Light My Kindle

Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon.com (the maker of the Kindle), has invested in the social networking / microblogging site Twitter, via his fund called Bezo’s Expeditions.

Twitter plans on using the money to improve their reliability, which will make their thousands and thousands of addicted users very happy.

I’m currently in the process of moving from one apartment to another, and I’ve discovered yet another wonderful thing about my Kindle.

Any time I’ve moved in the past, I took special care to pack a few books to read in with my necessities and to-be-unpacked-first boxes. This time, however, I have a Kindle.

I didn’t hesitate to pack up my entire bookshelf, including my to-be-read pile. I didn’t have to worry about not having reading material, because I have the Kindle and access to plenty of reading material that’s downloadable in seconds.

Have you found a surprising benefit to owning a Kindle? Share it in the comments.

Accessing the Kindle Store from your Kindle is probably one of the easiest tasks you can do, which is what makes using the Kindle such a joy.

First, ensure your wireless switch is turned on. From your Kindle home page, click the scroll wheel on the Menu at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. Scroll down to Shop in Kindle Store and click the scroll wheel. Tada! You’ve arrived at the Kindle Store. From here you can browse, search, sample, and more.

For the 1000th issue of Entertainment Weekly they did lists of the “New Classics” - movies, TV shows, albums, and even tech gadgets that they call, “the most brilliant, new, outrageous, inspiring, addictive, hilarious, life-changing classics in movies, TV, music, books, and more of the last 25 years.”

The Amazon Kindle fell in at number 23 on the Tech list. Entertainment Weekly says,

Maybe the book won’t die after all - it’ll just be displaced. Amazon.com’s Kindle, a handheld device that lets you download and read book-length texts, is already a success after less than a year.

Also on the Tech list are TiVo, Netflix, Game Boy, and Amazon.com itself. The rest of the issue is fascinating as well, and I’ll certainly be using the The New Classics Book list to guide some Amazon Kindle Store shopping later. Check out the issue on stands now.

One of the most brilliant things about the Kindle Store is that you can try a sample of any book. There are two ways to do this. One is through the Kindle Store on Amazon.com. On any book page, click the Try A Sample button (as seen at left). A sample of the book will be sent wirelessly to your Kindle.

The other way to do this is to go to the Kindle Store on your Kindle. On any book page, there are a series of bullet point choices along the right-hand side (Reviews, Write a Review, etc.). From that side, choose Try A Sample, and you’ll have your book sample in seconds.

Recently some Kindle owners have been reporting issues with frozen and broken screens. This unlucky owner experienced a broken screen after only two days. Other Kindle owners have been reporting similar issues. Luckily, a few commenters have said that Amazon resolved their screen issues by replacing their Kindle within two weeks. (I don’t think I could voluntarily go two weeks without my Kindle now that I own one, but I think it’s a reasonable amount of time to wait for a replacement item that’s in such high demand.)

I’ve been experiencing a touch of this issue and have narrowed down exactly when it happens, at least in my experience. When I put the Kindle to sleep (by pressing ALT + the text key), I always wake it up (by pressing ALT + the text key again) before turning it off. The few times my Kindle has frozen with the screen looking as it does on this site is when I turn it off before waking it up. The next time I turn it on, the screen goes funny like that and I have to turn it off and turn it back on to get it to work properly.

Luckily, mine has never frozen to the point of needing repair. If yours does, however, try turning it off and turning it back on as I do. If that doesn’t work, one commenter says there’s a reset button under the rubber cover that you can press with an opened paperclip. If all else fails, contact Amazon Customer Service and they should be able to replace your Kindle within two weeks.

One of my absolute favorite things about the Kindle is that it automatically bookmarks your page for you when you stop reading. Anytime you leave a book or other content by hitting the home button or opening a new page from the menu, the Kindle remembers where you were and opens to it the next time you read that content.

What if you want to bookmark another page? For example, if you and your significant other are both reading the same book. Bookmarking a page on the Kindle is as easy as bookmarking a page in a paper book by folding the corner down. On any content page, use the scroll wheel to select the small triangle in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Click the scroll wheel and you’ll see the small triangle now looks like it was folded down.

