My grandparents got me a Kindle for my recent birthday, which I am extremely pleased with. I would never have bought it for myself (or indeed asked for it as a gift), but it seems like it will be a great tool, especially I do most of my reading on the train.
I’ve loaded it up with a few public domain books to get me started, but what I’d really like to do is subscribe to academic journals, or buy individual articles. Does anyone know whether this is possible? There are several journals I don’t currently subscribe to because of the high fees, and I am hoping that these might be lower for a Kindle in the same way that book prices are. This might be wishful thinking though. Anyone have experience doing this?
And more broadly, what uses other than “buy book, read book” have people found for their Kindles?
I’ve used it check my email and look up maps while I’m out and about - it’s very good for that because you can use it in bright sunlight and the map stays on screen even when you’re not online.
I’ve started scanning my sheet music (actually, taking pictures of it since scanner isn’t big enough and pictures avoid that bending to black in the creases). I convert the files to one big pdf and have sheet music on the go. I think PDFs might suck up a bit more juice than a mobi file though.
I’ve got a newspaper subscription - the Guardian/Observer (UK) - on mine. I switch the Kindle on every morning, turn wireless on (best to keep wireless turned off as leaving it on uses up the battery quicker), and that day’s edition appears in a few seconds. Very useful for me at the moment, as I’m working in Singapore where UK papers are scarce.
It’s £9.99 per month, so maybe about a quarter the price of the print edition, but the first 14 days were free. I took all the UK broadsheets up on their 14 day free trial offer, so it was a good few months before I paid anything!
The disadvantage of this is that the Kindle isn’t good at showing photographs or graphics that accompany the news stories. And, of course, you can obtain all this content on the Guardian’s website, for nothing. But meh, I don’t always have my laptop with me, and it’s only 30 odd pence a day.
Do you drive to work/school each day? I love the read-to-me feature - I use one of the common adapters for playing an MP3 player through the car radio.
Sure, the mechanical voice is nowhere near as nice as a “real” human reader on an audio book. But it’s great to be able to easily pick up reading wherever the narration ended once I get home.
For more free books, including many classics, go to the Amazon Kindle book store and look at their “Top 100” lists. They have 1 list for “free” books and another one for non-free books. I get most of my entertainment reading that way.
I like the games we have on ours. We have about four word games that keep the kids busy when they need a distraction.
Other than that, a subscription to a blog that specializes in reporting e-book bargains is a must. I get a lot of good reading material from Books on the Knob. You do have to sift because the majority of the bargain/free books are silly romances (that’s not to say I don’t download and read a few myself) but there are still some very good books that are a free for a short period as a marketing tool.
Don’t forget to put your books in Collections! It took me ages to go back and do it later, but scrolling through 20 pages of books to find what I was looking for got to be too tedious. Besides, I needed a Pratchett collection so I could find Guards, Guards quickly.
If you download Calibre you can then subscribe to a variety of newspapers and magazines for free (well over 300 are available). No idea if the academic journals you seek are among them.
I keep everything managed in a Calibre library on my computer, and keep a smaller subset of ~50 books on my Kindle at any given time - for me, much easier for me than messing around with (PITA) Collections. It’s also got handy features for converting files between formats etc.
One thing I can recommend is Delivereads which emails to you for free (if you are using the free wifi delivery email service on your kindle a compilation of stories from magzines and websites, about every two weeks or so (sometimes as often as once a week). It is really cool.
If you read a lot of books published by Baen, then www.webscription.net will probably be to your liking. Good bit cheaper than the Kindle store fore the most part, unless you want to buy the books before the dead-tree versions are released, then it costs a bit more.
Of course, you either have to put the books on your Kindle with the USB cord (through Calibre or through the click-and-drag USB flashdrive interface), or set up the wifi email delivery (which requires some poking around in your Amazon settings to allow emails from webscription.net. They use a whitelist setup to keep spam out of your Kindle, and by default only the Kindle store is on the whitelist.)
A similar service to Delivereads is Instapaper - which not only aggregates content but provides a Read Later bookmark so that webpages and articles can be saved from a browser, aggregated and read on the kindle at a later time in a Kindle-friendly format.
