Kindle now sharing your highlights

There has been some alarm over a new Amazon Kindle enhancement that collects and shares highlighted text. I will confess that I’ve evolved into a lazy Kindle user who for the most part just downloads and reads e-books on the device without paying too much attention to new enhancements to functionality so I needed the blog post on gigaom to find out that this was happening. I do use the highlight feature quite a bit at times and I also take notes. I briefly visited a Kindle board a few months ago where people were saying they never use the note taking feature and don’t even know how it works. I can’t imagine reading and not making notes but  – but then again these are probably the same people who read 400 page books in half an hour. If you tend to stop and comment regularly like I do  – the going is a lot slower. Here’s something to keep in mind about Kindle notes. You can copy and paste your clippings from your Kindle to a document on your computer. You can empty out your clippings document on your device, but all clippings are stored on an amazon server and you cannot delete that content, in fact Kindle users don’t know where the data backup is.

Here’s what the notes look like when you download them:

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Michael Jackson: The Magic, The Madness, The Whole Story, 1958-2009 (J. Randy Taraborrelli)
- Note Loc. 1547 | Added on Sunday, xxxx 18, 20xx, 01:50 AM

jrt needs to get the ages right and stick w/ them

==========
Killing Willis: From Diff’rent Strokes to the Mean Streets to the Life I Always Wanted (Todd Bridges)
- Note Loc. 1741 | Added on Wednesday, xxxx 28, 20xx, 11:16 PM

why did i think this was earlier?
==========

These notes could easily be extracted and shared if amazon chose to and that could be a much bigger privacy violation than highlight sharing. But it is also true that without context the notations can be fairly meaningless. It takes paid analysts with access to user ids, to make connections between notes made across multiple publications read on a single device and build a profile. Without this analysis the notes are random anonymous text floating around in the global mind miasma, and far less revealing than something you’d voluntarily share on twitter or face. I confess that even before I knew about the shared highlighting, I have been mindful about what I highlight or write on Kindle but this is no different than how I’d treat a print book because I often lend books to friends and family members. Unless you live alone and never plan to share your books with anyone, you wouldn’t scrawl things you don’t want people to know in the margins of your print books because this could be similar to sharing your diary. It makes sense to treat books that you read on your Kindle device in the same way.

Filed under: Books, Technology, enhancements, highlights, kindle, notes, privacy violation

Publishing 2020

“Digital books will most commonly be referred to as “books,” not ebooks,” Says Mark Coker of Smashwords. For the rest of his predictions about the publishing industry in 2020 click HERE http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/publishing/smashwords_book_publishing_10_years_in_the_future_147705.asp.

Here’s hoping that in another ten years all publishers will have the memo on this. I just had to drop a seminar because the key text is not available in digital format and the closest print copy is on reserve in a library 40 miles away. This means I can check out the book out for two hour periods but can’t remove it from the library. In these type of situations, photocopying is usually the solution, but to add insult to injury the only copy machine in said library is broken. I actually drove the 80 mile round trip for two days before I gave up. I’ve been making use of Kindle and the Barnes and Noble e-reader for the past few classes and got used to the convenience of being able to buy my etexts on the day of first class, so the idea that I would have to do a cross country paper chase to find this book caught me unawares. I am not talking about an ancient manuscript on delicate parchment bound by crumbling leather. This book has a 2005 copyright and the publisher obviously has the electronic files sitting in their computers but neglected to make a digital version for sale – a process that would take one of their editors a few hours to create in the worst case scenario and a few minutes if a clean conversion is possible. Furthermore the publisher gets to double their profit margin each time they can sidestep printing, binding and shipping costs and sell an ebook. So all in all it makes no sense at all for a publisher to be so clueless about industry trends that they are passing up on good money from willing customers, and all I have to say is “wake up!”

Filed under: Books, ebooks, future of publishing

Twitterature (book release)

The Wall Street Journal hears Shakespeare rolling over in his grave. I say it’s a mistake to think Shakespeare was a luddite, fuddy duddy, future phobe. Follow the link below to read about the book.

dracorosa: Twitterature: the World’s Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less..http://bit.ly/2ayRwY
Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/dracorosa/status/6545895108

Sent via TweetDeck (www.tweetdeck.com)

Sent from my iPod

Filed under: Books, Technology, shakespeare, twitter, twitterature

The Atlantic to sell short stories on Kindle

gothamwriters: The Atlantic will sell short stories on Kindle: http://bit.ly/5te67G
Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/gothamwriters/status/6506087381

Sent via TweetDeck (www.tweetdeck.com)

………..

