I've used this extension, Instapaper's wireless delivery, and Wordcycler (a desktop app that that syncs files from Instapaper when your Kindle is connected to your computer).
This extension is better than Instapaper's wireless delivery because it treats each article as a separate "book". Instapaper, on the other hand, groups all the unread articles in a single book with each article as a different chapter. This means that if you read halfway through one article you can't start another article without losing your place.
The extension also works better for me than Wordcycler because Wordcycler doesn't download the article from Instapaper. In order not to hammer Instapaper's servers, it grabs the URLs when you connect your Kindle, then downloads and formats the articles itself. By the time I connect my Kindle to my computer many of the articles are only available as previews, so Wordcycler doesn't get the full article.
I'm inclined to think that the author is not doing anything malicious, the js code is obscured/minified so it's hard to verify that. I'll say that the analytics script has the sole purpose of tracking real usage (the webstore doesn't provide any info on "active" installs).
Other than this, the author already received a comment pointing out the existence of readability, i hope he'll update his code soon.
Ok, the author confirms with a webstore comment that none of this data come from the users. It looks like they test the extension on various websites and add there manually the text location for sites that are not being parsed correctly...
As an aside, I just traveled with my Kindle to Europe and was ecstatic by the ability to load up on (free, from Gutenberg) books, and easily switch between them on the long flight.
However, those who herald the end of books is here are very wrong. Except from the "many books on long trip" or "Netflix-like instant book delivery" (and a few other, like reading long web pages) use cases, I wouldn't event think about switching to Kindle full-time. Gripes are:
* All books appear almost the same, little or no typesetting
* The note taking interface is shockingly primitive, e.g. just to get a questions mark requires several clicks
* AFAIK, pagination depends on you display, so bookmarks may change place among Kindle readers on different devices.
Of course, all of these are easily addressable. The question is: can the device that does these and other cool stuff (e.g. color) be sold around ~ $150.
> The note taking interface is shockingly primitive, e.g. just to get a questions mark requires several clicks
Do you normally make notes in your physical books?
> AFAIK, pagination depends on you display, so bookmarks may change place among Kindle readers on different devices.
The start of the page you bookmarked will still be the start of the page you jump to, whatever display layout you use. The pages might be different length.
Yes, I do take notes in books, but as they say, the margin is too small for some of my notes. I thought this would be one of the big pluses of Kindle for me, and it still is, but using the 1980s style interface really is a killer.
Bookmarks work as you say, which is counterintuitive is one is used to how bookmarks use in real books, i.e. generally one or two points are of interest on a page. On the Kindle, with different pagination, a sentence you like may not be on the bookmarked page anymore. There's no easy solution to this problem, I guess.
With bookmarks you need only type an alt-b -- it toggles.the bookmark.
What you want here is to get back to a sentence. I'd highlight it instead.
At the beginning of a sentence, press the 5-way center down and
then continue to the right or down (or even across a page) and when
you get to the end of the sentence or partial paragraph you want,
press the 5-way button down again.
That creates a highlight (underlined) and is faster for me than
doing it on my NookColor with my finger, which invariably gets the
wrong letter or row.
When you want to find your highlight (or note), press the Menu
button and go down to "View my Notes & Marks" and you'll get a list
of the ones you made in the order they're in the book, with context
and a link to the annotation.
That's a pretty good solution. You'll also find a personal
private,password-protected annotations webpage of all your notes for
a book, on the Amazon servers. See how at bit.ly/webknotes1 as it's
a really useful feature.
If you don't want your annotations backed up to your area on their
servers, just go to the Kindle's Home screen and use the Menu button
to get Settings and turn off Annotations Backup.
APOLOGIES. I have no idea how to edit on this. The first one I did w/normal word wrapping while writing didn't wrap when I was reading and most of it was off the screen. This final result is very odd. :-)
I only started taking notes once I got a Kindle. The idea of defacing a physical book just bothers me, and most the books I read are from libraries, anyway. Now that I have my Kindle I've been taking notes all the time, but there are a lot of missing features. Not being able to link to other sections in a book is a killer.
Not only does it take several keys, but the placement of the keyboard is just awkward (I have a DX). If I have to take any meaningfully note I have to place the DX on the table/lap/somesurface and I chicken peck my note out.
Not to convenient, but I still love my Kindle for pure reading.
Some people do annotate in the margins. Especially non-fiction books. At the very least I've been known to add a bookmark (i.e. shred of paper) to a particular spot with some notes written on it.
My criticisms of the Kindle are for its page transitions and poor interface. The Kindle is really like the Blackberry of of digital readers. The interface is beyond clunky compared to simple taps and swipes that much more closely emulate the act of reading a physical book.
My best hope is that Mirasol comes to the Nook Color sooner rather than later as I highly doubt the iPad will come with a non-backlit display for several generations.
The interface is beyond clunky compared to simple taps and swipes that much more closely emulate the act of reading a physical book.
I've often felt that the "need" to emulate something in the real world on new devices and new interfaces has held back significant innovation. Despite that "the desktop metaphor" is supposed to be familiar, people still can't manage their files effectively. And now new interfaces are rare/difficult to gain traction because people are used to the desktop metaphor despite that it becomes less and less a good metaphor.
Regardless of whether we should or shouldn't emulate the real, I still stand by my statement that swipes and taps are superior to the Kindle interface. Perhaps in your case despite rather than because that interaction is more like reading a physical book.
I fail to see the significant difference between a "tap" on a screen and what you actually need to do to turn a page on the kindle: "tap" a button.
