Amazon's Kindle

[Sibling DavidH]

I'd be interested to see what Siblings make of this:

The Kindle has pre-loaded English and German dictionaries.  When you place the cursor in front of a word, you get the entry in English in English books, but the German dictionary is automatically selected in German books.  This I have long known, and assumed that e-books have a language tag in the header, or similar.

Recently I found a German poem on the net, cut-and-pasted it into Notepad and saved it into my
Kindle.  Today I looked at it and, from curiosity, put the cursor before Hand, which is German for hand.  It came up with the German dictionary.  There cannot be any tags or markers in that file, and this was the first word I looked up.  How does it do that?

[pieces o nine]

^ They're watching  you, Neo...

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Dunno either, although have you set the main language as English or German?
---
On the subject, I bought a Kindle for my MIL and a Nook for my son, both touch & paper white. At this point I'm liking the Nook's interface much better than the Kindle's, the lack of buttons in the Kindle make you wonder how to do things if you don't know the touch areas, while the nook has buttons that will take you to the menu, turn on the backlight, and passing pages. Also, the advertisements in the Kindle are much more prominent and potentially confusing if you don't use a list.

Pity, because I like Amazon's catalog much better than B&N. 

[Swatopluk]

I gues it does it the same way as MS WORD. It checks the text for similarities and guesses the language. In previous Word versions that could be quite troublesome since occsionally it tried to guess from single letters and one had to do several clicks to get back to work again.

[Griffin NoName]

........... and one had to do several clicks to get back to work again.

....like trying to undo automatic capitalisation......... my pet hate

I discover things about my Kindle by accident. It works for me !!!

the advertisements in the Kindle are much more prominent and potentially confusing if you don't use a list.

advertisements? I don't get any advertisements........... ??

lists...  ??  how do you do lists?

[Sibling DavidH]

Yes, I also assume it analyses the text - after all, it's really the only possibility.  But it seems very involved for such a simple device.

IIRC some kindles were sold cheaper if you accepted adverts.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

When you hit Home, you have your library books on the first half of the screen and the advertisement in the bottom part, both sections as images, so that you could think that an advertised book is a book you already have/own. If you switch the view to a list view then the books you own take the bigger part of the screen and it's perfectly clear what is yours and what isn't.

[Griffin NoName]

when will society ban ads - they are evil

[Bluenose]

Actually the add supported Kindles are not available in the Land of OZ.  They would be a bit cheaper, but in the end you would quickly forget the cost of your device and the ads would be there forever, so I would avoid those machines if I were a potential Kindle buyer and had the option to buy the cheaper version.

[Griffin NoName]

Actually the add supported Kindles are not available in the Land of OZ. 

Not in the UK either.

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

In the interests of ... ahem... "fair play", I must point out that there are any number of websites which contain "how to's" on how to hack your kindle.

Among the various reasons?  Allowing non-kindle books to work, such as EPub (or so they claim), and to inhibit the advertising. 

As for me?  After owning the thing for a year, I'd consider hacking it and deleting the advertising capability-- Amazon more than got their investment money by then, and it'd be out of warranty anyway. 

And you could install various other apps, some of which let you read ePUB books, such as from Barns & Noble.   Ironic?  You betcha! 

But I wouldn't hack one that was still under warranty.. just in case.  These do fail occasionally.

[Sibling DavidH]

As long as Calibre is free and easy to use, I personally wouldn't bother to hack the Kindle to read epubs.  I can see why you'd want to get rid of the adverts, though.

[Griffin NoName]

Calibre made a complete mess of converting my smart phone user guide (pdf) to Kindle formats (tried all). Shame the Kindle does not read PDF format.

[Sibling DavidH]

Mine does.  PDFs are not read properly so you get odd line-breaks, but it's OK.

[Griffin NoName]

Actually I never tried loading the PDF directly. At least I don't remember doing so.

All converted formats put so many line breaks in that whole sections consist of one word per line.