Tag: Kindle

My new Kindle!

After weeks of hemming and hawing, I finally bought a new Kindle. My old Kindle Keyboard 3G bit the dust in a cat-related accident, so it was time for an upgrade.

Because I’m a cheap bastard, I went with the basic model with the special offers, though the Paperwhite was certainly tempting. Since the basic Kindle no longer has a physical keyboard, a touchscreen would have made the onscreen keyboard a bit easier to use. But I never did much typing on my old Kindle, so it seemed silly to spend an extra $50 for something I would rarely use (yeah, I know you also use the touchscreen to turn the pages, but I kinda like having the buttons for some reason).

Gompers better not break this one!
My new Kindle.

I think the new Kindle looks a lot nicer than the Kindle Keyboard. While the latter always reminded me of the PDAs my dad had in the late 90s, the former is much sleeker. It looks very tablet-like. It’s also a hell of a lot lighter than the older model.

The one annoying thing is that Amazon no longer includes a wall-socket adapter with their new Kindles. Fortunately, I still had the one that came with the Kindle Keyboard. Otherwise, Amazon would have charged me $14.99 for it (and that’s a discounted price that’s only good if you order it along with the Kindle; if I’d waited, the price would have gone up to $19.99!).

My first purchase on the new Kindle was a collection of short stories by Saladin Ahmed entitled Engraved on the Eye. I’m looking forward to starting it later this evening!

 

Even in the digital world, Formatting 101 is important

As I read more and more ebooks on the Kindle, I’m starting to detect a quality-control problem.  For example, in both of Aliette de Bodard’s Aztec mysteries (which are awesome, by the way), I’ve noticed formatting glitches galore.   Hyphens are missing.  Text is improperly italicized.  And in Mike Shevdon’s Sixty-One Nails, two characters’ dialogue will  often be smushed into the same paragraph, which makes for an incredibly confusing read.

Both de Bodard and Shevdon are published by Angry Robot, but the problem is not confined to one particular publisher.  I’ve heard reports of similar problems in ebooks published by other companies.  These kinds of basic formatting errors might have been understandable back in 2007, but ebooks have been around long enough that they should have worked out the kinks by now.   I have to wonder, do ebooks actually undergo any kind of independent proofreading?  Or do they just take the electronic files from the print edition and transform them into an ebook?

The amazing clockwork circus

I can cross a book off of my summer reading list!  As you may have seen in my last post, I was unsure of what to read first, but I ended up settling on Mechanique: a Tale of the Circus Tresaulti.

It’s the story of a circus whose performers have all been turned into vaguely steampunkish creations: there’s a guy whose lungs have been replaced with clockwork bellows, the aerialists’ bones have been replaced by hollow copper facsimiles, and the strongman has a metal spine with a clock sticking out of his back.    The circus travels around a post-apocalyptic world where governments come and go and never control more than a tiny smidgeon of the map at any one time.  Eventually, a scheming government official (known only as “the government man,” which made me think of the G-Man from Half Life) takes an interest in the circus because he believes that the technology inside of the performers could be used to create an army of super soldiers.

I really shouldn’t have liked this story.  The plot zips forward and backward like a trapeze artist and there are multiple POV characters.  Although most of the narration is third person omniscient, it sometimes veers into first person.  But you know what?  It worked.  These are all things that I usually dislike, but they never irritated me in this story.  The writing is so strong and artful that you just get sucked in.

Even though the main plot comes to a satisfactory resolution, the reader is still left with a number of unanswered questions.  It’s never explained how Boss (the lady who runs the circus and does all the machining) got her strange power.  Nor is it explained why the world was apparently engulfed in chaos.  But it really doesn’t matter within the confines of the story.  All you need to know is that Boss has this power and that the world has fallen apart.  The details are irrelevant.  And the more details you give, the more you invite your readers to peer behind the illusion you’ve created.

A final note: if I didn’t have a Kindle, I probably wouldn’t have read this book.  I’m not all that into steampunk, and I would’ve been reluctant to shell out $14.95 for the paperback edition.  But the Kindle edition was just $4.95, so I was willing to take the risk.  And I’m sure glad I did.

Next in the reading queue: The Man With the Golden Torc.

Kindle awesomeness

I am a reluctant ebook reader.  I knew they were the wave of the future, but I was still determined to resist them for as long as possible.  But when I got my iPhone last summer, I spent some time messing around with the Kindle app and I had to grudgingly admit that ebooks can be pretty spiffy.  While I still prefer paper books, there is something to be said for being able to download an interesting book at 3 am while you’re in your pajamas.

Although reading on the iPhone isn’t horrible, I knew that I wanted to upgrade to something with a bigger screen.  I narrowed my options down to two: the iPad and the Kindle.  At first glance, the iPad seemed like the best choice since it can do so much more than the Kindle.  Plus, everyone I know who owns an iPad is madly in love with it.

Try as I might, I was never able to fall in love with the iPad.  It’s a slick machine, to be sure, but I couldn’t escape the fact that I just didn’t need all the extra bells and whistles that it offers.  I already own two laptops, so my portable computing needs are pretty much taken care of.  Also, I just couldn’t see myself curling up with the iPad, which is kind of an issue since I do most of my reading lying down.

So far, I’m really impressed with the Kindle.  It’s the perfect size for reading in bed and the screen is a lot easier on the eyes than a computer screen.  I also like the fact that it syncs your progress in a book across all platforms, so I can start reading a book on the Kindle and then pick it up on the iPhone without having to hunt around for my place.

At first, I was a bit put off by the the flash you see when you turn the page.  From what I can tell, it’s just a side effect of the eInk technology, so all eInk-based readers are going to be have it to some degree.  I got used to it quite quickly though, and I can’t really say that it bothers me.

The only real complaint I have is that I don’t really like the built-in keyboard, but it’s not a big deal since I don’t see myself typing up a storm on this thing.  For the occasional search, it’s just fine.

Now I just need to decide what to read on it first.  I’m torn between Mechanique and The Man with the Golden Torc.  I think I may have to flip a coin on this one…