time…the cat is less likely to be fetching help or performing tasks.

Still, this is the kind of article I love, and I do highly recommend it.

Americans still like the library

Let’s try that infographic embedding experiment again:

Courtesy of: CityTownInfo.com

That comes from

http://www.citytowninfo.com/infographics/public-library-adaptive-success.html

I actually reported on the underlying study before, so I won’t say much about it now…but it is interesting how seeing it in an infographic can make it different. There also is more in the infographic than I covered.

So, what do you think? Is it a big deal that Amazon isn’t doing KDP books in Welsh? Do you have a favorite literary cat? Will you admit to watching cat videos online? 😉 Any surprises in the infographics? Does making one (or two) mistakes make you doubt an entire statement? If so, under what circumstances? Feel free to let me and my readers know by commenting on this post.

By the way, I’ll check the infographics both on an RSK (Reflective Screen Kindle…probably my Paperwhite) and a Kindle Fire…but I’d still like to hear your experience and opinion about the embedding. Even if it looks good, you might not like, and it would help me to hear that.

*I used Google translate to put this into Welsh…my apologies if it doesn’t make sense. 🙂

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.