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.

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• Deployment Platform
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• Testing Application Compatibility
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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