How to Share Books on Amazon Kindle

A common question I get is how do you share books between more than one Amazon Kindle? There are two basic answers to this question. First, the setup that I use:

It turns out that I have 7 Kindle like things in my life. Two of them are literally Kindles, the rest are mobile phones or computers. If you trust someone, say your spouse, and want to share books with them, there is an easy way. You just have to tie the Kindles to the same Amazon account. All book purchases made through the device will be to the same credit card. This approach has a few pros and cons.

First, you must truly trust the other person. While this is typically easy for spouses, it gets a little bit harder for people that are less closely related. What about a really close friend? What about a book circle? For myself, I chose the wife only option and have not regretted it at all.

Second, the really cool background sync feature may start to work against you. If the two of you happen to be reading the same book, either together or one after another, it will keep asking to sync to the furthest page read. Amazon is setup to read through a book just one time. They don’t, to my knowledge, allow you to restart your book. Their system also occasionally makes mistakes:

If you can deal with these issues, it is possible to build a much more robust library than one person would alone. It is also easier to enjoy books together. Since, at this time, Amazon does not allow transfer of Kindle books between accounts, the key action is to setup your Kindle on the same account from the get go. Any books you purchase on the other account will only be accessible if you re-register your Kindle back to the other account. According to the Kindle support forums and eHow Share books between Kindle accounts, you can keep the books on the device after it is deregistered. That means you can flip over to someone else’s account, download a few books, and flip back. Book copies are limited to around 5 devices.

The other option is far simpler, just wait for Amazon’s soon to be released Kindle lending feature. With the first solution, two or more people can be reading at the same time. With the Amazon solution, it looks like you will give up your rights to the book for up to two weeks and someone else will gain them. Also, not all books will be available for lending. This is where the paper book analogy starts to get me. I can do this with paper. They have a new cheaper distribution mechanism, which they sometimes charge more for, and they are taking away capabilities from their customers. Grrr… For what it is worth, my book, Leading and Managing in Silicon Valley, should be able to be read aloud and shared (if not, let me know).

Jacob

Apple was Right, and Other Updates

It turns out that Apple's iPhone 4 advertising was right. I thought It Changes Everything. Again. was pure ostentatious marketing fluff. I was duped by the "higher resolution than the human retina" line for a little while. I figured this line was just pure easy proof that Apple had finally managed to jump the shark. At it turns out, it is the literal truth. They are trying to change the way people hold their phones. Yes. If you hold it in the wrong place, you loose everything. If you hold it in the right place, you are at the mercy of ATT. As they said in Sneakers, "Now you won't know who to trust." When your phone call is dropped, it must be your fault, because you were holding it. You know, your handheld device. It is so pretty, it should not be touched.

On a more positive note, as some of you may remember, my Kindle II used to be a little photo sensitive. For those who would like to see pictures of the issue: Blurry Kindle in the Sun. I am happy to report that after dropping my Kindle out of my hands and onto concrete, Amazon replaced it for free. YAY customer service! The new replacement does not have this issue. I can now change pages in the car or in the sun and the image is still clear. I have read elsewhere that the Amazon has been replacing Kindles for this issue alone. I really respect that and love it when a company stands behind their products.

Blurry Kindle in the Sun

Many of you know that I love my Kindle. It is like a small lapdog. I am carrying it everywhere and it occasionally draws attention to itself. I have run into some issues where the Kindle has rendered poorly though. It reminds me most of when an ink jet printer is running out of ink or has clogged heads and the text is really faint and grainy. Now, for an ink jet printer, I can understand this. For eInk, I am a little confused.

When the symptoms would happen, I would flip pages backwards and forwards for a while trying to clear out whatever it was that was making the image blurry. It usually cleared up in a few flips of the page and I would go back to reading. Sometimes, I would read it while it was still blurry because it was being particularly resistant to clearing up.

This issue nagged and nagged at me. I don't like to leave problems without finding a reasonable cause for why they happen. In the software world, I have found that if something breaks once, it will break again. Typically, it will break in the same way at multiple locations around the world almost simultaneously. Ignore software problems at your own peril. Since I could not reliably reproduce the problem or make it go away, I figured there was some issue that was affecting its performance. I considered several factors: ambient temperature, duration of use, speed of flipping pages, ... I started to pay far more attention to the problem when it occurred and looked for patterns.

I noticed a few patterns right away. The problem was not consistent throughout the screen. Any part of the screen could be affected. Usually a large portion of the screen or the whole screen was affected at one time. I was frequently on the move (either walking, in my car, waiting in line, ...). While this made me even more suspicious about ambient temperature, I noticed that cold or hot days did not make a difference. One day, I was holding the device in a way that covered part of the screen, flipped the page, and figured out the pattern.

