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Decluttering Your Life with an E-Reader

Stack of books in Gould's Book Arcade, Newtown...
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We’ve continued to grow more and more enamoured with the Kindle as an e-reading device, especially now that it has become so comparatively inexpensive. Business Insider reported today that the Kindle with Special Offers is the bestselling Kindle.

But, how can you, as is our title, declutter your life with an E-Reader, kindle or otherwise? Start by reducing your book collection with a few simple tips.

  • Replace all your books that are in the public domain with free electronic editions.
  • If you have a shelf of O’Reilly reference books, take advantage of their $4.99 EBook upgrade. Get the e-book version of any book you own for only $4.99. They don’t specify you have to keep the book after that.
  • Identify beloved books in your collection that are falling apart. If they are worth keeping for your love of them, it may be worth repurchasing them in e-book form.
  • If you want to go to the extreme, go a step further and sell your paper books in favor of a complete digital library. You will lose money on this deal, but think of the space you’ll gain

We asked Len Edgerly of The Kindle Chronicles podcast to solicit feedback from his users, asking how many of them had actually repurchased a book they’d owned in paper form in electronic form. We recommend the podcast, even if you aren’t a Kindle owner, for his excellent and informative interviews.

What other papers other than books can you save? Well, magazines and newspapers are not quite all there yet. A big part of this is that the layout of these, when offered on e-readers, leaves much to be desired. Many pieces are omitted, or substandard. Many titles are not digitally available(More on this in the future).

What about article reading? Many people print/clip articles to take with them. There are services that will send articles to your reader. To name a few, popular service Instapaper, which we’ve mentioned before, will send you the last 20 articles you saved in it on a time schedule. You have Send to Kindle extensions and sites. There are similiar ones for other formats. An we’ve mentioned Calibre as a way of sending even more content to an E-Reader

So, what is left? Simple Note taking?

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There’s a decent app for that that might eliminate a basic notepad.

Ultimately, you can’t do everything with every device. But, imagining how much stuff we could get rid of if we moved our written materials digital is a very interesting and compelling idea. There are many things we will never part with, many books in particular. But there are plenty that our attachment is to the words, not to the form, snd would not mind compressing our collection.

What do you think?

Published on May 13, 2011
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Moving Back to RSS from Twitter

This icon, known as the "feed icon" ...
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It is amazing that we would come full circle from where we were when we started with Twitter in January of 2009. When we began using Twitter, part of the appeal was as a real-time replacement for RSS reading. But, recently, we’ve returned to RSS feed reading as a much more reliable manner of ensuring we get our news.

That does not mean Twitter is not still a big part of our news delivery, but it has become overwhelming. But if your feed consists of nothing but your news feed piped into Twitter, then we will now go back to following you in Google Reader. We will now take advantage of the greatest benefit of Twitter to someone looking to get news and information…curation. The most valuable stories will float to the top as people tweet them.This will make Twitter much more social for us.

In January, an article made the rounds, maintaining that RSS was being ignored, and we should be worried. Google Chrome has no native RSS support built in, Mozilla is killing off the RSS icon in Firefox 4.0. How RSS integrated into systems may need to be rethought. Google Reader is all well and good, but that is a website, not a browser. That same article has some good suggestions.

  • Why can’t, when you visit a blog article, the browser reads the comments RSS, and when you next come back to that article, it can tell you that there have been new comments since, and highlight them on the page?
  • Why do we go through the same daily routine of checking certain sites over and over again? Can’t our computers be more intelligent here? Isn’t the purpose of the computer / browser to save us time!? Why doesn’t the browser, when you open it, tell you how many new items there are, on what sites you commonly visit, without you having ever configured this?

Dan Frommer, on Business Insider, countered that RSS is not dying, normal people never used it. In his opinion, RSS is a fine backend technology. In fact, many who moved to Twitter are reading feeds pumped to Twitter from RSS. That using RSS in an RSS reader has never been mainstream, which is valid. O’Reilly points out, as a backend technology, RSS never blocks you or goes down.

We wanted there to be a Twitter alternative, and there very well might be. Twitter is a stream. Twitter Lists would allow everything to be neatly organized in an intuitive way,  but the issue is that there is no adequate solution to reading longer and in-depth on your desired sources for Twitter. There is paper.li and the Twitter Times. There are social feed readers. We will be exploring these at some future point for discussion. But magazine/newspaper like feed readers seem to be the rage right now.

What do you think?

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Published on May 2, 2011
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Review: Kindle with Special Offers

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Update: The $114 Kindle has been deprecated, please try the new $79 Kindle linked above

The Gadget Wisdom labs got in the $114 Kindle with Special Offers today, on launch day for the item. As previously mentioned, the Kindle with Special Offers is, hardware-wise, identical to the Kindle Wi-Fi, currently listed at $139.

