Kindling

[naill_renfro]

I just bought my first book for my new Kindle 2: Curse's Captive, by Jennifer Schwabach.  I got the K2 last week, and loaded a couple of dozen azw-formatted books from ManyBooks.  Loading the books one at a time is a bit tedious -- I'm hoping someone out there has set up zip files of all the public-domain works by a particular author, or in a

Comments

[jjschwabach]

C. C. is probably safe for her, too. Marketed as romance, but lacking that certain je sais quoi that is so common to romance.

I have been pondering the Kindle. How's the battery life?

Re the Read Aloud feature. I'm fairly sure the consideration there was to make any and all books readily available to blind people, who currently have a choice between waiting 3-9 months after a book comes out to have it on tape, or sometimes twice that long to get it in Braille. Only highly anticipated books, such as those stories about that kid with the scar and the wand, are published simultaneously in Braille.

[naill_renfro]

Battery life is pretty good -- e-paper doesn't use current except when you load a new screen, so if you're not reading much it can go days without recharging. Even with reading there seems to be enough battery life for a Transpacific flight.

Amazon wimped out on the read-aloud, but in a fairly harmless way. Authors can opt out of the read-aloud. That means that all the public-domain stuff will still have it, as well as any works whose authors don't opt out. So the blind won't be left behind.

[naill_renfro]

What story about a kid with a scar and a wand?

[mollyringle]

Cool--didn't know you'd gotten an e-reader. I have the Sony (either latest or second-to-latest incarnation; I forget) and find similar issues with it. Still, I do use it. I'll take the middle line that most people seem happy to take: ebooks aren't going to replace paper anytime soon, nor do we want them to, but they do have their conveniences.

So the read-aloud doesn't sound all weird and robotic and hard to understand, huh? (Like Mac's "speak" feature in the Text program...) That bodes well for computational linguistics, at least.

[naill_renfro]

The read-aloud is pretty good, although it does mispronounce some words, esp. names. I haven't tried it on works in other languages. (I did upload a book in Chinese, but the Kindle can't display the text, let alone read it aloud; the screen just shows gobbledygook.) I've also got a few things in French and Spanish to try it on, but haven't gotten around to it (OK, it's been taken over). Since Amazon is selling the Kindle in France, though, I don't expect it to have any trouble.

There are two voices: male and female. The male is newsreader-neutral and unobtrusive. For the female voice, they perhaps wisely elected not to go with Sexy, but rather than, say, Technical, Schoolmarmish, or Maternal they decided to go with Annoying.