The portion of the screen that I was covering was bright and vibrant and the rest was affected by this issue. I quickly determined that it was UV rays that were affecting the image. My Kindle is sun sensitive. Now, I am sun sensitive and this would explain why the Kindle would only act up when I was on the move. Most of the time, I was either out of the sun or behind UV protected glass. For this blog entry, I took a few moments with my car parked out in the sun and took some candid shots of my Kindle. (I hope it has a nice modeling career ahead of it).

I started out with rendering a page on my Kindle inside my car (UV protection in the glass). You will notice that the Kindle image is very sharp and quite easy to see even in the direct sunlight on a bright California afternoon.



I then, without moving the Kindle, advanced to the next page. The difference is pretty striking:



You can see how blurry the kindle is. How much of the text is completely missing and you cannot read much of the page. After that, I thought about a few ways that I might convince and/or show people that this was indeed the issue. One bad render could easily be caused by a temperature difference. A temperature difference could be caused by say, pulling the Kindle out of a car and putting it on the hood on a nice bright California afternoon. While the Kindle surface is a little bit small for this exercise, I tried a few attempts at making patterns on the screen by shading it with my hand. In order to have sharper lines on the display, I placed my hand directly on the device while I flipped pages. Here are two different patterns with before and after shots. Look near where the edge of my hand was and see how big the difference is between the shaded portion and the non-shaded portion.




As a final experiment, and more detailed pattern, I decided to stack some coins on the corner of the Kindle. My Prius hood is a little too steep for them to sit in the middle, so I stacked them up in the corner of the screen. Unfortunately, 2 pennies would not have been a very good example image, or I would have shown you my $0.02.



You can see the influence of the coins, but the pattern is a little blurry. Some of the coin edges are visible but they are not too crisp.

Going back to Amazon.com just before posting this entry:

Read in Sunlight with No Glare

Kindle's screen reflects light like ordinary paper and uses no backlighting, eliminating the glare associated with other electronic displays. As a result, Kindle can be read as easily in bright sunlight as in your living room.

I have to say, the Kindle does not quite live up to the advertising in this case. It does have glare, it is not bad, but it is there. Also, while you can read amazingly well in bright sunlight, you cannot read after turning the page. I turn lots of pages.

I have tried this on at least two kindles (one original, one Kindle 2) and have seen a consistent issue. I have to say, for a device that is dedicated to reading, not being able to read in the sun is a little disconcerting. I think an inexpensive UV filter over the screen would both protect it and prevent this from being an issue.

[No Kindles were harmed in any way in the making of this blog post.]

Happy Reading!
Jacob

Amazon Kindle Review and Feature Requests

I have been spending way too much time on the Kindle. I just read this Kindle Review and had a few comments on it. Basically I agree with the review. The Kindle is a relatively early product with a few odd issues. The price is relatively high and it mostly makes sense for the impatient, frequent travelers, and/or avid book readers. Hrm, sounds like Americans to me (with the possible exception of the avid book readers part). There are now over 200,000 books available for the Kindle.

The fact that it does not have back lighting makes the display require far less power, as mentioned in the review. It also does another thing though. The lack of backlighting decreases eye strain. I used to print lots of stuff in order to be able to read it without my eyes getting tired. Now, I can send it to my Kindle with a simple email message and read it there without having to burn more paper. One nice way to make up for the lack of backlighting is to purchase a clip on light for it. Here is a simple clip on light that works pretty well. It is a bit bright though, so if you want to read next to a very light sensitive person, this may not be the one for you.

There are a few things that I would love to see the Kindle and/or Amazon support:

• Please let me share documents with my family. I would love to be able to share a book with a friend or family member, temporarily giving up my right to view it. My preference would be to still allow for searches, still show it in the list, and give me the ability to request it back from the other person. I am fine with waiting until it is removed from my device for them to be able to get it and removed from their device before I can get it back. DRM is secure and I can share books.
• Allow for Kindle focused reviews. People say all kinds of wonderful things in the reviews for a book that is available in the Kindle store, but sometimes, when you get the book, the formatting or images are terrible. I have noticed (and blogged) that there is a huge difference in the quality and usability of the books based on the formatting effort put in by the publisher. I would love to be able to say this book was a hit, wish I could read the diagrams.
• It would also be nice to have a glow option for the kindle (like the Timex Indiglow(TM).)
  

