Kindle help requested!

January 25, 2011 9:28 PM

Kindle information needed!

I’m pretty certain I want a Kindle. I’m 62, love to read, and I think I am sold.

But, I am a grazer. Sure, I’ll get some NYT best sellers, but the majority of my reading is grazing. Magazine’s like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s. I would love to download other content that is free on the web. The NYT, and websites with great, but long content. History and philosophy websites, eg.

I am all about free. Accessing what is already free on my computer.

My eyes do not tolerate reading page after page on a backlit device. Thus, Kindle.

I live in a log cabin in Idaho, but recently visited Chicago and the Apple store on Michigan Avenue. Thought I was at a Moonie convention. The iPad is not what I want.

OK. I know I can buy books. My question however, is how to access free stuff on the web? Do I need 3g? I have WiFi at home, but I would like to have a newsstand on the road.

I know a bit about Calibre and InstaPaper, but not a lot. I’m no Luddite. I’m not a pirate (I’ll figure that out on my own). I would like to aggregate what is presently free.

Assume that I am going to get a Kindle. What can I do with it and how can I easily do it other than order books? How do I make sure that it is stuffed with stuff to read when I am sitting by a glacial lake (often)? An airport? Starbuck’s? On a plane or in the back seat of a car? Do I need 3G?

Lastly, is there a Kindle oriented website or blog that is written in plain English? I just want to know what I can do and how to do it. For free, if possible. Thanks in advance for acronym free answers. Yeah, I know, .epub, .mobi, .pdf. I can deal with that.

posted by private_idaho to Computers & Internet (19 answers total)

Have you checked out the Nook? I know you said you don't like backlit but these are really nice and they have all the newsstand stuff you're looking for.
posted by lannanh at 9:36 PM on January 25, 2011

You should take a look at the Sony Readers.

I got mine because I am able to check out library books. They also play nice with the epub/less drm'd formats with little tweaking. Project Gutenberg!
posted by bibliogrrl at 9:40 PM on January 25, 2011

I ordered the WiFi+3G version of the Kindle (due to arrive tomorrow) largely so I can check out the Project Gutenberg collection. Lots of great reading material, all in the public domain, and absolutely free. I thought about getting the WiFi-only version at first since, like you, I have WiFi at home. But since I like to travel, I opted to spring for the 3G in order to be able to buy books when out of wireless range.

The Kindle Owners Blog may be just what you're looking for in terms of Kindle news etc.
posted by Telpethoron at 9:54 PM on January 25, 2011

The only additional capability 3g gives you is the ability to do network things like web browsing or buying books while away from a WiFi network. The networking is used primarily to download (usually paid) content from Amazon; if you want to load your own files onto the Kindle, you plug it into a computer, where it appears as a hard disk that you can drag and drop documents onto.

With 3g you would be able to browse the web away from wifi using the "experimental" web browser, which generally sucks on the Kindle's slow-to-respond screen, but works well enough for the mobile versions of Google Reader, Metafilter, Wikipedia, etc. I've been using Google Reader to read my usual assortment of blogs and news sites, which is great, but as far as I know there's no convenient way to download that sort of content for offline browsing --- you'd have to smush it into a PDF by printing to a file, and then copy that onto the Kindle while connected to a computer.

Project Gutenberg now supports Kindle's native mobi format, which is great if you want to read some Dickens or Shakespeare.

Lastly, a word of caution: There are lots of "free ebook" sites purporting to offer recent ebooks for free, but as far as I can tell they're all shameless scams.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 9:59 PM on January 25, 2011

I have a first gen kindle (that I've had for over 2 years now), and the not-very-secret-but-people-still-don't-quite-get-it secret is that you can access the web from your kindle from anywhere at all if you buy the 3G version. For life. No monthly charge. No annual fee. It's in black and white, of course, but many of the sites you mention are fully accessible. Free. No need to subscribe. Sans charge.

Of course they'd LOVE you to subscribe. They are all about bundling web pages like boingboing and blogs and feeds and other sites and selling them to you for a small fee. But hey. If they're currently free on the web, they're still free on your kindle. I have mine right here and hey, BBC News! Google! Everything! free internet.

There is pretty much all you can eat for free stuff that you can stuff your kindle full of, like Project Gutenberg, and amazon itself has bundled up classics and put them at $0.00. There are promotional releases that publishers release for free. There are backlist titles listed sometimes to entice you into longer series. The site lists the top 100 seller, and the top 100 free titles side by side. It's basically a firehose of free out there.

Probably the best kindle site is actually the forums on amazon. Start at the kindle store main page and browse around.

My one wish is that my kindle would play nicely with libraries. So far, no go.
posted by clone boulevard at 10:01 PM on January 25, 2011 [1 favorite]

The New Yorker & Atlantic are available by subscription for the Kindle (not free, but less than print), though Harpers is not. I find them mostly satisfying, though the lack of images is occasionally disappointing.
posted by judith at 10:51 PM on January 25, 2011

There's a service called Instapaper that allows you to flag long-form content and articles that you'd like to read later. You can then configure Instapaper to email your kindle a file containing your 20 most recent articles. Specific details on the Instapaper blog.

I've long used Instapaper on my iPhone and really enjoy being able to read the content on the Kindle screen.
posted by herrtodd at 12:08 AM on January 26, 2011

Oh, heh. You know about Instapaper! Well, use it in conjunction with Give Me Something To Read to get even more free content!
posted by herrtodd at 12:10 AM on January 26, 2011 [2 favorites]

You say that a majority of your reading is through magazines? I've been using a Kindle 3 for the last three months or so, and absolutely love it, but I've also never tried reading a magazine on it. A lack of a color screen would prevent me from even trying, even if I read magazines regularly. Something like the Nook Color would be FAR more suitable for reading that kind of material. Of course, then you have to deal with the fact that it's a standard back-lit LCD screen and not only is it terrible for reading in the sunlight, you'll have to charge it once a day if you read for more than a few hours a day.

