Light My Kindle

Before I discovered the Try A Sample feature of the Kindle bookstore, the Save for Later list was my favorite feature. It’s a to-be-read list of the Kindle books you’re interested in. It’s incredibly easy to add books to the list, and equally as easy to find and purchase an item from your list.

To get started, make sure your wireless switch is turned on and navigate to the Kindle Store. Once there, find a book you’re interested in, but don’t want to purchase right now. On the book’s information page (where you see the image of the book in the upper left corner, with a description, reviews, the price, etc. below) you can find the Save for Later option on the right side of the screen. Use the scroll wheel to select Save for Later (just as you would select Buy if you were purchasing the item), and it will be added to your Save for Later list.

To get to your Save for Later list, select the Menu button with your scroll wheel from anywhere in the Kindle Store and choose “Save for Later” Items. All the books you have added to your Save for Later list will display just as books do in the Kindle Store. You can delete items or click through to the information page to purchase them.

An added featured of the Save for Later list is that books you have already added to that list will have the Save for Later menu option shaded out and changed to read “Saved for Later” so you don’t have to worry about accidentally adding the same book to your list multiple times.

There have been reports (such as on Engadget) that there will be two new Kindle models available in the fall. One will be smaller than the current model and one will be roughly the size of an 8 1/2 X 11″ piece of paper. According to the reports, they will both be available in a variety of colors.

I’m pegging this one as a rumor, mostly due to the descriptions. Kindle owners aren’t looking for a variety of colors (and if they were, they could get them by purchasing skins). I also can’t see how an 8 1/2 X 11″ device is going to make your reading more portable. Most paperbacks are smaller than that, and even most hardcovers are as well. I can see the demand for a smaller device, however, I don’t think it’s necessary. The Kindle is the perfect size to slip into a briefcase, backpack, or even a medium-to-large-size purse. Make it any smaller and you ruin the screen size that mimics a book.

Until I hear it from Amazon, I’m going to stick with the statement from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos that a second edition of the Kindle is not planned for some time.

According to an email newsletter from Amazon sent today, there are now over 140,000 titles available for the Kindle.

This count includes books, magazines, and newspapers, but doesn’t mention blogs. It looks like more and more publishers are opening up to this new device and realizing its potential.

For those of you using the iGoogle homepage, you can now get your daily Kindle book fix with a widget from GoogleWidgets.com. They have created a simple widget (seen at left) that shows you a Kindle book every day, including the star rating and the price. You can get it at GoogleWidgets.com.

While I doubt I’ll buy a lot of books this way, it will at least expose me to books I might not necessarily have seen otherwise.

There’s also a Kindle store search widget, although it is a little bulkier than I like my search boxes. It does allow you to search the Kindle store in significantly fewer steps than going to Amazon, selecting Kindle Store from the dropdown menu, and then entering your search.

There’s a wonderful post on the Amazon Kindle Official blog about hiding your reading material by using a Kindle. I can relate, since I read a lot of weird stuff (if you saw the same woman on the train every day and every day she was reading Stephen King, you might start to question her sanity). The author mentions reading He’s Just Not That Into You, which I also read and was embarrassed to be seen reading. However, it was co-written by one of my favorite comedians (Greg Behrendt, who once explained that you can get a man to go anywhere by saying the phrase “There might be cake.”) and I just had to read it. Instead of bringing it on the train like most of my reading material, I read it only at home to avoid being laughed at, even if it was only in my imagination.

The beauty of the Kindle is that you can read whatever you want, and no one can tell. The Amazon blogger says it’s going to allow her to feed her self-help book obsession. For me, it means I can read the new Oprah book club book, despite my dislike of Oprah, and not feel like a giant walking Oprah billboard. Or I can read the murder mysteries with the really grisly titles without feeling guilty when a small child passes me on the train.

In short, the Kindle gives readers an opportunity to read their guilty-pleasure books out in the open. What guilty pleasure books will you be reading on your Kindle?

TechCrunch reports that “Friends” star Jennifer Aniston has a Kindle. She was spotted in a paparazzi shot in US Weekly hanging out by the pool with her Kindle and her boyfriend-of-the-month.

What do you think the former Rachel Green is reading? Charles Dickens? Something from Oprah’s book club?

Go check out TechCrunch for the photo.

One of the wonderful things about the Kindle is that you can get new releases and best-sellers at $9.99, instead of the $24.99 you’d usually pay for them at the bookstore. It seems some publishers, however, aren’t getting the hint that the low price entices Kindle users to buy.

