Adventures in home working

A few tips on how I use my Kindle

Case

I started out thinking I didn’t need a case for my Kindle, but over the months I realised that this was a mistake:

1. A case means you worry less
2. A case makes it easier to hold the Kindle, even though it’s slightly heavier
3. A case lets you prop up your Kindle on a table for easier – hands free – reading
4. This is the one I went for

Content

Getting content onto your Kindle is key and there’s no better solution than Calibre:

1. I have a huge library of eBooks built up over the years in all manner of formats.  Many of these are public domain books from Project Gutenberg, some of them PDF documents and many more are electronic equivalents of the many thousands of paper books that I’ve purchased.  Calibre lets me convert these books to suit whichever eReader I happen to have at the time starting with Sony, then iPad, now Kindle.
2. Amazon has a good collection of free eBooks, note that if you get them from Amazon then your reading position will sync across your devices (assuming you have Kindle apps on them).  If you load them from Calibre then you only get them on your physical Kindle
3. Amazon has listed other free book collections
4. Although I like to read magazines on the iPad, Calibre auto-downloads content off magazine web sites and formats and packages it up for reading on the kindle for free.  The results are generally excellent.  Even better it will email the books direct to the Kindle (I use my gmail account to go this).  I leave Calibre running on my Home Server and so each week the magazines all just arrive on the Kindle like magic.
5. Instapaper is a web service that allows me to capture web content that I want to read from many sources including Google Reader, Twitter and arbitrary web sites.  Gathering web sites is as simple as clicking a bookmarklet, or using the Firefox addin Send to Instapaper.  The Instapaper web service stores all of the URL’s and then on a daily basis will email a neatly packaged up “book” to your Kindle for offline reading.  It’s not as good as the iPad experience which is fully synchronised with the web service, but it’s still useful.  I’m hoping that when the Kindle Appstore gets going one of the first apps in it will be Instapaper!

Getting content to the Kindle

I use several methods:

1. Calibre will transfer content directly to the Kindle via USB, perfect for bulk loading a large collection of books
2. I generally use email to get ad-hoc content to the Kindle.  I have a 3G Kindle, but I don’t generally want to use 3G for delivery of content, because then I have to pay for it, so I set my threshold to Zero (see pic) and then everything gets delivered via WIFI at no cost, regardless of which email address it’s sent to.
3. Every week Calibre sends me a bunch of magazines via email, over WIFI
4. Every night Instapaper send me a bunch of web pages via email over WIFI.  Although Instapaper says it doesn’t use the free kindle email service, you won’t get charged if you set your “personal document charge limit” as I have it above.
5. I buy — way too many — books as well via the Kindle store and they all get delivered over WIFI or 3G depending on where I am

I have a Kindle and an iPad, but its the Kindle that’s had the biggest impact on my life – so what’s so great about the Kindle?

The Kindle is for reading, whilst the iPad is optimised for distraction.  Yes it’s possible to do almost everything the Kindle does on the iPad, but not for long.  My brain has been trained by modern life to look for distractions every 5 minutes and if I’m reading on the iPad then it readily supplies those distractions and it does it incredibly well.

In contrast the kindle does only one thing well, it’s a superb text reading machine, yes it has an experimental browser, can read magazines and PDF’s, even play games, but it does all those things badly and slowly.  It’s sufficiently painful to browse the web on a kindle that I never bother, it’s never a distraction.

Why is this single mindedness an advantage over the iPad – because I want to read.  Reading is a real joy, something that I hardly ever get to do enough of and the Kindle is superb at it:

1. The screen is fantastic, wonderful contrast in all light conditions including full sun
2. Very light weight, meaning less stress on arthritic wrists
3. Very long battery life, meaning I never have to worry
4. Excellent page turning buttons
5. Small enough to take almost anywhere
6. Great Kindle apps on all of my devices, including the Blackberry for those very few times when the Kindle’s too big to take somewhere

I never regret an hour or two spent reading, but I often wonder what I achieved after an hour on the iPad.

What does the iPad do best?  Almost everything, but in my “busy” life the one thing it really does that the blackberry and the laptop struggles with is reading rich documents, magazines, manuals, text books.  Goodreader is a revelation in terms of PDF reading and Instapaper is fantastic for reading web pages that I’ve captured on the PC to read later.

I’m hopeful that there will be a dedicated Instapaper app for the Kindle sometime soon that will auto synch with the web service, but for now when it comes to work reading the iPad is king.