You might have a specific book that you want to either emulate in some way or beat at its own game.  This is quite normal as it gives you a baseline.  When you submit a formal book proposal to a publisher then they will expect you to properly research your competition and know what it is they do and how your book will do everything in a more effective way.

You might think it’s extremely difficult if not impossible to find out how well your competitors books are selling, but it’s surprisingly easy.  The website Titlez will allow you to search for specific book types on Amazon, and it will show you their ranking among other information.  You can use this information to see which are the best-selling books so you can measure what you’re doing against them (as obviously these titles will be doing something right!)

Looking at the best-selling comparative titles, which will be Windows 7 books, you will be able to see the types of topics they are covering and how they are doing it.  Visiting the Amazon page for a book will probably allow you to view some pages, and usually the table of contents, so you can evaluate their content.  Don’t ape another book however, you’ll get into copyright issues there, but you may want to go in a completely different direction if you think they’re doing something wrong.

Another tip is to read reviews of these books to see how people are either praising or criticising them.  Some books are highly praised but others, including some best-selling titles also receive a great deal of criticism from the public.  You can learn from these comments how the books are failing and how you can improve on them.

If you want to sell your book, rather than give it away there are many services that you can publish it through.  You can do it through the new iBooks author portal, though currently Apple’s terms create a lock-in that mean you can’t also sell your book anywhere else.  You can also use an independent site like Lulu which is has a great reputation and is the service I self-published my Windows 7 Power Users Guide through, or you can publish directly with Amazon which you may think is your best option given that when people think of books they think of Amazon.

Wherever you publish, try and make sure that you choose an option that gives you an ISBN number.  This may incur a small cost but it does mean that you will be allowed to sell your book on many online stores.  Amazon for example now insist on your book having its own ISBN number in order to qualify for sale.

Research is everything if you want to make your book successful.  Never assume though that self-publishing a Windows book will you rich, it won’t.  If you give away a free eBook though the prospect of getting tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of downloads is quite realistic.  Since making my Windows 7 Power Users Guide free the downloads are well into the high six figures.  It is this success that you can shout about to publishers and that will help add weight and credibility to any approaches you make for a full book deal.

I have been turning the idea in my head on writing a Windows 8 Book and aside from writing the book I have no idea where to go from there. You would think with all the information you can find on the internet, you would find everything you need. Lately though, the overabundance of information has actually become an issue, leaving me with alot of information but nothing that really helps.

This is a very good point, that many people who would want to write a Windows 8 book might not have a clue where to start.  I thought then that I’d follow up yesterday’s article with a guide to doing exactly that and getting started writing.

Audience

The first and most important decision to make, as it will influence everything else, is who your intended audience will be.  Who it is you’re writing the book for will determine what type of language you use, the types of images and annotations you use, and how many, and how long and detailed the book might turn out to be.

For example, if you want to write for complete beginners, perhaps something for family and friends and people you provide tech support for, then the tone would be warm and friendly, with an absence of jargon and with every technical word you must use clearly explained at the time.  You will probably want to use a lot of colourful screenshots, with many annotations so that it is very clear to readers what they’re looking at.  You would also want to use a fair few numbered and step by step guides that will help people perform tasks.  Lastly the content for this audience will largely fall around using the new Metro interface, downloading and installing apps and keeping things ticking over easily and quickly.  After all, people in this category simply don’t want to hear anything about installing Windows or the Control Panel, it’s just too complex for many of them.

We move on from there with more business-centric users, perhaps people in your workplace more interested in how to keep working on the desktop and what new productivity and power-saving features are available for them.  Enthusiasts will want to know how to install Windows 8 in different ways and how to configure it, with little in-depth hints and tips to help them get the best from it, and so on.

Size and Content

Now that you’ve determined who your audience will be you need to decide how big the book will be and what the content will be.  A book for newbies would be relatively short, perhaps between 50 and 100 pages, while one for business users might not be much longer and one for enthusiasts might run to 200 or even 400 pages.  It’s important when writing for the first time, especially when you have all your formatting, page layout and editing to do as well not to set yourself a goal that’s too high.  I found 170 pages when writing the Windows 7 Power Users Guide gruelling while also holding down a full time job.  By the time I wrote the 500 page Troubleshooting Windows 7 Inside Out I was down to working only two days a week and writing the rest of the time.  There simply was no other way to do it.

