Toadfish Monastery

Quote from: Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith on March 16, 2012, 04:14:54 AM

Quote from: Griffin NoName on March 16, 2012, 04:02:20 AM

Quote from: The Meromorph on March 16, 2012, 01:34:00 AM
If you bought books from Amazon, you can re-download them free for ever to any new kindle you get
If you got them somewhere else, TAKE BACKUPS onto your PC...

Doh! I don'y know what I've got between my ears these  days.

Bob, if I ever need to replace a battery, I'll send it over to you!!

You pay the shipping & battery? 

Of course.

Be interesting if it is still not superceded by something I consider better by the time the battery won't recharge any more - and I haven't even bought it yet. And if I go for the original Kindle, it's already old hat!

I don't have a Kindle, but I do have a Sony PRS-600. It has a large screen and a good user interface, although the battery life isn't as good as touted, but then i'm usually somewhere I can charge it up before it runs out. It was a present, so I don't know how much it cost, but I did by an SD card for it (8GB, I think), and have thousands of ebooks ready to place onto it, although to be frank, I haven't touched the sides of what's on the internal memory, yet.

I prefer traditional books, especially the smell and feel of them, but find the eReader to be quite versatile in its uses. It makes a great appliance to take on holiday with you, as you can store more books than would fit in your suitcase, and if you get bored of one, you can always just choose another to read without having to move, especially if you're laid out with a beer in one hand!

Quote from: Roland Deschain on March 19, 2012, 02:22:12 AM
I prefer traditional books, especially the smell and feel of them

Never ever thought I'd consider eBooks, as real books have been a huge part of my life...... I love them, I have thousands, I could never throw any out, etc etc etc.

But. I have no more room for books and find it hard taking them to the charity shop and I can't afford them new any more. So, the Kindle would pay for itself over about 3-4 years I reckon, and solve the other two problems.

Quote from: RolandI prefer traditional books, especially the smell and feel of them, but find the eReader to be quite versatile in its uses. It makes a great appliance to take on holiday with you, as you can store more books than would fit in your suitcase, and if you get bored of one, you can always just choose another to read without having to move, especially if you're laid out with a beer in one hand!

I used to say I preferred real books, but now I have a Kindle I find there's a vast advantage I never thought of, and that's the range of literature I now have access to.

Quote from: Sibling DavidH on March 20, 2012, 09:23:08 AM

Quote from: RolandI prefer traditional books, especially the smell and feel of them, but find the eReader to be quite versatile in its uses. It makes a great appliance to take on holiday with you, as you can store more books than would fit in your suitcase, and if you get bored of one, you can always just choose another to read without having to move, especially if you're laid out with a beer in one hand!

I used to say I preferred real books, but now I have a Kindle I find there's a vast advantage I never thought of, and that's the range of literature I now have access to.

Yes, to pay peanuts for rubbish that one might enjoy seems quite attractive

It's not mainly rubbish.  I get a lot of history written close to the event; eg an account of Gettysburg written a few months after by a staff colonel who fought in the thick of it, and similar accounts of WW1 battles. These are things you never normally come across.  I've got loads of classic stuff in English and German, such as the complete works of EA Poe, HP Lovecraft and JS Le Fanu.  I've got every single Hornblower novel, ditto Sherlock Holmes; all 3 Stieg Larsson novels; all 3 'Hunger Games' books and a load of other favourites.  Also, 122 good SF titles.  And so on .....

In almost all cases I didn't pay 'pennies' for them: I paid nothing at all.   

Seriously, the range of stuff out there is astonishing.

Quote from: Sibling DavidH on March 20, 2012, 02:52:23 PM
In almost all cases I didn't pay 'pennies' for them: I paid nothing at all.   

Seriously, the range of stuff out there is astonishing.

mmmmmmmm now I can't wait

but I've promised myself I will wait until I have finished my university course (as I can't afford to spend time playing with it). Not long now I hope.

I must echo David's comments:  I have in excess of 400 titles on my Android pad (and my Kindle too, come to think of it).

More than 1/2 of these I got for free-- if I thought that one day, I might just want to read something?  (mostly from ManyBooks website-- google) I would download it, convert it to MOBI (via Caliber) and stuff it onto my devices.

I have loads of books, hopefully to suit my every whim, for when I end one book, I really like to start the next one immediately.

I've been resisting the Kindle.   

I usually have about 6 books from various genres going at any given time, picking them up and setting them down as the mood strikes. Noob question: can you "bookmark" several different electronic books that way?

When you re-open any document on Kindle, it automatically goes to where you last closed it.

Quote from: pieces o nine on March 21, 2012, 02:10:51 AM
I've been resisting the Kindle.   

I usually have about 6 books from various genres going at any given time, picking them up and setting them down as the mood strikes. Noob question: can you "bookmark" several different electronic books that way?

As DavadH pointed out, the Kindle software helpfully remembers your progress in each and every book.  There are various ways to reset these progress indicators, if you like, but the automatic process works pretty good.

You are also free to manually mark each book as much as you like, too-- by adding notes, mark-ups, just a "bent over page" (on the Kindle, it actually looks like you've bent over the corner)-- as many as you like-- you could theoretically bend over each and every page in each and every book on your device-- it stores this info in associated files along side the E-book's original file, no problem.   (size isn't an issue, here-- not really-- we are talking of mere kilobytes of size, on a device with giga-bytes of room.... and no, I won't insult you by explaining those terms, either... )

Even the Kindle application running on Android or Apple's OS on the iPad/iPod/iPhone easily does this too.

As do the many and varied non-Amazon reading apps you can run on your PC laptop, Android tablets/phones or Apple stuff-- they all have various ways to "mark up" your virtual book with notes, bookmarks and so on.

But basic progress is always saved-- good for linear books such as novels.  Kinda useless in a "Complete Works of Mark Twain" or All The Recipes of Yugoslavia books, though.    That's where the manual bookmarking really shines.

On the Kindles?  Referencing your manual bookmarks takes you to a summary page, listing each mark, and a helpful paragraph or so from the page you marked.  You can add notes too, if you like.

I read about these features somewhere or other and was impressed.

If one can scribble notes in the margins, why don't newspaper eReader versions include crosswords and sudokus?

There is no real technical limitation to do so, and I'm sure sooner rather than later it will be implemented.

Quote from: Griffin NoName on March 21, 2012, 09:36:47 PM
I read about these features somewhere or other and was impressed.

If one can scribble notes in the margins, why don't newspaper eReader versions include crosswords and sudokus?

There are some limited Apps that run on the Kindle, from Amazon's kindle store-- I think they have both of these you mentioned.  I'm not into either one, so I did not pay much attention to such things myself.

I know there are a slew of crossword/sodoku games for Android, and MaJong too (I have two of the latter).  I suspect the Kindle could easily handle that one, too.

I'm probably being dense but I forget what uses Android, etc etc. My mind won't keep hold of the information. It's like selective blindness.