Kindle: Update on Update
11/29/2009
I haven't seen any big increase in battery life since the update in firmware last week. You'd think it would be dramatically noticeable if life has doubled, as advertised. On the other hand, it seems to me that the time from hitting a key to get rid of the screen blanker to reading text is improved. Please let me know your feelings about whether battery life has improved, or other changes since the firmware update.
The Kindle Spin:
11/22/2009
Kindle for PC: The Genie Is Out of the Bottle As you look at the outstanding literature available for the Kindle, often at a dramatic reduction in price from retail, note that you no longer need a Kindle to read it. This is far more revolutionary than most Kindle-watchers realize. In some ways, you could say that book prices are generally crumbling. Reading has just received a big push, and prices have taken a big dump.
I have already been reading many books on my ASUS EEE 1000H, a 10-inch Netbook computer that runs Linux and Windows. But I have mainly been running in Linux, and it is exciting that though the Kindle for PC program wasn't intended to run in Linux, it works very well there, using the Windows emulation program Wine. The variety of Linux I am using is called Ubuntu, and making Kindle for PC work there was a matter of selecting Wine from the Ubuntu software installer and clicking Install. Then I downloaded Kindle for PC from
this page, even though it specifies that the program you are installing is only for Windows.
Then just click the file you downloaded, and Wine takes care of installing it.
After I installed it and was happily using Kindle for PC in Linux, I learned that it worked even better if I set Wine to emulate Windows 98, a simple matter of selecting Windows 98 as a preference in Wine.
Installing Kindle for PC under Windows is also quite easy, just a matter of going to the site linked to above and double-clicking the installation file after downloading it.
If you already have a Kindle, is there a reason to download Kindle for PC? Emphatically yes, because pictures, some colors, graphs, and maps generally look a lot better on a PC than on the Kindle. In addition, other programs that you have on your laptop or PC, such as note-taking programs are very handy to use while reading your Kindle book, and it's a lot more convenient than using your Kindle AND your computer at the same time, which is what I was doing before Kindle for PC.