With your page count in mind you should set about writing a draft table of contents, making sure that the page count is foremost in your mind all the time.  Think about how many paragraphs or pages it will take to decribe or walk people through specific subjects and use this as a basis for getting the content to fit your book.

Production

It’s common to write a book in Microsoft Word, after all it’s a writing tool, but Word and other word processors can be limiting in the page formatting they allow you to do.  I used Microsoft Publisher to write the Windows 7 Power Users Guide after quickly realising that I couldn’t do something “visually appealing” enough in Word.  Using a desktop publishing package does present its own challenges with text run on from one page to another difficult among other problems.  Using DTP software though can make for a much more engaging book.  All that said there’s nothing wrong with using Word and some of the advanced layout and imaging tools available can make for very eye-catching designs.  The layout and design can be a slow process to get right however and on the Windows 7 Power Users Guide probably one-third of the three months it took me to write was spent getting the formatting correct.

One very important part though will be the option to either export of print your file as a PDF.  There are many free PDF writers out there, some of which will also export as other eBook formats, but having written your book you’ll want people to be able to read it in a non-editable format.

This is a short and probably simplistic way to look at how you can start writing your book.  It all comes from the planning, and that is why this article has focused so much on that.  Spend time getting your table of contents, page layout, design and voice correct and the rest will fall into place reasonably naturally afterwards.  So good luck and let us know here at gHacks if you release a Windows 8 book on the Internet.

Getting a book contract at this point proved pointless, though I did try.  I hadn’t proved myself so eventually in 2008 I decided that self-publishing would be the way forward.  Thus in January 2009 when the Windows 7 beta appeared I began designing page layouts, insert graphics and a draft table of contents for what would be my “Windows 7 Power Users Guide“.  I went through several drafts and designs when writing the first three chapters but eventually found my stride and on August bank holiday, shortly before Windows 7 was released to manufacturing, I released my new eBook and paperback for sale.

As a way of making money they were never going to be the route to my next foreign holiday, and the eBook was made free a year later.  As a 170 page book however I felt that perhaps I could use it to prove my mettle and began contacting publishers through the submission links for new authors on their websites.

There were a few knock back emails I received, and some emails went unanswered but eventually a nibble came in the form of an email from a senior editor at Microsoft Press.  They were looking for someone to write a Windows 7 Troubleshooting book and wanted to know if I was interested.  Two months later the contract was signed and “Troubleshooting Windows 7 Inside Out” was published in October 2010, one year after the release of Windows 7.

Since then I’ve been able to better enjoy the fruits of my labour.  I was given a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable professional) award in the Windows Expert category in January 2011 and this was recently renewed for a second year.  I’ve also spent the last year receiving review hardware from companies including Samsung, ASUS, Nokia and HTC and have had a great many Windows Phones, laptops and more through my door to play with (a very pleasant perk of the job).

Now my Power Users Guide has been formally picked up by US publisher APress and the “Windows 8 Power Users Guide” is scheduled for release this year to coincide with general availability for Windows 8 itself.  I’m also working on an eBook project for Microsoft Press’ parent company O’Reilly for whom I am continuing to run a monthly series of help and how-to webcasts.  In addition I was last year signed by a new publisher, co-founded by the man responsible for making the Dummies books popular, and where Ed Bott is now Editorial Director, and my first eBook for them “Need2Know Office 365 Security Essentials” was released last November.

In short the last three years have been amazing (though very hard work too) and I thought I’d throw down the gauntlet and encourage you to get here too, after all, if I can do it anybody can!  Have you ever wanted a book contract of your own?  Do you want to write about Windows 8 or perhaps the next version of Microsoft Office?  If you do then now is the time to start planning as the public beta for Windows 8 will begin at the end of February.

