Kindle Owners, Help!

[dmarley]

I am looking at e-readers, and am intrigued by the new Kindle, both for its smallness and its (relative) cheapness. My main purpose in buying an e-reader is to read fanfic without having to lug my laptop around, so my main concern is the ability to transfer TXT, PDF and HTML files to the device and be able to read them

Comments

[xtricks]

This is correct. Also, Amazon has a bad history with both some kindle related things and a larger one in relation to queers.

RE: kindle - they seem to believe that since they have access to your kindle every time it hooks up (wirelessly or otherwise) to the internet, they have the right to pull any books on the kindle without prior consult (also, to disable it or your account, if they don't like what you do).

I'd suggest looking around and seeing if there are other devices that work for you, personally. I'm looking at the Asus eee reader (or the one that's going to be coming out in spring, I think).

I'd suggest the iPad but Apple is starting to piss me off too, with their censorship, which I can't abide.

[dmarley]

Thanks for letting me know. I was kind of stunned, thinking that it was so ludicrous that I had to be wrong, but then realizing that this was Amazon, who also thinks that they still own things after they sell them.

In fact, this post was orginally about three times longer, detailing all my other reservations about Amazon/Kindle, including their previous fails and their crappy history with downloads in general. Even before the 1984 incident, they had a terrible history with their mp3 and video download software basically taking over user's computers and deleting and re-downloading files from their purchase lists. (Fortunately, I never had to deal with it because they didn't support Mac OS at all.) When I buy something, I have this silly notion that it's mine, and I don't like their attitude that they still retain control over it just because I'm forced to read it on a device I also had to buy from them.

I'll have to take a look at the Asus reader. Until I was distracted by the shiny cheap Kindle, I'd been looking at the Astak EZ

[xtricks]

I was excited by the kindle, until the various amazon fails, then I was excited by the iPad, until apple started failing in censorship related ways

Now I'm having to actually educate myself on what devices work with my needs and what the companies do and don't do in terms of social behaviors. Someone needs to do a !fail comparison for various tech companies, as well as a tehcy one.

[remydesire]

You can check out this link ( http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_Reader_Matrix ). It offers a comparison of a wide range of ebook readers

[dmarley]

It's very helpful, thank you so much!

I just finished posting to xtricks that I've been looking at the Astak, so it's nice to hear another recommendation.

I tend to save files as .txt to save space (and because I like reading in TextWrangler), so I'll probably just have to plunge in with the .txt extension and see what happens.

[remydesire]

I try to save them as is, since some writers use italics and sometimes the story loses something without them