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.