Writing a book, even one as small as 170 pages (I know, it sounds ridiculous to me too) isn’t easy, doubly so if you’ve never done it before.  It will monopolise your time and you can expect to spend three months writing it in your spare time.  If you have a book about Windows 8 in you though I strongly encourage you to write it.  After all, you never know what opportunities it might open up for you.  The rewards can be unexpected and very welcome, and the feeling you get from helping people is worth it on its own.  ;)  I’d love to read your Windows 8 books later this year and see your particular spins on the format.  Good luck all.

Fair Trade Digital Exchange is a revolutionary “digital first” publishing company devoted exclusively to technology topics. The Fair Trade DX development model lets us turn content from world-class authors into high-quality books and learning products, at a pace that leaves traditional print publishers in the dust. Unlike other publishers, we treat authors as full partners, and our shared goal is to inform, enlighten, and delight readers.

We’re proud to announce our first four titles, available today in all popular digital formats.

• Need2Know: Ed Bott’s Windows 8 Head Start, by Ed Bott
• Need2Know: Microsoft Office 365 Security Essentials, by Mike Halsey
• Need2Know: Broadcasting your PowerPoint Presentation, by Katherine Murray
• Need2Know: Building ASP.NET Web Pages with WebMatrix, by Jim Wang

I wanted to make this first book a really holistic view at Office 365 security for small businesses.  In this I look at every aspect of business computing from your ISP and Internet connection to your PCs, smartphones, tablets and even employment policies, home working and more.

It’s fantastic to have been invited into such esteemed company as they’re all brilliant authors, and doubly so to be with them during the launch of the publisher and their first new book series.

Regards Office 365 Security Essentials, the publisher says…

Many smaller organizations rely on a few tech savvy managers to ensure that Microsoft Office is configured and deployed to best support core business objectives. If you are one of these indispensable managers, you are probably aware that the online collaboration features of Office 365 also create security risks not associated with desktop versions of Office. In Need2Know: Microsoft Office 365 Security Essentials, author Mike Halsey identifies and explains those risks, and answers essential questions about how to run Office 365 safely and
securely. With a program that eliminates the need for a patchwork of third party solutions, it’s important to harness the tools at your disposal to the fullest.

Microsoft Office 365 Security Essentials shows you how to secure your Office 365 team site, how to manage your users and administrators, and how to employ secure practices with Microsoft and third-party tools, as well as good old common sense. Author Mike Halsey brings wisdom from his extensive work with Microsoft Windows and the Office product family to the table to help you address the security threats you must know how repel in order to protect your company and its assets.

In Microsoft Office 365 Security Essentials, you will quickly learn how to:

• Manage Office 365 email and contacts securely
• Implement team site security effectively
• Handle security when using Office 365 with other Microsoft products
• Create and manage different types of Office 365 user accounts
• Set appropriate permissions on Office 365 team site accounts
• Identify different types of Internet threats, and implement an effective antivirus solution
• Implement common sense password security and use encryption to protect sensitive data

Microsoft Office 365 Security Essentials also includes handy references to safe password creation, secure web browsing, and anti-spam best practices, suitable for sharing with employees and coworkers.

You can find out more about this new book series at the fair Trade Digital Exchange website.

Click to view full size

Why do I say this, because rather ironically that very same day I’d also published my own free Facebook guide, “The Facebook Privacy Guide“.  I’ll let you decide which one you prefer but I’ll give you the run down on my own eBook.  It’s completely FREE and a 36 page essential guide to everything you need to know to protect your online privacy from unscrupulous people, current and future employers, advertisers and malware writers.

I’ve included a great many Quick Tips throughout the book and it’s all in glorious full colour with large text and screenshots throughout.  I’ve used the same accessible and non-technical language I was praised for with my Microsoft Press book “Troubleshooting Windows 7 Inside Out” to make the book useful to people of all ages from children and teenagers to adults and the elderly.

It’s a complete and essential guide to keeping yourself, your personal information and your photos and videos safe from prying eyes and those who would use it for unwarranted purposes.

There’s more than just that though, I’ve included details on how to spot and keep yourself safe from Facebook spam and malware, and also how to create safe and secure usernames and passwords, not just for Facebook, but for every website you visit.