For example, the book Upgrade Your Life, edited by Lifehacker.com editor Gina Trapani, is listed at $17.95. For that price, I’d rather just order the printed book for $19.79 (Amazon’s price as of this writing). Better yet, maybe I just won’t order the book at all.

And I’m not the only one. The discussion in the comments on Lifehacker.com when they announced the Kindle release of the book were very clear that Kindle users refuse to pay more than $9.99 for a Kindle book. You can read all the comments here, but my favorite comment was from a user named Gideon who says,

I ran to buy it… but 18 bucks stopped me cold.

What about you? Would you pay more than $9.99 for a Kindle book?

Len Edgerly, a tech writer, posted a sweet picture of himself and his father both reading their Kindles while waiting for someone. You can see it on Edgerly’s blog, LenEdgerlydotcom.blogspot.com.

While browsing through the Kindle store one day, I came across Infected: A Novel, a first novel by Scott Sigler. Within seconds of reading the first line of the summary, I had bought it and it was wirelessly on the way to my Kindle. Here’s what sold me,

Across America a mysterious disease is turning ordinary people into raving, paranoid murderers who inflict brutal horrors on strangers, themselves, and even their own families.

Yes! I love mysterious diseases that sweep across America and the world! Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later, basically any zombie movie, I’m sold. However, as soon as I started reading Infected, I knew it was different. There were no zombies to be seen here, but it was even more interesting that I had guessed.

The book follows four major storylines. One is a woman named Margaret who was assigned to study the victims of this disease and use her experience as a scientist at the CDC to help solve the problem before the public is made aware of the situation. Storyline two is a policeman named Dew who is trying to catch one of these murderous victims alive so Margaret has something more concrete to study than a dead body. Storyline three is the disease itself. Yep, once in a while you get to see their plans. Not told from first person, of course, but it’s still fascinating. Storyline four, and my personal favorite, is Perry. He’s a former college football player, current IT worker who has developed seven distinct itches in various places around his body.

As the story progresses, we see just how intense this disease is. It’s unlike anything earth has ever seen before. It’s smart. I mean, really smart. We get to see its effects close-up through the character of Perry, and they are probably the most entertaining sections of the book. I like the parts with Dew and Margaret trying to solve the puzzle, but for me Perry was much more engaging.

I absolutely loved the book. Loved it like I can’t even begin to tell you. I hope Scott Sigler writes twenty more books. His writing style is wonderful - he gives the characters real personality, and you lose yourself in the story. The story itself - whoa - it’s addicting. I found myself grabbing the Kindle to read for two minutes here, four minutes here, just to read more. All the other things I was currently reading fell to the side because I didn’t want anything to get in the way of me finishing this book. And the second I finished it, I told my husband he had to read it. And he loved it too. Like me, he spent the next couple of days reading every chance he got, even going in a few minutes late to work the day he finished the book because he saw he only had a couple of dots left on the Kindle progress bar and he just had to get to the end. (Incidentally, it was also his first time reading a full book on the Kindle, and he quite enjoyed it. I think I’m going to have to start sharing it more often.)

In short, the book is exciting and interesting, suspenseful and smart and all the things you want a good mystery/thriller-type book to be. I highly recommend it. I can honestly say it’s one of the best books I’ve read in the past five years.

Get it for your Kindle. You won’t regret the $9.99 price, I promise. (In fact, if you’re not a Kindle owner and you’re reading this, go get it at Barnes & Noble or order it from Amazon. You won’t regret the $24.99 list price either.)

As a fairly new fan of the show “Lost,” I’ve been going a little crazy without the show. I only started watching it a few months ago, starting with seasons 1, 2, and 3 on DVD, and then catching up with season 4 on my TiVo. In a short span of time I had watched all four seasons, and now I have to wait for January 2009 to see new episodes. What’s a girl to do?

Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, the creators of “Lost,” have come up with a summer reading list for the fans. It’s called The Lost Book Club and features any book mentioned on the show, referenced by the show, or read by a character (most likely Sawyer) on the show. Most of which, I would guess, are available for the Kindle.

Titles include On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, and Carrie by Stephen King. Even more impressive is that you can sort the book list by season and even watch clips that show where in the episode the book was mentioned. There’s also a message board for the book club where you can discuss the books with other fans.

I’ll be starting my Lost Book Club experience with Slaughterhouse Five, a book I always intended to read. In fact, the list bears a striking resemblance to some of my high school summer reading lists. You can join The Lost Book Club here.