The Kindle hardware is usable with one hand. I don't find reading books using the kindle app on my android phone to be as easy to do with one hand as with the hardware, mostly because since the kindle page turning buttons are physical and have decent resistance, I don't need to hold the device in an awkward way to avoid activating an action I don't want to.
The kindle is actually much better than a book because it's easier to operate with one hand than a physical paperback is.
Pagination doesn't actually exist because (except for pdf's) there are no pages, only locations (see bottom of screen). Bookmarks mark locations, not pages.
Exactly, which take quite a bit of getting used to (see my comment above), because it doesn't work that way for real books. In fact when people cite references with page numbers, they usually give the precise editions of the book, since different editions may have the sentence or point being referenced on different pages. So it's important for the "bookmark" to hold the information about the whole text that the user sees a that time, I think.
In case you didn't know, "Locations" are actually sentences, images, etc. I don't know how you can get much more specific than identifying the exact sentence that you'd like to bookmark and remember.
Which makes it impossible to do anything other than read certain books straight through. I wanted to skip around in Infinite Jest, but since the chapter names are meaningless and all the book guides have page number references, it's impossible to know the book's outline.
From these you said, I only miss the typesetting.
If they add some new fonts, and differente typography. It would be more awesome!
And one thing, I think all books for people more then 14 years old, are in black and white. Lol.
I considered building something like this for some time (there are similar extensions but they either not work or send only pdf) and will probably do it anyway even if send to kindle kinda work.
The thing i don't like about this particular implementation is that looking at the code (background.js) it looks like that it contains a list of urls with the location of the text content (tag path to the location).
I guess this is done for pages that are not being parsed correctly (the user then select the text manually, and the url+tag path is sent to the server and it will be added to the list in the next release), he should have used readability.
I'd prefer something that doesn't log in any way the urls i'm sending to the kindle (even if only to fix some issue with the text extraction algorithm).
Edit: The contained urls have query parameters too, not good.
I tried RekindleIT but could never get it to work properly, and I didn't like instapapers method of doing things, was looking for something like this - awesome.
I love my kindle, no more piles of heavy coding books that I buy and never read (because I can only read them at home due to their size). I love the ecosystem, I bought ASP.NET Pro MVC 2, and for the walkthrough bits I can read it on Kindle for PC whilst doing the tutorials in Visual studio (I have a 24" monitor rotaed 90 degrees - perfect for reading short instructions). Then when it got into chapters where it is just explaining how things work, I could continue them on my kindle with its awesome screen anywhere I wanted, or on my phone while waiting in line somewhere. Brilliant.
I've gotten to where I hardly ever read from my latest-gen small-sized Kindle Wi-Fi. I prefer the touch screen interactivity of the Kindle app on my iPhone4. This makes me think that reading on an iPad would blow the Kindle away, with the only caveats being battery life and nighttime reading where I wouldn't want a back-light to keep me awake.
I have a Kindle, Ipad, and android phone (Droid X).
Kindle:
Pro:
One great thing about the kindle is battery life and how easy it is on the eyes. For reading fiction, it's great.
Con:
It is horrible for technical work--pdfs in particular. If you're like me and you jump around in a book, it's impractical to do so on a kindle given the slow page refresh rate.
Pro:
The nice thing about the kindle app on the android phone is the convenience--when I'm standing in line at the grocery store (or am on the subway), I can catch up on some light reading and have finished a number of books this way that I wouldn't have ordinarily.
Con:
Screensize. I used to use the kindle app on the ipod touch and find the screensize of the Droid X to be a much better experience--but it's still small.
Ipad:
Pro:
The screensize is great and bookmarking pages is intuitive.
Also, for technical books, I can get them in pdf form and
use GoodReader.
Con:
Battery life--for international flights, if you don't have power, you can survive, but the kindle wins with battery life hands down.
I wouldn't give up the Kindle for anything. The E-Paper screen feels much more comfortable on my eyes. Its size is perfect for having it always with me and reading with one hand in bed or on the train/bus. And I don't interact much with the Kindle anyways except turning pages or opening another book from the main screen.
Unless I'm out in the sun, I prefer reading on my iPad to reading on a Kindle -- but since Amazon has the largest selection of e-books, I end up reading on my iPad using their Kindle application.
I vastly prefer reading in a 'night' mode of amber text on a black background to reading on my Kindle. However the iPad had other issues with it, including low res, and iPhone has too little text on the page, in both cases my wrists end up sore either from weight or repeated paging.
I'm hoping iPad 2 is a little lighter, and does have the 2x linear resolution bump. Then it will be quite a good experience.
On the contrary, I've even started using my 3G as my primary internet device, just for basic web surfing and stuff. My eyes feel more relaxed than they have in years.
iPad hurts my wrists after about 15 minutes. I have the first gen Kindle, and I like how lightweight it is, plus it has a memory card slot, and I can read it in total brightness.
This extension is better than Instapaper's wireless delivery because it treats each article as a separate "book". Instapaper, on the other hand, groups all the unread articles in a single book with each article as a different chapter. This means that if you read halfway through one article you can't start another article without losing your place.
The extension also works better for me than Wordcycler because Wordcycler doesn't download the article from Instapaper. In order not to hammer Instapaper's servers, it grabs the URLs when you connect your Kindle, then downloads and formats the articles itself. By the time I connect my Kindle to my computer many of the articles are only available as previews, so Wordcycler doesn't get the full article.