Facebook currently has around 750 million users worldwide and has been heavily criticised in recent years for very lax privacy, including one change that automatically made every user’s private information visible to search engines.  This was one of many privacy problems with the world’s most popular social networking site that caused a public outcry, and the company had to quickly change the settings again for all users.

You can see some images from the eBook below and if you find it useful I do ask that you please pass the link on to your friends and family.  You can download The Facebook Privacy Guide from our sister site Windows7News.com.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2011/08/22/download-ghacks-editors-free-facebook-privacy-guide-ebook/feed/ 4 http://www.ghacks.net/2011/05/29/create-ebooks-in-epub-format-with-grabmybooks-for-firefox/ http://www.ghacks.net/2011/05/29/create-ebooks-in-epub-format-with-grabmybooks-for-firefox/#comments Sun, 29 May 2011 13:44:09 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/?p=45716 Grab my Books is a handy Firefox add-on for users who want to convert multiple web pages into the EPub ebook format. The add-on offers functionality to add the active page, a linked page or a selection on a page to the ebook. Everything else is handled more or less automatically, even though there are options to edit added pages and selections before the ebook is created.

The biggest advantage over saving websites as HTML or PDF documents is that it is possible to add multiple pages to the ebook. You could for instance add all Ghacks Firefox articles to the ebook, or a Wikipedia entry plus all links to related topics that are posted on that Wikipedia article.

Once you have installed GrabMyBooks you can use the add-on’s functionality by right-clicking on a page, link or highlighted section on a page.

The contents that have been selected for inclusion are then displayed on screen with direct links to delete or edit them. Additional links lead to the local Mybooks page that offers to display all articles and text selections on the screen.

A click on Grab My Book on that screen creates the ebook in epub format directly. The page contents are most of the time picked up correctly by the extension. You will however notice that images and other media will not included when page contents are copied with the help of GrabMyBooks.

That’s by far the biggest downside of the program. An option to add multiple pages at once to the ebook is missing as well, which could speed up things for users who for instance want to create an ebook that contains an article and all pages that article links to. For that, users need to select each link individually on the article’s page which can become tiresome if the original article links to more than a handful of websites.

Lastly, the fact that GrabMyBooks is not available on the Mozilla add-on repository but only on a third party website may keep some users away from installing and using the add-on.

Alternatives are available, but most are not as comfortable. You could for instance copy and paste web pages, text and even media contents in a Word document instead, and convert that Word document in the end into an ebook format like Epub. Websites where you can do that for free are available on the Internet, 2EPub is one of them. The website supports files with a maximum file size of 25 Megabytes, which should be enough in most cases.

Interested users can install GrabMyBooks directly from the developer website. Cautious users may want to wait until the add-on has been added to the Firefox add-on repository before they check it out.

UPDATE : In the first day of it’s release as a free eBook, the Windows 7 Power Users Guide has received more than half a million hits!

The book contains 16 chapters and is a guide on how to get the very best out of Windows 7 from installation to configuration and advanced operations. It includes step-by-step guides, screenshots and diagrams on every page, quick tips throughout the book and is presented in full colour.

From the author of Troubleshooting Windows 7 Inside Out from Microsoft Press… A book for people who use Windows 7 at home or at work and know it can do more for them, but who don’t know how. The Windows 7 Power Users Guide contains helpful how-to’s, full colour pictures and quick tips to guide you through everything from using the Start Menu and Taskbar to backing up your documents and identifying and fixing problems

You can download the book from my online book store or directly from my website here. 

You can now catch up with more of my writing and events (including competitions and giveaways) at my new Facebook Group.

The Firefox web browser does not support the EPUB format by default, which means that you can only download the file to your local computer system if the website is not providing access to an online EPUB reader.

The Firefox add-on EPUBReader changes this by adding support for the EPUB format to Firefox. It basically means that you can read epub ebooks online in the web browser. Not every user may need that functionality, especially users with ebook readers may prefer to read EPUB books on those readers instead.

EPUB Reader highjacks the download process of EPUB files on the system. It decompresses the files, processes them and makes them available in a readable format in a new browser tab.