So, what do you get for your $25 savings? You get ads on the bottom of the home screen and as the screen saver, instead of random images of authors and such, you get ads. Ironically, you will likely have more dynamic screensaver options on this Kindle with Special Offers than you will on the more expensive Kindles, which do not let you customize your screensaver at all, unless you hack it.

Aside from that, the Kindle, no matter what version, has its place. Even Joe Wikert, who shuttered his Kindleville blog when he went out and bought an iPad, came back a year later, declaring the Kindle the perfect iPad accessory. We’re not quite so sure about that, but a lightweight reading device at $114, while not the magic $99 price people speak of, is inexpensive enough to feel comfortable taking it anywhere.

With Whispersync, even if the Kindle is stolen, it can be deregistered and nothing(save the device) is lost. You cannot say that about an iPad. While e-readers may change over the years, and get cheaper, we cannot say, like some pundits, that the tablet computer will make the e-reader obsolete any time soon.

That said, buy the Kindle with Special Offers. Save yourself $25. You aren’t losing anything by having ads.

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Published on April 29, 2011
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Kindle Library Lending is the Last Big Missing Feature of the Platform

Amazon Kindle PDF

Amazon announced yesterday a new feature for the Kindle, Kindle Library Lending. In partnership with Overdrive, a company that already provides E-Book lending services for tens of thousands of libraries, Amazon will offer customers the chance to take books out of their local library.

Lending will be enabled not only on the Kindle itself, but on the ubiquitous Kindle apps. That means the books will be lent to the account, not to the individual devices within it. The service will offer not only Whispersync between devices, but the opportunity to annotate books. If you later purchase the book, your notes will return.

We’re not sure if you’ll be able to browse a library collection and take out books easily directly from the Kindle. The shopping functionality on the Kindle already lacks in ease of use compared to shopping on the Amazon site.

Unfortunately, while the announcement is now, the actual functionality will not be available until later this year. Librarianbyday.net commented on a few lingering questions.

  • Existing E-Books that libraries have will now be available in Kindle format. But it does not say definitively whether or not there will be an additional cost for this for the library
  • Are you required to link your Kindle account to your library account to the point at which data is exchanged between the two? If so, how much data? Does Amazon get to know all of your checkout history

We’ll have more on this when it actually happens.

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Published on April 21, 2011
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Switching from Instapaper to ReadItLater

The concept of a Read It Later service is not new to our workflow. Back in October of 2010, we discussed moving our workflow to Instapaper. Then, our storage expanded to Pinboard, and we discussed integrating Pinboard and Instapaper into a writing and reading workflow.

However, the developer of Instapaper is very iOS-centric. He released an official iPad and iPhone app, and many of his updates are paired with an app update. We do like the product, but we decided to consider the competition when ReadItLater released an official Android app(Market Link), which is available currently at 99 cents. We had initially looked at ReadItLater and moved on, but things have changed.

The Android app offers an exclusive feature not available for any other platform app. Instant Push Sync, which ensures new items instantly download and are available on the phone, even if the phone is offline. Also on the Android side of things, there is a ReadItLater plugin for Dolphin Browser.

Read It Later also has a Firefox extension with a feature we were hunting for(unfortunately not also available for Chrome), which is Save All Tabs for Later. It also offers offline reading, Google Reader integration, etc.You can mark items as read directly from the browser.  Overall, it is much more tightly integrated into the browser experience.

Pinboard also supports the same import from ReadItLater it does from Instapaper, which means that end of my workflow(the archive) is unchanged.

Read It Later also has a beta paid feature called Digest. This turns your Read It Later stories into an online magazine format, and automatically sorts them into topics. The magazine format is very popular right now.

It does lack the auto-send to Kindle function that Instapaper offered, but this can still be reproduced using Calibre. It lacks folders, but supports tagging(which can accomplish the same thing)

If your priorities are clean formatting of long-form text content and integrated portability to an eReader, you may lean toward Instapaper. If you do your reading with your browser or mobile device and want to keep up with content-rich pages with lots of images or videos, Read It Later may be more suited.

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Published on April 15, 2011
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Amazon Releases New Ad-Supported Kindle – Save 25

Cover of "Kindle Wireless Reading Device,...
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Amazon announced on Monday a new Kindle option, Kindle with Special Offers. It is a $139 Kindle Wi-Fi selling for $114 if you agree to have ads on it. The ads would appear as part of the screensaver, and at the bottom of the Home Page, but not inside the reading experience. This is the sort of ad experience we can live with.

Business Insider insists that this is the future of gadgets…ads that are not annoying, but are present. Remember, a newspaper has ads and people do not find them offensive. The subsidy is $25 now, but it could be more on future projects, depending on the results. And as long as the ads aren’t annoying, and you have the choice to buy adless…why not?

As for why the Kindle isn’t free with ads…there is no proven business model for that. But maybe, after this, there will be.