One of the featured authors will be:

… Ms. [Edna] O’Brien, one of Ireland’s best-known writers, the Kindle deal drags her into the 21st century. Ms. O’Brien, who writes all her novels, stories and plays longhand, then dictates them to a typist, said she had never even seen a Kindle.

She submitted her story “Shovel Kings,” about the lives of Irish workers who dug the tunnels for the London Underground, to her agent to see if she could get a traditional print deal. Instead, The Atlantic offered her the Kindle opportunity.

……..

As a Kindle owner I’m all for seeing as many types of literature available for Kindle as possible – but the publishing industry is never going to snap out of its funk if they don’t start working with modern writers. It seems that The Guardian for example is featuring a different author every week who doesn’t even know what a computer does. We need more people who know how to use today’s technology to create new style and form to excite and reengage the reading audience. That’s what we need.

On a slightly related note, one of the clicks on my blog today was “Kindle just a fad” – perhaps someone deciding whether or not the device is worth buying for Christmas. I’ve read critics who think that Kindle will go out of fashion as soon as Apple releases the much anticipated tablet computer. But you know – not everyone is going to want a tablet computer. Some people will be perfectly happy with a Kindle. And presuming that the tablet will be pretty much like the iPhone/iPod but bigger -  that’s a highly desirable product and I know I will want one but that in no way invalidates the usefulness of a Kindle device. That would be like saying that people will only read a book printed on one kind of paper or bound in a certain manner.

The bottom line is that the ebook isn’t going anywhere. The look and navigational functions will be slightly different depending on the device that you use. For example my Kindle books look different on the Kindle device than they do on my Ipod Touch. On Kindle which has a matte screen they look like newspaper. On Ipod I have it set to sepia tone which mimicks the look of an older book but on the backdrop of a glossy screen. On Kindle you use buttons to navigate from page to page. On Ipod you use your finger to swipe with a moment that is sort of like what you’d do on print. However I use both interchangeably (and actual print as well) and have no intention of chucking one in favor of the other. So all that to say Kindle is just a device but electronic text – including ebooks is not a fad, but simply a part of life in the internet age.

Sent from my iPod and updated on a reg’lar macbook.

Filed under: Books, kindle, the atlantic

Contemporary Reading

An urban focused website tweets that they want to book reviewers. They ask for two writing samples – including a review of a recent book. That makes me think if this means fiction I can’t remember when I last read a recent novel. I’d like to and I’m always tagging new books for future perusal – but there just hasn’t been time this year. For my MA work I’ve read very little past the middle 1960s. If I can find a suitable doctoral program for next year then I suppose I’ll have more time to explore. All that to say – maybe the contemporary reviews thing is not for me.

Sent from my iPod

Filed under: Books

Academic E-texts

Conversation with a friend who is also back in school: I asked him if he’d tried a learning website that I recommended, and he said he’s been swamped with reading from multiple texts these days and hasn’t had time for much else. I asked if he’d tried e-books (because they can make a student’s life easier). He said he doesn’t like the idea of e-books and doesn’t like reading books on the computer. I told him I have a Kindle now. He was unimpressed and asked if that wasn’t the same thing as a computer – just smaller – i.e. a redundancy and waste of money. I told him it is a reader device. E-Ink technology and the fact that the screen is not backlit prevents eye strain. Computer reading hurts my eyes but I read using Kindle for hours without discomfort. This makes a difference for me because I’ve been reading e-books on computers for years. In the past I used e-books when there was no print available. The first e-book I read was only published online – this was circa 1997. Now I use print when there’s no e-book available. There are e-book fans who won’t read print anymore. I’m not an extremist like that – I’ll always use both types of books. Anyway I’ll take my Kindle for a show and tell next time and see what what this friend who isn’t exactly a gadget lover or a technophobe thinks of it.

Filed under: Books, Technology, Academic, ebooks, Education, etexts, kindle

Writing a great novel

Yesterday (Nov. 6, 2009), the Wall Street Journal published collection of tips from some of the biggest novelists of our time. Bookmark this article, tag it, read it several times and take notes. The tips are priceless.

The article talks about some of the challenges writers face and how they overcome them.

“Behind the scenes, many of these writers say they struggle with the daily work of writing, clocking thousands of solitary hours staring at blank pages and computer screens. Most agree on common hurdles: procrastination, writer’s block, the terror of failure that looms over a new project and the attention-sucking power of the Internet.”