EPUB ebooks are divided into two columns on that page. The left column displays the index of the ebook, the right the contents and some controls at the bottom.

Controls include text formatting options to increase or decrease the font size, navigate pages, access a library of locally stored ebooks or free online libraries or saving bookmarks to continue reading at the position at a later point in time.

The library navigator is pretty handy. It currently supports ebooks on feedbooks and archive.org. You can use the search to find a specific ebook on either site, or browse the epub books by category or other factors such as popularity or upload date.

Each ebook is displayed with its title and author, and a short description. You can load a detailed description or the full ebook with a single click. Ebooks that you have download this way are added to your private library from where you can open them at any point in time, even if you do not have an Internet connection.

EPUBReader offers settings to change the layout and table of contents. The program will use the book’s default formatting which you can override in the options. Here it is possible to change fonts, backgrounds or the margin to customize the reading experience.

EPUBReader is a handy Firefox extension, especially for users who regularly work with ebooks in epub format. Firefox users can download the add-on from the official Firefox add-on repository.

I like several aspects of the program, from its online library that offers free downloads of ebooks and magazines over the paper like navigation of pages to the comfortable handling with the mouse and hotkeys.

Lets start at the beginning. Martview is a free ebook reader for the Windows operating system. It supports both the pdf document format and its own mart format. Format support is one of the aspects of the application that the developers need to improve, to add support for widely used ebook formats like epub, comic book archive files or even plain text documents and Microsoft Word documents.

For now, you can only load mart and pdf documents. There is an option to create ebooks in the mart format from images, archives or comic book files but that’s not a suitable solution. It may work for single files but if you have hundreds of ebooks in different formats then you surely do not want to convert all of them into a different format just to be able to read them in the ebook reader.

Martview is on the other hand excellent if your ebook collection is available in pdf format, or if you want to download and read the available online magazines and ebooks that have been uploaded by other Martview users.

Lets take a closer look at the controls and handling first, before we take a look at the online library and other features.

A help document explaining the handling and navigational elements of the ebook reader is displayed when you start the program for the first time. You can flip the pages with a click of the mouse on the left or right page and a flick of the mouse in the opposite direction, just as you would do with a normal book or magazine.

You can alternatively use the cursor keys for navigation, the mouse wheel or switch the controls to touch mode if you have touch capable hardware.

You can zoom in and out if you press the left and right mouse button at the same time, or if you hold down the right mouse button and use the scroll wheel.

The hotkey Ctrt-l displays all pages of the ebook as thumbnails for easy navigation, while the horizontal or vertical slide mode offers to move faster through a document by sliding it horizontally or vertically.

The reading options are versatile and helpful. The different browsing modes and the mouse and keyboard shortcuts make the experience as comfortable as possible.

The online library of ebooks and magazines alone justifies the installation of the reader. A total of 13000 different documents are available, all uploaded by users of the service. Ebooks and magazines are sorted in categories like computers and tech, lifestyle, repairing manuals or comics and manga. Some offer subcategories. The comics and mange section for instance has more than a dozen subcategories for popular series such as Detective Conan, Bleach, Hunter X Hunter or Full Metal Alchemist.

All magazines and books that are displayed in the library can be downloaded to the local computer system. Martview’s policy is that users need to be the owner of the document to upload it to the public library. Several of the magazines raise legality questions, but that is something that this review cannot sufficiently address. All online documents are provided in mart format with no option to convert the files once they have been downloaded, at least not from within the ebook reading software.

Martview’s online library is a feature that not many ebook readers offer at this moment. It adds lots of value to the program. That, and the excellent controls make it one of the best ebook readers on Windows. The developers need to add support for additional formats including conversions between formats to make it the best ebook reader there is.

Interested Windows users can download the latest version of Martview from the developer website.

The books can only be loaned once however and for a maximum period of 14 days.  You can read loaned books on a Kindle or in any Kindle App.  These are available for a variety of devices including Windows, OS X, iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone.

Not all books will be available for lending, this will depend on the publishers providing permission for Amazon to do so.  There’s also precious little information on whether this will be a free service or what charges may be payable, again we can probably assume this will vary depending on the book and publisher.

