It bothers me...

[suddenlynaked]

that I want a kindle. The last thing I want to see in the world is the general acceptance of "licensing" books. As a copyright holder, and one who has studied and continues to study it pretty extensively, I've come to believe that we've let copyright and other forms of intellectual "property" go too far. The Kindle may do for books what the music

Comments

[mlerules]

While I miss the old sit down and listen to four sides of an lp whilst reading the lyrics and scouring the cover art, that's not the way we listen to music anymore.

I still spend time listening to (mostly new to me) music whilst reading the lyrics. I've used playlists all along for making compilations, only now it's a hell of a lot easier w/CD-burning and 'puters for lining stuff up and seeing how the transitions flow than back when I did it on cassettes from records.

Now I tend to load the CD player (part of stereo) w/5 disks, hit shuffle, then when something particularly good/compelling comes on, note the track number on a post-it on the back of the CD...THIS is oft-times how I choose what goes onto my next compilation.

I wish though that I still had the power to snag snippets from songs rather than the entire thing, but that's liely mainly a matter of being fairly low-tech myself. I think Toast'd let me do it, but I haven't been initiated into such mysteries yet.

[suddenlynaked]

There is a bunch of software in the world that will let you do that. Cool Edit was really good, then Adobe bought 'em. It's still good just pricier.I can show you Adopbe Audition sometime when you're over - there a bunch of 'em out there. I bet even some open source stuff or shareware.

[mlerules]

Oh, that'd be really cool - thx!

[pauldf]

Yeah, it phones home a lot, to see whether you've bought anything new, and such. I find it annoying only because it drains the battery. Sheesh. It has an option to disable the cell network connection. (In v1, it was a physical switch, but not in v2, probably since switches cost $$.)

They don't advertise it much, because they're trying to push the coolness of having things delivered over the net, but when you plug it into a computer, its storage appears as an ordinary USB flash drive, and will happily take .mobi files, a format that was originally targeted at the PalmPilot. Baen chooses to not sell Kindle titles via Amazon; instead, they sell .mobi files on their own website, complete with free samples, typically the first book in a series, and you can just copy them over, and they Just Work. It'll also take text files and maybe others. (Don't confuse this with the longer list of formats that have to be converted through Amazon's conversion service, which comes in a free flavor (they email you back the converted version, which

[pauldf]

Yeah, I think I saw that too. In the Kindle agreement, I think I read a clause somewhere that says they don't charge you until you hit $1 in charges (at which point they say they charge you $3, and won't charge you again until you've spent $4, and so on...), and I haven't reached that threshold yet.

[vismaya_viewer]

I'm not usually lured by technology but The Kindle does tempt my inner knowledge whore. :o)