Kindle eBooks | Greg Ahern's Blog

Publisher Price Fixing Law Suite! Its About Time.

April 11, 2012

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It’s about time. I was so bummed when all the book prices jumped up after Apple and the Nook started selling books. It made no sense, without publishing and distribution the cost for e-books should be less than a physical book. Never mind the fact that you can’t really share or give away an e-book like you can a physical book. I ended up buying real books again if the price for the e-book was the same or higher. Here is my previous post on this subject with profit breakdowns.

I would not mind if the extra money was going directly to the author but I doubt that was happening.

People started protesting and rating good books with one star on Amazon to punish the publishers. In the end it probably hurt the authors. Even Amazon notes that the price is set by the publisher not them.

Let’s hope e-book price drops to a fair price.

More information on law suite

e-Book Prices Rise to High

January 11, 2011

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I love using my Kindle for a number of reasons; I can carry a bookshelf of books with me, I can change the font size, I can review books before reading them. But one of the most important is the price of a book. I often spend $5 for a book, sometimes $1. Not any more…

Since Barnes and Nobles released the Nook and with the release of the iPad the publishers got greedy and the new contracts for book prices are in some cases the same as the cost of the book store. This does not make any sense since the cost to create an ebook $0.00 and to distribute $0.00 should significantly reduce the price of a book. I am not the only one upset about this. Online groups are starting a PR war giving best seller authors 1 star on Amazon because the book is over priced for an ebook or released late after the hardbound release.

Think about the effect of this…a one star reviews on good books just because of the price. This throws the whole online crowdsourced marketing campaign into tail spin with long term effects.

Here is a cost example:

$20 book	% of list price	Cost	Profit	e-book
bookstore	40%	$12	$8	$6 (Amazon 30%)
book Wholesaler	60%,	$8	$4	$0
Publisher	30%		$8	$8
Author	10%		$2	$2
Agent	15% or Authors %		$0.30	$0.30
Author final			$1.70	$1.70

*Data from: http://en.allexperts.com/q/Writing-Books-675/writer-profit-book.htm

So let’s take out the costs if we had an e-book. The bookstore is now Amazon at 30% of list. The wholesaler does not exist. Assuming the publisher still gets 30%, e-books should cost 70% less that list or for a $20 book would be $6.

The publishers have to take note to what happened to the music business. If they increase the price too much piracy will increase. I have found sites where I was stunned to fine compete collections of top authors for free.

I think Amazon is upset about this, you will noticed they now say “ This price was set by the publisher”.

Interestingly Borders is about to go bankrupt and I heard Barnes and Nobles had a 70% increase in digital sales due to the Nook. Not sure what the time frame was but it is clear that the digital book era is well on its way. And everything digital costs less, companies have to be more creative in their business models to survive.

Don’t get me wrong I would happily pay a few extra dollars if I new the author was getting the money… Funny I am starting to rediscover the public library again.

Kindle Version 2 Shortcuts, Tips, Tricks and Hacks

November 22, 2010

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Below is a list of shortcuts, tips tricks and hacks I have found for the Kindle version 2.

General Shortcuts:

Sleep/Wake – Slide and release the power button (on top of the K2)
Power Off – Slide and hold the power button for 4 seconds
Reset – Slide and hold the power button for 15 seconds
Screen-shot – Alt+shift+G creates a screen-shot (.gif format) that goes to the Documents Folder of the Kindle 2 which you can view when connected to computer.
Refresh Display – ALT+G (if you notice any ghosting, try this shortcut) Also useful for refreshing web browsing page
Jump to page 1 – 5 on Home Screen – Press the number on keypad and then press 5-way Controller
Display the Time – Press MENU button
Display Free Memory – Press MENU button
Display Wireless Network (3G or 1X, if wireless is on) – Press MENU button
Alt-Shift-0 set current picture as screensaver
Play Minesweeper – Shift+ALT+M (from home page) (M or enter to mark; R to restart game; 5-way controller to move cursor)
F toggle fullscreen mode MinesweeperI,J,K,L up,left,down,right (or use 5 way controller)
M mark mine
R restart
Space open cell
Scroll move cursor up/down
Alt-Scroll move cursor left/right
H return to Home screen Text input
Go to Amazon Kindle Store – alt-home
Jump to Web – Type in your search terms and move the 5-way controller to the right and then select “google”.
Search Wikipedia – Select “wikipedia” in search category
Search Content by Specific Author – Enter @author [author’s name] in the Kindle Store search bar
Alpha Search – To search for an author or title by first letter, click one letter on the keyboard and press the 5-way controller. Then go immediately to the place on the list with the first author or title under that letter alphabetically, *but only if that match exists*. So if you have no Q’s, you can’t get to the R’s that way. This doesn’t work for “Most Recent First” listings but seems to work for title or author sort and could be useful if you have a lot of books on your Kindle 2.
List Supported Search commands - Type @help in the search string to display other supported search commands like @dict, @url etc.
Search Kindle Store by Author – When in Kindle Store, type @author in searchbar to limit your search to author names
Show Diagnostic Data – From Settings Menu, enter 411
Show Current Radio Diagnostics - From Settings Menu, enter 411 (constantly refreshes the data)
Search Amazon Kindle Store for Free Books – From Kindle Store search, type in -domain into the search field.