I’m all ears and eyes for anything that will get me off burning away precious hours on the internet. I am doing much better I’m proud to say. I rarely look at celeb gossip blogs anymore. Another benefit to Kindle is that it will get you offline and reading quality material (as opposed to pouring through DC craigslist personals and calling it your research in 21st century mating habits among beltway office workers …). You will get your reading done on Kindle without repeat clicking on twitter to see what’s new. BTW I don’t mean Kindle helped me get over my internet habit. I had to give up a lot of my slacker ways over the past 5 months because of school demands but as it turns out Kindle is a useful time management tool because it helps you use the time you’d normally spend reading digital media online more efficiently.

Here’s an excellent tip.

On his author Web site, John Irving describes how he begins his novels by writing the last sentence first.

Elementary (Watson!). How many times have you struggled so hard with an ending that you lost the fight? And the solution overlooked – begin.with.the.end.in.mind!

This makes me think of back when I first started writing stories – way back when. My stories were all handwritten in (high) school issue note books and I wrote them from beginning to end in ball point pen with nary an error – yet later I came to rely on word processing software but never had that kind of fluidity of motion from brain to paper. Hmmm. Gives one pause for thought.

Click HERE to read the article and repeat – don’t 4get 2 tag it.

Filed under: Books, author, novel, tips, writing

Kindle is here, Kindle is here! (My First Impressions)

What I may have indicated in my earlier post about the BN Nook notwithstanding, I went for it and bought the Kindle Wireless Reading Device. This is the Latest Generation device with the 6″ Display and U.S. & International Wireless. I ordered on the 23^rd with the free super saver shipping, it was delivered yesterday and I picked it up today. I’ve been reading the Amazon boards for the past couple of days and there you’ll see a lot of buzz and hoopla about Kindle vs Nook. Who’s happy with Kindle, who’s not, and who’s looking to jump ship to the Barnes and Noble product. Lots of people are looking at this as a Coke vs Pepsi type argument when there are actually at least ten different choices so it’s not either Kindle or Nook proposition. This is not an e-book vs print issue either as some internet buzz might lead you to believe. I use both everyday for different reasons and most of the world’s books and a large percentage of periodicals are not available electronically yet. Here are some reasons why e-books and e-readers are handy: An e-reader is nice because it allows for hands free reading – which is a big help if you’ve ever struggled to hold thick hardbacks in your hands or to hold paperback pages in place. E-books are great for academic reading because the text is searchable which means for one thing you can highlight text or make notes actually find them again in a second which is not the case when you mark text the old fashioned way. But in either case this does not mean that once you buy a reader you’ll never read print again or that print is a dead medium.

Filed under: Books, amazon, ebook, Ereader, kindle, Review

Sony Reader Daily Edition

The Sony RDE is another tempting e-reader option. This handsome lookin’ gizmo (from what I can see from the non-descript pics in the sonystyle website) is 3G connected for content on the go and can also read content from your PC or Mac in multiple formats. The grey/black aluminum frame around the 7″ display is smooth and elegant and along the lines of what we’re used to in Sony TVs. Navigation is by touchscreen instead of clunky buttons. There are two ways to take notes on the RDE – Free hand with a stylus or using touch screen keyboard. You also have the option of reading in portrait or landscape mode. Sound tantalizing? Sony Style says the product will be available in December – not mention of price yet – but I guess we will find out presently. Click HERE to read the Sony RDE specs.

Filed under: Books, 3G, ebook, Ereader, Mac, PC, Sony

About nook

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/features/

I am just about sold. After leering at Kindle all year what makes me feel confident about jumping on the BN nook just like that? I think it’s the 3G wifi, 17000 book capacity (with expansion slot) and ability to share/synch books I download with my laptop. This is a first gen widget and typically suspicious of first gen technology because it is inevitably rushed to market with known bugs. There is a two year protection plan that is supposed to make me feel better about my purchase. I’m not looking to replace or even get away from paper but it can be a handy thing for a student/writer to be able to search and find every time an author refers for example – to “brown walls”. I will be starting a Steinbeck seminar next week. This course marks the half way point in the obstacle course to my master’s degree, and it is also the first of my classes where all of the texts are available electronically. Unfortunately nook won’t be available until after the seminar so I will be using e-books on my laptop instead.

(I am going to think of that song lyric “I did it all for the nookie” everytime I see the gizmo. I don’t think anyone made memorable use of the word “kindle” like that).

Filed under: Books, Grad School, ebooks, reader, wifi