What is this place?

This is a place learn about and share your experiences with the Amazon Kindle, it's accessories, the eBooks and other downloads available.

Saturday, December 1, 2012

Going Viral - Free

The apocalypse is here! Infection is everywhere. Captain Richard Yorke's British army unit were tasked with escorting civilians to the safety of Twickenham rugby stadium but instead find themselves facing wave after wave of flesh-hungry ravening maniacs driven to pass on the virus infecting them. Meanwhile teacher Sean O'Day hides out with his family, hoping the infected hordes will pass them by, while schoolboy Richard Green spends his time hunting and killing the infected, blaming them for the death of his best friend. None of their lives will ever be the same again. Going Viral is the first book of The Virus Sequence, a post-apocalyptic thriller in the tradition of Dawn Of The Dead and 28 Days Later.

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Breaking DRM

One of the hassles of eBooks is commercial titles often come with DRM, or Digital Rights Management. This prevents you from moving a ebook from your nook to your Kindle, or from your Kindle to your kid's Kindle. Well, in the USA, the Supreme Court ruled that breaking DRM is not a crime, only what you do with the broken media once you have unlocked it. If you unlock a DRM's eBook so that you can transfer it to another device, and you bought the original, and own the the device you are transferring to, no law has been broken, and you are within your rights. If you then give a copy to your neighbor, then you have broken the law, but it was the act of giving it to your neighbor that was the offense, not the cracking of the DRM. This cannot be any more clear, and if anyone tells you otherwise, they are very wrong. Ok, that out of the way, the easiest tools to remove DRM from an ebook is a program called Calibre, plus a set of plugins that actually perform the cracking. A very cool individual who goes by the name of Apprentice Alf wrote a simple to understand article describing the process. You can read about that on his blog, Apprentice Alf's Blog.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Kindle Owners’ Lending Library

Today we're announcing a new benefit for Kindle owners with an Amazon Prime membership: the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.

Kindle owners can now choose from thousands of books to borrow for free, including over 100 current and former New York Times Bestsellers — as frequently as a book a month, with no due dates. No other e-reader or ebook store offers such a service.

The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library features a wide array of popular titles, including Water for Elephants, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, and Fast Food Nation – plus award-winning novels such as The Finkler Question, motivational books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, biographies and memoirs including Kitchen Confidential, and Pulitzer Prize-winning books like Guns, Germs, and Steel.

We’re adding the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library to Prime membership at no extra cost — Amazon Prime remains just $79 a year, which gives you free two-day shipping on millions of products, plus unlimited instant streaming of almost 13,000 movies and TV shows.

If you’re a Kindle owner with Prime, you can start borrowing books today. If you don’t yet have a Kindle, our all-new Kindle family is available from just $79.


Kindle Lending Library

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Free Kindle books with delivery

I've posted about Project Gutenberg before as a valuable source of old books for the kindle, at no charge. Today I want to share with you another fantastic source of out of copyright ebooks, that get delivered straight to your kindle for free. The site is openlibrary.org, and I highly recommend it. Search for a topic you are interested in (I chose Home Mechanic by Schofield), and then chose "send to Kindle". It was that easy. Check it out!

Friday, October 14, 2011

New Kindle Personal Documents Features

Dear Kindle Customer,

As a past user of the Kindle Personal Documents Service, we are pleased to let you know about some improvements:
• Your documents are now automatically archived in your Kindle library (you can control this from the Manage Your Kindle page at www.amazon.com/manageyourkindle).
• Archived documents can be re-downloaded from your archive to the all-new Kindle and Kindle Touch devices, as well as Kindle Keyboard (Kindle 3rd Generation--requires the latest software update v3.3 from www.amazon.com/kindlesoftwareupdates) – you will be able to find and download your documents from any of these devices that are registered to your account.
• Now (just as with Kindle books) Whispersync automatically synchronizes your last page read, bookmarks and annotations for your documents (with the exception of PDFs) across devices.

We expect to extend these features to Kindle Fire and Kindle apps (such as Kindle Cloud Reader, Kindle for Android, Kindle for iPhone, Kindle for PC, and Kindle for Mac) in the coming months.

You can control these new features from the Manage Your Kindle page at www.amazon.com/manageyourkindle where you can see a list of your archived documents, re-deliver documents to your Kindle, delete any document from archive, or even turn off archiving for your account.

Learn more about the Kindle Personal Documents Service from our help pages at www.amazon.com/kindlepersonaldocuments.

Thank you for choosing Kindle,

Amazon.com Kindle Support

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

The New Kindles Have Arrived!

Two touch screen versions, and a color tablet, like we previously announced, and lower prices on the k3 editions, now called Kindle Keyboard, are all available now! There are now 6 versions of the Kindle, ranging from $79 to $199. The library book borrowing option is now online as well. It's an early Christmas from Amazon!

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Color Kindle Tablet - Available very soon

November 2011, if reports can be believed. It's color, 7", multi touch, built on Android, and very Amazon centric. This is not just another Android tablet. The book reader is a Kindle app (which looks similar to how it does on Android and iOS now). The music player is Amazon’s Cloud Player. The movie player is Amazon’s Instant Video player. The app store is Amazon’s Android Appstore. Oh, and the best part? $250