Some Kindles have location capability in the CDMA module.
Alt-1 show current location in google maps
Alt-2 find gas station nearby
Alt-3 find restaurants nearby
Alt-4
Alt-5 find custom keyword nearby
Alt-D dump debug info to the log and toggle highlight default item
Alt-Z toggle zone drawing and show log Audio Player

Entering Text – Symbol Shortcuts

Double Quotes “ – Alt-9
Colon : – Alt-8
Comma , - Alt-7
Question Mark ? – Alt-6
Apostrophe ‘ – Alt-0

Book or Periodical Viewing:

Add or remove a bookmark – ALT+B. Alternate Method: Press 5-way up/down to go to cursor mode, and then press 5-way controller twice.
Alt+shift+1-9 – changes the spacing and number of lines per page (default is 3)
List Sections of Periodical – Press the 5-way Enter Button
Newspaper View Summaries – To view summaries of the articles in a newspaper or magazine, while viewing the newspaper section list, press the 5-way controller to the right to highlight the number showing the number of articles in a section, then press the 5-way select button
Jump Quickly through Periodical – Move 5-way controller to right to go to next article or to the left to go to the previous article
Start or stop text-to-speech – Shift+SYM (shift key is the “up arrow”)
Pause text-to-speech – Spacebar
Switch Between Male and Female Voices & Change Voice Speed – Alt + Aa keys & then toggle between settings with the 5 way controller
Start text-to-speech at specific point on a page – To begin the text-to-speech at a particular point on a page, move the cursor with your 5-way controller to the point just before you want the reading to begin.
Play or stop MP3 Audio – ALT+spacebar
Skip to the next audio track – ALT+F
Pause Audible Audiobook – Spacebar

Text-To-Speech Shortcuts:

Audio Controls:

Photo Viewer Controls:

The picture viewer can be activated by connecting your Kindle2 via USB cable to your PC and create “pictures” folder in Kindle USB disk. Create subfolders inside of that and copy the pictures. The subfolders will then become “book” names and the pictures will be pages. *.gif, *.jpg and *.png files all seem to work. Now you disconnect the USB cable and press Alt-Z in the home screen. Your picture folders should now appear among the books now.

While you are viewing pictures in the Picture Viewer:

Toggle Actual Size – C
Toggle Full Screen – F (currently not working properly)
Zoom In – Q
Zoom Out – W
Rotate – R
Reset Zoom Level – E
Pan Photo Larger Than Screen – Use 5-way controller to pan photo

Other Tips and Tricks:

Save All Words You’ve Looked-up in Dictionary – When you look a book up in the dictionary, highlight the word & the definition and it will save it to “My Clippings.” You can then track all of the words you’ve looked up. My Clippings is accessible in a text file when your Kindle is tethered to your computer with the USB cable. Here’s a step-by-step guide on saving your looked-up words:

1. Place the cursor over the word you want to look up. (or search for the word)
2. A “mini definition” displays at the bottom of the screen.
3. While the mini-definition is showing, press the “return” key.
4. The more detailed definition from the dictionary will appear.
5. Place your cursor at the beginning of the entry and click the 5-way controller. Then move the cursor to the far-right point of what you want to save to “my clippings” and click the 5-way controller once more to highlight the definition.

Turn multiple pages at once – Hold down the next/prev page button or click them multiple times causes the Kindle 2 to turn several pages at once. It’s slow and not ideal, but does work.
Delete Book from Kindle – Highlight the item you want to delete (navigate with 5-way button), then press left with the 5-way controller to bring up the Delete selection option. Press select with 5-way controller to confirm deletion.