If you decide you don’t want that page bookmarked anymore, just follow the same process and the triangle will turn back to how it was.

You can view all your bookmarks by clicking the scroll wheel on Menu and choosing “Go to Bookmark…” This is a great way to mark entire pages that you’d like to reference later. There are other ways to bookmark or highlight smaller passages as well, but we’ll get to those later.

As a Stephen King fan, I was surprised to find I had never read his 1980 novella The Mist. Then again, it was published four years before I was born. I read it over a couple of days while visiting my parents, and I spent a few nights reading into the wee hours trying to finish this terrifying tale.

The novella starts innocently enough with a thunderstorm on a lake in Maine. After the storm, the residents discover the power has been knocked out, several trees have fallen, and there’s a thick mist moving in over the lake. David Drayton and his son set out to pick up some groceries and they let their neighbor Brent Norton tag along despite their heated disagreements in the past.

The store is very crowded, as one might expect, and everyone gets set on edge when a man comes running through the parking lot shouting that there are things in the mist and they attacked someone out there. His nose is bloodied and he insists they shut the doors of the store. The people do so, as the thick mist settles around the store. Shortly after there’s a loud event, like an earthquake, that shakes the store and furthers the feelings of unease in the store.

This being a supernatural thriller, the creatures in the mist start to show themselves quickly. The creatures are quite terrifying, especially since there are so many different kinds of them. There’s the tentacle creature that grabs Norm right at the beginning. Plus huge bug-type things, huge bird-type things, and a monster whose size would put a blue whale to shame.

The novella hits on interesting territory by not only relying on the supernatural to scare the reader and the characters. The element of mob mentality is brought into the story through the character of Mrs. Carmody. Mrs. Carmody is known about town as a little bit of a crazy, and when the creatures begin appearing through the mist she starts to preach about the wrath of God. She tells the people that the creatures are a sign of end-times and that they must repent for their sins. Her crazy-babble starts to draw more people to her as the days pass and more people die. Her little mob shows just how far people will go when confined and helpless.

The Mist was a quick read, but a scary one. The paranoia and constant on-edgeness I felt while reading it was seriously intense. As someone who is prone to nightmares (I know, I probably shouldn’t read Stephen King before bed), this novella had me on edge waiting to see what would happen to David and his young son. I highly recommend the novella to fans of supernatural horror. I also recommend reading it before checking out the recent movie adaptation starring Thomas Jane. The movie is mostly faithful to the novella and actually complements it quite nicely.

You can get it for your Kindle or in paperback.

Amazon’s Gift Central, which I use religiously at every holiday and birthday, now has the Kindle listed as the most wished for item in electronics. This means that more people have added a Kindle to their personal wish list, wedding registry, or even baby registry, than any other item in their electronics section.

Somehow I don’t really see this as a surprise, since the Kindle is a fascinating gadget that people are hesitant to buy before trying. Receiving it as a gift, however, would take some of the pressure off.

Also good to mention is that Amazon is still giving away free two-day shipping for Father’s Day (which is in just a few days). So if your dad’s a big reader you might want to consider buying him one.

This weekend I discovered a fantastic feature of the Kindle.

I was reading the Amazon Daily Al Dente blog post about a giant Wilton cupcake pan on my Kindle (since the Amazon Daily blog is delivered free) and was excited to learn Amazon sells the pan. I had been searching the art store and other baking supply outlets for weeks trying to find it.

Just out of curiosity, I clicked on the link in the post that linked to the Amazon product page for the cupcake pan and tried to purchase it. Within seconds I had signed into my Amazon account and bought the pan.

I estimate it took me less than a minute and a half to get from clicking the initial link to getting the confirmation page you see at left.

If you have a credit card saved in your Amazon account, you can purchase items from Amazon using the Experimental Web Browser, not just the Kindle Store, just like you can on a mobile device.

I would assume this means that you can shop from any online store that has a mobile site, although I haven’t tested it yet. Has anyone else had success shopping online from your Kindle?