I have the wifi only Kindle 3, but the only reason I use the wifi is when I've bought something on Amazon and don't feel like pulling out a USB cable to manually move the file over to my Kindle (same as with a USB flash drive). I just activate wifi, wait for the book to download automatically, and then turn wifi off to save battery life.

If you do get a Kindle I would recommend downloading all of the books you want to read to your computer, and then converting them to a format readable by the Kindle (.mobi being by far the best choice), and then move them to your Kindle so that you have a catalog of books ready to be read whenever you feel like it.

If you are ONLY going to be using books that you purchase (free or otherwise) through Amazon.com then the 3G version would be right up your alley. If you're wanting to use books obtained from other sources, and in other formats, then I can't recommend the extra cost of the 3G version.
posted by Brando7s at 12:21 AM on January 26, 2011

Yes, instapaper will do most of what you want. Or you can email documents you want to read to the kindle's inbox email address. In both cases I use the free.kindle.com address so they only get to me by wifi. If you deliver "personal" content by 3G you have to pay - I didn't realise this before buying the Kindle and if I had I might well have bought the wifi only version.

Longform and givemesomethingtoread are both good resources for articles.
posted by crocomancer at 1:13 AM on January 26, 2011

It's not a feature I use so I may have some details wrong, but Calibre has the ability to download nicely formatted news from hundreds of sites (presumably via their RSS feeds), you tell it which ones you want and how often to check, and then whenever you fire up Calibre with your kindle attached it copies over the latest batch of news. I've certainly heard of people plugging it in each morning to get the news ready for their commute that day. I just checked and The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Harper’s are all in the list.
posted by markr at 2:36 AM on January 26, 2011

The Kindle also comes with two e-mail addresses, [e-mail] and [e-mail]. They both push data to the Kindle, but the difference between them is the free.kindle.com address will only attempt delivery if you're connected over wifi (hence the free part). There's a small charge if you send data to the Kindle over 3G.

What this means in practice: Calibre can be configured to e-mail the daily digests mentioned above to your Kindle. So, if you don't mind leaving your home computer running while you're out, you can have your very own "newspaper" of blog feeds, websites, posts from the NYT and Atlantic webpages, etc., all waiting for you when you wake up, no matter where you are. Obviously it's free if you're somewhere with a wi-fi signal, but if you don't mind spending a couple of bucks here and there you have information available wherever there's a cell signal.
posted by backseatpilot at 5:11 AM on January 26, 2011

I agree that instapaper is great on the kindle; so is the new yorker: it's $2.99 a month for all the articles (you get the cartoons, too). I don't find I miss the images.
posted by dpx.mfx at 6:09 AM on January 26, 2011

I'd just point out that the $150 nook with the e-ink screen does all of what you want AND allows you to check out e-books from your public library if they offer the service. You can check to see if your library does.
posted by General Tonic at 6:58 AM on January 26, 2011

Don't neglect the many, many, many free books available on Amazon. If it's somewhere in Project Gutenberg, it's probably also on Amazon for free, and often with better formatting. The Gutenberg texts are OK, but it irks the hell out of me that I can't correct them as I read because the formatting is often crappy and in many cases there are obvious issues with OCR (ie, something like "Oh! see." when it should read "Oh, I see." and so forth). Yes, it happens in the Amazon ones too, but not as often and the formatting is usually not as bad (plus it doesn't start with the 40-page Gutenberg credits notice, which I kind of dislike just because there's not usually a link to bypass the darn thing).

Added bonus, the Amazon ones will sync between devices, where manually-added books will not. So I can pick up reading Dostoyevsky on my Kindle right where I left off on my phone or laptop.
posted by caution live frogs at 7:38 AM on January 26, 2011

I, too, love to read, and I am all about free as well.

There is tons of free Kindle content out there. Instapaper, Calibre, and Project Gutenberg, but also just many free Kindle books right there on Amazon. Take a browse. Chances are, if it's public domain, Kindle has it for free, or maybe 99c.

I love having a 3G Kindle. Yes, the browser isn't great, but it's free for life and works fine for text only stuff. Most magazines are not behind paywalls, so you can access their articles and browse as much as you want for free. I don't miss magazine pictures at all.

(I actually subscribe to the print version of National Geographic, since even my little kids devour it, and at $12 per year it's quite the bargain. This is our household's only print subscription of any kind. I actually would miss NatGeo pictures.)

I do wish I could get library books on my Kindle, but I have learned how to download library audiobooks onto my iPod, so that has scratched that itch.
posted by Leta at 8:09 AM on January 26, 2011

Also, they are now allowing lending of Kindle books between individual owners and libraries aren't far down the road from that.
posted by teleri025 at 10:05 AM on January 26, 2011

Response by poster: Thanks so much! Lots to go on here...
posted by private_idaho at 10:06 AM on January 26, 2011

Here's what you should do:

First install the Readability bookmarklet (go to the site, configure how you want text to look, then drag your custom bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar).

Whenever you see a longform article anywhere on the web, click the Readability bookmarklet.

Then click the Instapaper Bookmarklet (also on your bookmarks bar)

In your Instapaper settings you can set it to send a collection of unread articles as frequently as you want (mine does once a day) for free over wifi.

Assuming you have regular access to wifi somewhere, then once a day all the wonderful things you want to read from the internet will arrive neatly formatted in text sizes that you find readable.
posted by special-k at 2:02 PM on January 26, 2011