Advanced Kindle 2 Hacks

Make your own custom screen-saver images – You will have to upload a piece of code to do this http://ebookreadersresource.com/ebook-readers-blog/kindle-how-to/amazon-kindle-2-screensaver/

This linke has a number of firmware hacks – http://beta.ivancover.com/wiki/index.php/Kindle_2_Hacks

Amazon Kindle ver 1 Screen Saver

October 16, 2010

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The Kindle can view pictures and you can upload images to the screen saver function. As you know pictures on the first version of the kindle are low resolution so black and white or grayscale images work best. The image screen is 800 x 600 pixels but images look best at 550 x 450 pixels. Total image size has to be less than 64k, JPG, GIF or PNG.

To upload an images do the following:
1) With your Kindle connected to you computer, make a folder (with lower case letters) on your Kindle called “pictures”.
2) Create a subfolder and put the images in it.
3) In Home screen press Alt-Z. A new “Folder” should appear as a book. Open it to view your pictures.

To user your images as a screen saver:
1)       Upload images to your Kindle above. Use the folder names “pictures” with a sub folder “screensavers”
2)       From the Kindle home page Press alt-z to create a new book called “screensavers” which you can find at the end of your book list.
3)       Click through each picture by clicking the “next – page” button. On each picture press alt-shift-0 (that is zero). This will set the image as a screen saver.

To delete screen saver images:
To delete your images from the screen saver you have to go to a hidden folder call screen_saver. It is in the systems folder. You will have to set you computer to show hidden files to see it.

Amazon Kindle ver 1 Keyboard Shortcuts

October 16, 2010

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Keyboard shortcuts

From anywhere on your Kindle
Alt-Shift-R reboot Kindle
Alt-Shift-. restart GUI
Alt-Shift-G make screenshot – only works with SD card.

Home

Alt-Shift-M Minesweeper
Alt-Z rescan picture directories
Alt-T show time

Reader

Alt-B toggle bookmark
Alt-T spell out time
Alt-0 enable/disable slideshow
Alt-1 start slideshow (if enabled)
Alt-2 stop slidehow
Alt-PageForward/PageBackward go to next/prev annotation or one “chunk” (1/20th of a book) forward or backward

Settings

411 show diagnostics data
511 run loopback call test
611 diagnostic data service call
c/e/s
126 Lab126 team members

Font List

J show/hide justification options

Picture viewer

Alt-Shift-0 set current picture as screensaver
F toggle fullscreen mode

Minesweeper

I,J,K,L up,left,down,right
M mark mine
R restart
Space open cell
Scroll move cursor up/down
Alt-Scroll move cursor left/right
H return to Home screen

Text input

Alt-Backspace clear all
Alt-H/Alt-J move cursor
(the following don’t work in search field for some reason)
Alt-6 ?
Alt-7 ,
Alt-8 :
Alt-9 ”
Alt-0 ‘

Browser

It seems there is a location capability (GPS?) in the CDMA module. I cannot check it as I’m not in USA but the following shortcuts are programmed inside the browser.
Alt-1 show current location in google maps
Alt-2 find gas station nearby
Alt-3 find restaurants nearby
Alt-4
Alt-5 find custom keyword nearby
Alt-D dump debug info to the log and toggle highlight default item
Alt-Z toggle zone drawing and show log

Audio Player
Alt-F next
Alt-P play/stop

Search commands

These command work in the search field. You can enter only beginning of the command if that’s enough for it to be unique.

Public commands (always available)

@help
@web
@wiki/@wikipedia
@store
@time

To learn more go to http://igorsk.blogspot.com/2007_12_01_archive.html

Free eBook Sites

October 16, 2010

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The following links are to sites that offer free books you can downlowd to your reader.

Arthur’s Classic Novels contains web pages that can be read online or downloaded for free.

Baen Free Library — Over 100 free Science Fiction/Fantasy books, mostly from baen books. Available in several unencrypted, non-DRM formats: HTML, Rocket, Ebookwise, Mobipocket, RTF and Microsoft Reader.

BeBook catalog — These are PDF books properly sized for 6″ readers. The also have plain text directly from Gutenberg.

BooksInMyPhone — Hundreds of Public Domain and Creative commons books that can be read on java enabled ‘dumb’ cell phones.

Bookyards library to the world has eBooks and other items. eBooks are PDF.

Cory Doctorow — Fiction and non-fiction by Cory Doctorow.

Elegant Solutions Software and Publishing Company — eBooks in Microsoft Reader, Palm and Mobipocket formats.

