Comments on: Kindling

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:33:17 +0000

I totally love/hate my kindle.

By: syzygy

syzygy — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 03:02:20 +0000

The part of the Dune series written by Frank Herbert.

An encyclopedia would be nice. I think it’ll be useful to have a source you can constantly check if you want to look up facts and don’t have wireless on your phone.

If you’re into traveling a foreign dictionary would be useful too

By: Ann Nelson

Ann Nelson — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:22:04 +0000

You can download a bunch of books for free, ranging from classics to crime thrillers. You can go to Amazon and search for the tag “kindle freebie” .

But I probably should not recommend books to you, as you definitely should not recommend books to me. Once you recommended a reading list on CV and I tried one. I read “the Wasp Factory”. Ick. A book that I strongly wish I had never read.

The DX would be good for reading physics papers, except that
still missing is the ability to annotate .pdf. If you don’t mark papers while you read it would work.

Also missing: the ability to substitute a foreign language dictionary for the usual one, else this would be ideal for foreign language reading.

By: chemicalscum

chemicalscum — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 22:52:03 +0000

Bezos is a Bozo. They build Kindle on a unixlike (Linux) operating system and then they refuse to support folders, Duh?

By: yj

yj — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 16:15:45 +0000

Mmm… Engadget’s review of the DX was pretty scathing,
http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/19/kindle-dx-review/
but judging on the opinions here I might reconsider getting one…
Having no folder support is unfortunate. I was thinking of putting hundreds of pdfs in it, but that sounds impractical now.

By: Mary C

Mary C — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 13:28:36 +0000

Roberto Bolano — 2666

By: Matt B

Matt B — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:40:30 +0000

Charlie Wilson’s War. Some of the best nonfiction ever. Great, great, great read. Or anything by neil stephenson.

By: doublechateau

doublechateau — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:25:19 +0000

While I like Proportion Wheel’s suggestion, “Underworld,” I will nominate a book by one of my favorite authors, Mark Helprin. “A Soldier of the Great War.” Fantastic book. And large. Or another large tome, Pynchon’s latest, “Against the Day.”

By: Mark J. McPherson

Mark J. McPherson — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 03:44:15 +0000

Another vote for starting with a survey of the books available on Project Gutenberg, and there pick a lesser-known work by a master that you don’t see in the bookstores and wouldn’t be likely to pay for the “gamble”. Try some Wodehouse. After a few books down in Kindle, your enthusiasm for traditional books may actually cool. After a few months, I found myself wishing that I could convert many of my old print favorites to Kindle to re-read them.

By: Blake Stacey

Blake Stacey — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 22:22:24 +0000

PDF support is great – and the Kindle DX is quite good for reading arxiv papers, etc.

Interesting. I might have to look into getting a DX of my own. . . .

Big warning: right now, the Kindle software DOES NOT SUPPORT FOLDERS. So if you want to keep a selection of papers on your kindle for reference, get used to scrolling. This is something I hadn’t seen mentioned, possibly because it doesn’t bother you until you have 50 papers lying around.

$ cd Private/papers
$ ls -1R | wc -l
436

Or not.

By: Jared

Jared — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:21:31 +0000

Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland – amazingly enjoyable read, but I doubt you’d impress many literati with it

By: citrine

citrine — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:13:36 +0000

I for one, DON’T want people (other than literally a handful of friends/ family) looking at what I read. The reason? I don’t want to see the flicker of judgment on their faces which boils down to one of the following
(a) Trying to show off how smart you are, heh?
(b) I can’t BELIEVE you read that crap.

I think the Kindle is a great idea for the bookshelves of souls like me who just want to be left in peace re. our choice of reading material (unless we get caught “in the act”).

By: Brian

Brian — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:07:24 +0000

PDF support is great – and the Kindle DX is quite good for reading arxiv papers, etc.

Big warning: right now, the Kindle software DOES NOT SUPPORT FOLDERS. So if you want to keep a selection of papers on your kindle for reference, get used to scrolling. This is something I hadn’t seen mentioned, possibly because it doesn’t bother you until you have 50 papers lying around.

As for books, I’d recommend Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson. Unfortunately Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose isn’t available on Kindle – I suspect the instant dictionary feature might be handy.

By: RantingNerd

RantingNerd — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:40:08 +0000

Little, Big, by John Crowley. Another fabulous big book, but one that very few people would recognize on your shelf, so it wouldn’t give you any cool points. The only downside might be if the chapter- and section-headings aren’t properly reproduced in their faux-Victorian-scrollwork glory.

By: Blake Stacey

Blake Stacey — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:19:10 +0000

Kiln People and Jitterbug Perfume and Incandescence are all worth reading, I'd say. (Stop preemptively plagiarizing my recommendations, people!) If I were an arrogant self-promoter, or even if I had a smidgen of entrepreneurial spirit, I would consider this the perfect time to finish converting my science-fiction novel to a Kindle-friendly format and then boost it heavily. However, whatever drive I have, the evil of Amazon's software is stronger. I tried using the converter provided on their website to turn a PDF into something natively Kindle, and the result was horrendous. It didn't just strip out all the formatting, it managed to add bad formatting of its own. I think there's a way to get decent output by going from LaTeX through HTML and thence to the Kindle, but I haven't gotten it to work yet. PDF support is very important for those of us who wander the arXivoverse more than the real world.

By: Sean

Sean — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:33:00 +0000

I went with Julian Baggini, What's It All About?: Philosophy and the Meaning of Life. Then a couple of freebies: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Three Musketeers. But there are some good suggestions in this thread that I'll definitely be re-visiting.

By: Joshua Zelinsky

Joshua Zelinsky — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:19:10 +0000

I’ve recently borrowed a Kindle and found it excellent. One good book that was recently Kindled is Naomi Novik’s “His Majesty’s Dragon.”

By: Dr William Dyer

Dr William Dyer — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:22:47 +0000

I have long been a fan of Robert Anton Wilson’s books. They are fun books to me given how much information and symbolism he packs into his stories. While being a fan and somewhat an emulator of the likes of James Joyce in style, Wilson can wander into a type of thinking akin to the likes of Deepak Chopra occasionally. That aside, overall I really enjoy the twists and turns of his books and to that end I would recommend 4 of my favorites:

The Illuminatus! Trilogy
Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy
Prometheus Rising
Quantum Psychology

By: Phillip Helbig

Phillip Helbig — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:14:35 +0000

“I always wanted to buy a collection of those cardboard pretend-books that you find on shelves in furniture shops, but I couldn’t find them so I had to buy real ones instead.”

I was at IKEA last Saturday, in Frankfurt am Main in Germany, and there were hundreds of
what appeared to be dummy books in the bookshelves, with blank covers. Upon opening them
up, however, I saw that they were real books, in Swedish, mostly classics.

By: Aron Sora

Aron Sora — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:23:08 +0000

The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space