This is an interesting move from Amazon and, while it was broadly expected at some point, it will be an interesting move to watch to see how it affects eBook sales.  It is widely considered that Libraries have been good for overall book sales in recent years, so will this move do the same for eBook sales?

You can read more at the Amazon website.

While that’s a problem of users of all ages, teens and children deserve special attention. And that’s what Microsoft tried to do by publishing the Own Your Space digital book.

The book is freely available at the Microsoft Download Center. Downloads are provided for the whole book, and any of the 17 individual chapters.

safe computing book

The book consists of 16 different chapters, that explain security and safe computing concepts, from cyberbullies to nasty “ware”, taking spam off the menu to getting help.

Each chapter begins with a real world example, before the safe computing concepts are explained in detail. Warnings and Definitions are highlighted in the text. They provide additional information and safe computing tips.

Teens may be able to relate to some of the introductory scenarios of the book:

Braden is a typical 14-year-old. Over the past 6 months, he’s grown three inches, gained four shoe sizes, and eaten his way through nearly a ton of pizza. He’s also unintentionally trashed his family’s computer no less than 12 times. First, he downloaded some cool emoticons to use with his IM messages. Those smiley faces came with embedded adware that overwhelmed him with pop-up ads and slowed down the speed of virtually everything.

The book is pretty large, and most teenagers will probably get bored pretty quickly if they have to read it on their own. Parents and teachers need to step in here. It may for instance be a good idea to concentrate on one chapter at a time.

It is also recommended that parents and teachers read the book as well. First, most can probably learn a thing or two as well, and second, they can better aid the teens in understanding the safe computing concepts.

The book is aimed at children but it sometimes goes way overboard, take the following chapter for instance.

DNS Poisoning
The second way that users are hijacked is harder to avoid. It’s called a DNS poisoning. DNS poisoning occurs when a hacker breaks into your local DNS server. The DNS server (spelled out Domain Name Service) is what translates the domain name you type into the correct numerical Internet address. You type in www.google.com and it takes you to the specific Internet address where Google Safe Cyber Shopping 105lives. This greatly simplifies using the Internet for you, since it’s a lot easier to remember a named URL like www.CNN.com than it is to remember an Internet address like 192.123.0.0.

Own Your Space is an extensive safe computing guide. It describes many concepts in details, sometimes to many, so that the book may become to complicated for its core audience. A version of the book at half the size, without many of the advanced concepts, and shorter explanations would have been much better, in my opinion. In its current stage, adults need to read the book as well to walk their children through it.

Having said that, the book is an excellent read for adults who want to know more about safe computing. Your parents maybe?

It is in this regard even more specialized than the getting started guide, the audience limited to IT workers and administrators who manage Office 2010 in a computer network.

The guide has been made available in doc, pdf and xps format, with a total file size of between 226 Kilobytes and 522 Kilobytes.

operations guide for microsoft office 2010

The guide has been written by the Microsoft Office System and Servers Team. It consists of 23 pages that guide the user through various Office related tasks, including:

• Office 2010 Administrative template files
• Group Policy settings, and preventing conflicts with earlier versions of Group Policy settings
• Applying updates for Office 2010
• Uninstalling Office 2010 and installing a previous version
• Adding or removing languages after deploying Office 2010
• Managing and changing user configurations for Office 2010
• Customizing an existing Office installation

The relatively short size of the guide could convince some system administrators to skip it completely. The guide is however filled with hyperlinks to Microsoft websites that contain detailed information about concepts addressed in the guide.

All three versions of the operation guides for Microsoft Office 2010 can be downloaded from the official Microsoft Download Center.

In this article I will show you how to install and use Calibre to manage your Kindle book reader. NOTE: I have written about Calibre before (but only covered managing books in the Sony ebook reader). See my article “Manage Sony Reader in Linux”  for more details.

Installation

Installation is simple as you will find Calibre in the standard repositories. So you will only need to issue a command like sudo apt-get install calibre. Or you can do the usual:

1. Open up your Add/Remove Software application.
2. Search for “calibre” (no quotes).
3. Mark Calibre for installation.
4. Click Apply to install.