FeedBooks — Public Domain or CC licensed books available in ePUB, mobi, pdf, custom pdf, and pdf pre-formatted for Sony and Iliad. Users can add books and write book reviews. RSS feeds and Sudoku for your e-ink readers.

Free-ebooks.net — Free eBooks mostly in PDF and EXE format. They have an RSS feed that can deliver eBooks.

Girlebooks — Free ebooks by women writers, formatted into PDF, LIT, PDB and plain text.

Golden Age of Comics — Comic books in CBR/CBZ. Requires free registration.

Gutenberg Canada — Canada has different copyright laws than the US. These eBooks are public domain in Canada. content is HTML and TXT.

Internet Archive:Text — Free Books from a variety of sources, most available as scanned PDFs and OCRed plain text.

ManyBooks.Net — Free eBooks, in a variety of formats, mostly from Project Gutenberg. Formates include: Kindle, PDF, PDF large print, eReader, Doc, Mobipocket, Plucker, iSilo, zTXT, iPod Notes, iRex Iliad PDF, Sony lrf, custom PDF, custom HTML, RTF, Newton, TCR, RocketBook, iPhone PDF, iPhone Books.app, Mobipocket mobi, iPhone bookmarklet, JAR file. They provide excerpts and sometimes a book description. They allow readers to leave book reviews.

Memoware — Another giant collection of texts. This one is not just classic texts, but does include classics. The advantage of this site is that you can usually find a PalmDOC or iSilo text for most of the books. Other PDA formats are also supported on some books. They have their own excellent guides for many aspects of ebook reading on PDAs. It’s a great resource even if you don’t download any of their books.

MobileRead uploads — 5,000+ postings in LRF, MOBI, IMP, and miscellaneous other formats. Many of these are hand checked versions of the highest possible quality. They have been prepared by MobileReader users.

Munseys — The new name of BlackMask. 20,000+ titles in a variety of formats.

Project Gutenberg — Thousands of out-of-copyright books available for free, with more being added every month. This is a huge collection of classic texts that is sure to include your favorites. It is growing all the time, and the most popular books are even available on a CD or DVD that you can receive for free if you don’t have adequate online access. You might even want to consider donating a small amount to support their ongoing work to expand their library. And don’t miss their page on converting texts for PDAs and eReaders.

Project Gutenberg Australia — Provides books that are public domain in Australia.

Project Runeberg — Project Runeberg is a volunteer effort to create free electronic editions of classic Nordic (Scandinavian) literature and make them openly available over the Internet.

Stanford Collection — Documents and some eBooks – check the dime novels and medieval collection.

The Bookseller.com – click on digital for Bookseller supplements. The click on PDF to download the book.

The Fifth Imperium — CD-ROM images. Mostly the images are of the free CD-ROMs included with some Baen Books. Baen Books allows the CD-ROMs to be copied and distributed for free. Every CD-ROMs contains several complete novels in HTML format, and some have extras, like MP3 readings. All CD-ROMs also contain artwork for the CD-ROM itself.

University of Virginia Electronic Text Center — Free online HTML collection with some Adobe Acrobat, Palm Reader, and Microsoft Reader formatted books available. Hosting some books I believe are not found elsewhere online. 2,100 eBooks available.

Finding Free eBooks — Frequently updated, links to lots of free ebooks with descriptions and file types available; also links to time limited promotional give-aways. Categorized and searchable. Leave comments and ratings.

Also see this thread: Best Sources of eBooks.

eBooks For Free.org — Includes some writeups.

Free Books — Really big list of links to eBook sites, with descriptions.

Free SF Reader – blog — Links to many free SF, Fantasy and horror stories and books.

Free Tech Books — Links to free computer science, engineering and programming books.

The Online Books Page — Over 25,000 free books on the web.

E-book stores table includes both stores and Free eBook sites in a comparison.

250 plus digital libraries and archives

http://www.fanfiction.net/book/ – For anyone interested in reading fan fiction online

100 university libraries you can access from the Internet

To see updates to this list go to http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Free_eBooks

Greg Ahern's Blog

Publisher Price Fixing Law Suite! Its About Time.

e-Book Prices Rise to High

Kindle Version 2 Shortcuts, Tips, Tricks and Hacks

General Shortcuts:

Entering Text – Symbol Shortcuts

Book or Periodical Viewing:

Text-To-Speech Shortcuts:

Audio Controls:

Photo Viewer Controls:

Other Tips and Tricks:

Amazon Kindle ver 1 Screen Saver

Amazon Kindle ver 1 Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts

Free eBook Sites

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