Jacob

How to Zoom on Amazon Kindle

As many of you know, I am a fan and user of the Amazon Kindle. I have been reading lots of books on it recently (roughly 2-5 per week). When reading books with tables and images, I frequently find that they are too blurry to read. For some reason the font does not make solid lines. I am assuming there is not enough supported shades of gray to be able to draw the appropriate shape. Recently, I was trying to transfer a table off of the kindle by "Save Page as Clipping" or "Add Highlight". I found the context sensitive menu on the right had a "Zoom" option. When you "Zoom" an image or table, it frequently rotates to be in landscape mode and makes the image or table larger. Images and tables that have been "Zoom"ed on the Kindle are much easier to read. Here is a quick example of how to "Zoom" an image from Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer's Guide to SEO I have been enjoying this book. It is a great combination of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) advice, introductory material, and an explanation of how to actually implement solutions with code samples. Thank you: Jaimie Sirovich and Cristian Darie.

I start on a page that has an image that I would like a clearer look at:
Move the scroll wheel up to the position of the image:

Push the scroll wheel and select "Zoom" from the menu:

And then enjoy the "Zoom"ed image:
When looking for an example to snap pictures of, I found out that not all images or tables work this way. For the books purchased on Amazon, the ones that I have tried have worked. For the documents that I have sent myself using their email conversion, I have yet to see one work.

Hope this helps people enjoy their readers more. Lack of definition of images and tables was one of the few things that I did not like about my Kindle. I am very glad that they have this feature in the Kindle today. For what it is worth, I am running the latest version of the Kindle software as well. To upgrade, connect to wireless and put the thing to sleep using "ALT+aA".

**update** Sadly, one of the books that I purchased for the Kindle does not have zoom support. It looks like this might only work if people do some special formatting.

Jacob

All Things Amazon

I have been using and thinking about Amazon products for a while now. I have even started to use more of them. One odd thing hindering me is that most of my account usage recently managed to be under my wife's account. I think I was trying to track a package that she had ordered, but the net effect was that my browser remembered the settings and started automatically logging in as her. This has had a few interesting complications.

I have been wanting an Amazon Kindle for a while now. I actually liked the idea so much that I borrowed one from my aunt. I loved it. It still seemed like too much money, and the screen refresh rate was a little too slow for my reading speed. I was at my birthday party recently and was telling my aunt, from across the room what I had been hearing about the new version of the Kindle. I had already decided to purchase the new one the moment it came out. Note to self, "Never talk about the new version of something before opening the gifts." You will never guess what I received for my birthday. Yes, an Amazon Kindle. I love it. I use it constantly. It allows me to take multiple books with me without having to actually haul multiple books. I still am not terribly happy with the speed at which it swaps out pages, but I find that I am getting used to it. As one other kindle user mentioned, it is faster than manually flipping pages. Me, I think I flip pages faster than her, but to each their own.

Now, you are probably wondering what my wife's Amazon account and the Kindle have to do with each other at this point. I was at the party and registered the Kindle with the account that I have been using (my wife's). I then purchased a Guy Kawasaki's book Reality Check and started reading. Later, I found one of the top sellers, the Warren Buffet biography, at 60% off and purchased it too. Now I am in an interesting position where a couple of the books I have purchased will go away if I start using my account again. I want to register it to my account, but do I need to purchase the books again? I have finished and loved Reality Check. I don't want to do without it. Guy is going to send me a copy, but I might just buy it on the Kindle again. I want it handy. I have had several times where I wanted to club an entrepreneur over the head with one of his blog entries or a chapter in his book. I am thinking about starting to buy copies and have them shipped to the entrepreneurs. Transferring documents to your Kindle is as easy as sending the document to an email address and paying $0.10. Quite worth the price. I will likely be translating online documents into the Kindle for reading offline. I prefer the paper like look and feel and I find it is far less stressful on my eyes than looking at even a great computer monitor.

Another Amazon service that I have signed up for was Amazon Prime. I love the service. I pay a bit, but I get two day shipping free. I typically paid more for the shipping since I usually want books right away. Now, I can purchase more often, in smaller increments, and get the books faster. This too was signed up for under my wife's account. I have heard that I can share the Amazon prime account with my other user, so this one should not be too bad.

Amazon SaaS offerings sound really interesting. I know lots of people that are using them. I have spent some time with their chief evangelist. With their recent round of new offerings (block based storage and load balancing) I think they have a very complete offering. I have been using Amazon products and services for a while now. I have enjoyed them and plan on enjoying more soon.

I am also working on a book with several colleagues, "Technology Leadership in Silicon Valley". We are currently looking for a good publisher. Let me know if you are interested in providing feedback, quotes, or know of a good publisher.

Are you using the cloud? Amazon Prime? Kindle?

What do you think of them?

Have you read Guy Kawasaki's Reality Check yet?

Jacob