You can fire up Calibre either from the command line (enter calibre) or from the Applications > Office menu. As you will know (from previous Ghacks Calibre articles), the interface is simple. I won’t go over that. But I will walk you through the new first run wizard for setting up Calibre to be used with a Kindle.

Figure 1

When you first fire up Calibre you will be asked to set up the application for your eReader. The first step you will see this in is shown in Figure 1. Make sure you select the correct version of the Kindle you own.

Figure 2

In the next step you will set up how Calibre can send books to your Kindle without the device having to be plugged in. You will need to know your Kindle email address in order to set this up. Figure 2 shows the information you will need in order to get this working. You can use Gmail mail servers if you do not have access to an smtp server. I highly recommend you test the email settings before you move on. Upon a successful email test, you can then click the Next button to complete the setup.

Sending books to your Kindle

Figure 3

Let’s say you have already added a bunch of books to your Kindle. You don’t have your Kindle attached to your computer but you want to send a few books anyway. If you open up your library and right click a book you want to send you can select the book to be sent to your Kindle email address (see Figure 3).

Yes, there are books on my Kindle written by me ;-).  As usual, the emailed book will only arrive to your Kindle if you have the Whispernet turned on.

Final thoughts

Managing your Kindle books is getting easier and easier. And thanks to applications like Calibre, the task only gets more seamless.

Amazon recently started exporting the Kindle to other countries, so I bought one. Amazon struggled to negotiate deals with European carriers, which was one reason why the Kindle was not already available to the European market, so instead, the Kindle roams from the AT&T network.

The features are fairly similar to those available to American customers. One can subscribe to and download newspapers, magazines and buy and and download books. One can’t, however, download the images inside the newspapers and magazines, browse the Web or subscribe to blogs. This is all down through a mobile internet connection, either 3G/GPRS.

The 3G coverage in my house is somewhat intermittent, although I still think it is just about tolerable. I find a 2G signal perfectly reasonable for downloading a book or browsing the Kindle store. I initially thought it strange that the Kindle lacks WiFi, unlike many of its competitors, but I have since realised that WiFi is unneeded.

As the mobile internet coverage is included in the purchase price of the Kindle, Amazon prevent users from browsing the web on it outside the US due to the high costs they would face. This would prove annoying to some users, although I imagine web browsing on the Kindle would prove clumsy, due to fact it’s black and white.

The Kindle can also play MP3s, so audiobooks, music and podcasts can be placed on it. I believe that you need to connect the Kindle to a computer to transfer them onto it. For books, magazines and newspapers, no computer is needed. Files can be coverted into Kindle format by emailing it to an address that will automatically send them to the Kindle (at 0.99USD/MB), by using a free Kindle email conversion service and transferring the files via USB, or by using software like Calibre. The Kindle handles the Mobipocket format, so you can get free public domain books from websites like Feedbooks and transfer them on.

The battery life is very good, due to the way text is displayed. E Ink, which the Kindle employs, has extremely low energy consumption. If you turn the wireless off, it can keep going for weeks without being charged. Charging takes a couple of hours, although the charger supplied is a US socket. It does charge via USB so this isn’t an issue.

It has a couple of other nice touches, too. One can annotate texts, have them read aloud via a text-to-speech feature (although this doesn’t work very well) and has a very attractive standby screen which rotates between different images of different writers and writing-related objects.

The International Kindle costs $260, plus postage and import tax. Altogether, mine cost around $340. This is equivalent to about £210 or €225; roughly the same as its competitors. The mobile internet is a big selling point which many competitors lack. They are only purchasable from Amazon.com, so any discounts or vouchers you may have for other Amazon sites won’t work. Also, books are only available from Amazon.com, so you pay notice the absence of the work of your country’s authors. I hope that eventually we will be able to relink our Kindles to our own national Amazon sites, although there is no certainty (or even indication) that Amazon will permit this.

