Kindled

I got an Amazon Kindle for my birthday/graduation, and I am definitely in the honeymoon of my relationship with it. I have always wanted an ebook reader. I understand that many people just can't get over reading something from a screen, and desire the physicality of a book. Personally, I have backpacked too many hardback books, and just plain read too many pdf documents to hold that view. I used to be a book junkie, but about 8 years ago, I declared a moratorium on buying new ones until I had caught up with reading the ones I had on deck. Plus, I need to be able to clip and word search books to be happy.
Since I am writing my literature review right now, I really wanted to:

• not be tied down to my computer for my reading. My laptop has about 20 minutes of battery life, and at 6'4", I can't open a laptop on an airplane, because the screen will only open far enough to point at my navel. Plus, I can't put the tray table down because my knees are higher than the hinge.
  
• not have to print out reams of paper and hear the trees crying.
• be able to take notes while reading and export those somehow

The Kindle is working well on all counts. The battery life is great, and you can clip/annotate the text and export it. To me, the best part is that it works perfectly happily on Linux. As seen in the screenshot, Ubuntu Jaunty just automagically recognizes it as external storage, and you can immediately upload files, or download annotations. The Kindle doesn't always seem to detect when it has been ejected, and still displays the USB Drive mode, but it hasn't seem to cause any problems.


I have also been using the Calibre ebook manager, which has worked really well at indexing my enormous collection. I use Zotero to manage bibliographies and get my PDFs. I am a bit of a Zotero evangelist, having gotten sick of Endnote a few years ago.

Calibre detected my Kindle, and converted files pretty reliably from my old formats to make them Kindle compatible. I found lots of material from Project Gutenberg in Mobipocket format, which is directly Kindle compatible.



Calibre converts to the Kindle format, and will upload them directly, or you can just use the Kindle as a thumb drive and drag-drop stuff onto it. My biggest disappointment has been PDFs. Web pages, text files, and ebooks of various formats all convert well, but PDF is more problematic. Calibre often chokes at reading their metadata (if it exists), and Amazon's free service doesn't do a great job of converting them. PDF conversion is tricky. We'll see how this plays out.

Oh, one other thing... the Kindle is pretty sweet for reference manuals. I have ebook copies of a number of Python and GIS books. One problem with on-screen manuals is that on a laptop you have to flip back and forth, and you have to keep the browser or reader open, which is a pain, especially during reboots, etc.

The Kindle doesn't ship with a cover. There are lots of them for sale on Amazon and elsewhere, but many of them overcome the advantages of the Kindle itself by making it hard to hold in one hand, or by making it heavy/bulky. I was nervous about throwing it in my bag without something, so version 1 of my cover was a padded Jiffy envelope, which worked but was aesthetically lacking. Version 2 was an OCTO faux leather slip cover.
It is light, matches my aesthetic, and not bulky at all.