kindle

The New Kindle

September 28, 2011 by Ken

I don’t have much to say about the Amazon announcements today. I think Amazon has done an amazing job and offered a compelling device with a good media-delivery infrastructure. But other people have made that observation much more eloquently.

I just want to remind myself that when I was a kid, if I had been shown something like the Kindle or the iPad, I would have thought it something from fifty to a hundred years in the future, not just thirty.

We live in wondrous times. Let’s try not to forget how lucky we are.

Kindle 3 and Chinese

April 4, 2011 by Ken

The Kindle 3 provides some support for display of non-Latin scripts. But the support is not perfect. For example, if you convert Chinese books in UTF-8 via calibre into mobi books for the Kindle, the default configuration will result in many characters showing up as little squares.

A solution is provided by user “hyraxer” at Kindle Boards:

click the home button
click the enter button
just input
;debugOn (click enter button)
~changeLocale zh-CN (click enter button)
;debugOff (click enter button)

and then restart your kindle, everything will be OK.

I’ve tried it and it seems to work.

Kindles on the Subway

August 4, 2010 by Ken

I’ve been seeing a lot more Kindles in use on my commute, as well as other ebook readers. Last night, for example, I counted three ebook readers near me.

I’m sure more than a few people are reading on their phones too — it’s how I do the bulk of my reading these days.

When things change, there’s never a big neon sign flashing “THE FUTURE IS HERE.” It just happens from day to day. I remember writing letters in college as a freshman every week. And then, by the time I graduated, I realized that I hadn’t written a letter in a long time. I can’t tell you the day the shift happened.