• Deployment Platform
• Planning Deployment
• Testing Application Compatibility
• Developing Disk Images
• Migrating User State Data
• Deploying Applications
• Preparing Windows PE
• Configuring Windows Deployment Services
• Using Volume Activation
• Deploying with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit
• Migrate Already: Why You Should Migrate To Windows 7 If You Are Still Waffling
• 8 Common Issues in Windows 7 Migration
• 9 Things You Should Know About Windows 7
• Can’t We All Just Get Along? Running Windows 7 in Mixed Environments
• Integrating Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2
• The Good Computing Seal of Approval: Windows 7 Certification

The majority of information are provided with system administrators in mind, not the end user who wants to install Windows 7 on one or two computer systems.

The Windows 7 deployment ebook has a total of 332 pages and can be downloaded for free from the Microsoft website.

The customers who have bought the books did receive a refund but were left puzzled and confused. Anyone who thought that ebooks with DRM were just like book purchases might now realize that they are not at all as Amazon and the publishers seem to have the power to remove books at any time from the user’s possession. Amazon responded to user questions with the following paragraph:

The Kindle edition books Animal Farm by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) & Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell. Published by MobileReference (mobi) were removed from the Kindle store and are no longer available for purchase. When this occured, your purchases were automatically refunded. You can still locate the books in the Kindle store, but each has a status of not yet available. Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store.

Amazon states that is is unlikely to happen again. What users do need to realize is that it can happen at anytime. That’s a huge difference to books or other media that are purchased in stores. Once you bought it it is yours and no publisher or company in the world will come to your house to get the book back and give you a refund. Customers thinking about purchasing a kindle or any other electronic device that is making use of DRM should start thinking about viable alternatives that come without DRM. It’s better for them, their children and our future.

Calibre provides the means to import ebooks that are stored on the computer system. It will display information like titles, authors, sizes, publishers and ratings in the default view mode. This can be changed to view the ebooks by cover or by tags instead.

Missing information can be edited manually or by pulling information from an Internet server that can retrieve information based on author, title or ISBN. The ebook management software is compatible with many file formats including the popular pdf, lit, mobi, cbz, cbr, txt and various others including zip and rar.

The ebooks can be launched and displayed in the default viewer of the selected file format from within the program’s interface. It is furthermore possible to convert single or multiple ebooks into different formats and sync them with electronic devices. Supported ebook readers include Amazon’s Kindle 1 and 2, Apple’s iPhone, SONY PRS 500/505/700 and Cybook Gen 3.

Another interesting feature is the ability to fetch RSS news feeds which are then made available in epub format by default with the option to convert it into a different format.

Calibe can run a (protected) server application that provides access to the ebook library from all computers with a web browser and Internet connection.

The software eBook to Images supports all the eBook formats mentioned above and can be greatly customized to fit the exact screen size and display of your mp3 player. The options are manifold and will please every single user. The exact screen width, heights and image format can be selected so that every image fits perfectly on the screen of the mp3 player.

The advanced options are incredible. The font size and type can be changed to increase or decrease the font size. The text and background color can be defined and the images can be rotated 90° or 270° to fit on every mp3 player perfectly. Page numbers can be added to each image and colors can be inversed if needed.

It is furthermore possible to add a custom background picture and select the amount of pictures of each folder. The default is 100 pictures per folder.

Creating image files of an eBook was astonishingly fast. A conversion of a 2 Megabyte public eBook was completed in under a minute although I selected a different font, font size and colors. Oh, that 2 Megabyte PDF file converted to images with a total size of roughly 84 Megabytes.
via JK on the run

The encyclopedia is currently not working with the latest iPods including iPod Nano and Video. I can see many uses for this. Students who have to write a test could very well use wikipedia for the latest information, it is also nice if you are a tourist and want additional information about an object in a certain town. Take a look at the screenshots below to see how this looks on the iPod.

I hope that the developer will release a new version soon that is compatible to my iPod Nano. It would take about 40% of the space but I think it is well worth it.

Ipodlibrary is able to import txt, doc, lit and html documents avoiding the 1000 notes limit of the iPod (by setting some to inactive which means that they do not count against the limit). It keeps track of the position that you are currently at which makes it easy to continue where you left of.