From a Kindle perspective, we are very disappointed that you can get a custom screensaver that shows ads, but you can’t get one that shows something other than the random authors and art Amazon chooses. Seems a shame.

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Published on April 13, 2011
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Amazon Reveals Cloud Music – Google Next?

Amazon MP3 app on Droid
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Amazon announced Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player, a digital storage and music locker service. The first 5GB are free, 20GB is $20 a year(first year is free with the purchase of an album), 50GB is $50, etc.

The service will allow storage of any sort of file, but Amazon Cloud Player, which is available in the Amazon MP3 Android App and as a web-based player, only recognizes MP3 and AAC files. So no FLAC, OGG, etc. Shame, we like OGG.

Going forward, if you buy an album from Amazon MP3, it will be transferred directly to your cloud drive and does not count toward your storage allowance. Unfortunately, it will not import your previous purchases, so you will have to upload them. The MP3 uploader doesn’t support Linux, and there is no uploader on the Android app. Hopefully, Amazon or a third-party will rectify this, but we don’t see an API for third-party developers to build on yet either.

We’re curious to see what Google’s offering is for music. But this is perfect for Amazon MP3 purchases going forward. They are already storing the files anyway, so linking them into your account doesn’t cost them any space, which is why we’re surprised they won’t do it for already purchased files, considering they’ll have to store duplicates now.

It won’t beat Amazon S3 on functionality, but it does beat them on price. If they open it up to third-party app development and support additional formats, we’d put our media there, how about you?

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Published on March 29, 2011
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Downstreaming: Amazon Prime Instant Video

Amazon Prime
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Amazon Instant Video for Prime Subscribers is a great idea. Many think this is Amazon’s move to compete withNetflix and Hulu. Amazon already has a well-reviewed pay-per-view service and a rental service can get access to movies that a subscription service cannot.

Amazon Prime is a service that offers 2-day shipping on any Amazon purchase for $79 a year. Now, for that $6.58 a month, you get 500 TV Shows and 1800 movies. These are generally library titles, as opposed to first-run movies, but the selection will improve. And classics still have entertainment value.

Prime is a way to get $79 from their customers, but more importantly $79 that encourages people to buy Amazon products over other vendors. By adding video subscriptions, they make that more appetizing. We wouldn’t suggest you get the video without the two day shipping, but together, they are a compelling deal.

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Published on March 14, 2011
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Downsteaming: Hulu Plus

An evil plot to destroy the world. Enjoy! (Log...
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It was in December that we took our Roku on the road, visiting relatives, and vowed to spend the entire weekend watching only things on Hulu Plus. Some compare Hulu Plus to Netflix, which is easy. They are both streaming services, both $7.99 a month, and both offer TV shows and movies unlimited for a single price.

Hulu Plus, for one, offers all current season episodes of 45 popular shows. It is, by itself, the closest replacement for popular TV, but it has one annoying limitation. Some of the shows are web only. If you use a HTPC, that isn’t an issue. However, if you want to use a piece of dedicated hardware, such as a blu-ray player, Roku box, etc…you are out of luck.

In trying to pick all of the programs we would watch in a week, a majority of them, despite being available for free on Hulu, were web only, and not available on Hulu Plus enabled devices. So, pay for more, get some nice back episodes, but get less than you get for free. That seems rather unfair, and until they fix that, we can’t in good conscience fully recommend this prouct.

Hulu Plus, aside from that, like Netflix, offers a good back catalog of titles. If you want to be entertained, and are not looking for current TV, you can certainly be so with Hulu Plus. What do you think? Is current content a must? Or just a good selection of decent content, regardless of year of release?

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Published on February 13, 2011
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Amazon is Selling More Kindle Books than Paperbacks

First, Amazon announced that Kindle Books were outselling Hardcovers. Now, Kindle Books have outpaced paperbacks. For every 100 paperback books the company has sold, they have sold 115 Kindle books. During the same period, they sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books. These numbers are for the United States, of course.

The Amazon Kindle store has more than 810,000 books, of which 670,000 are $9.99 or less, in addition to millions of out of copyright titles.

But why is this the truth?

  • The Price is Right: The Kindle 3 Wi-Fi is $139, and $50 extra gets you lifetime 3G. They will likely continue to try and bring the price to sub-$100.
  • You don’t need a Kindle to Read Kindle Books: There are Kindle apps for every mobile platform, desktop(Linux excepted), and for the Web(full content pending). You can read a book anywhere.
  • Whispersync: Not only can you read it anywhere, but it remembers where you where you left off when device-hopping.
  • Simplicity: Amazon focused on a replacement to the book experience. It didn’t try to make a device that did everything, like a tablet. It may make one of these someday, however. But their design focuses on readability, battery life, etc.

And we say all this being a latecomer to the Kindle, after we thought it was too expensive, during the early days.

Published on January 30, 2011
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