Kindle Tips

Yesterday evening Amazon announced their Amazon Matchmaker program. (h/t Goodereader and Gospel ebooks).

Amazon Matchmaker is a single location for Kindle books in your library that have Audible books that are matched through the whispersync program (where you can move back and forth seamlessly from audiobook to kindle book.)

I really like the concept of the whispersync.  I love audiobooks and as long as the price is not much more, I am willing to purchase both for the ease of being able to move between the kindle book and audiobook. (Plus I prefer to re-read a book in a different format.  So if I read first on kindle, I like to re-read on audio or vice versa.)

This is the first time Amazon has had all of the whispersync enabled books from your library in a single place.  I have tried to get this info several times previously.  When I asked Audible customer support they can told me what books that I already own on audiobook that have a kindle option.  But they can’t tell me what kindle books that I own have an Audiobook option.  And from Amazon’s side, they have told me that all I can do is go through my kindle books one by one from the Manage My Kindle page and look to see which one has the whispersync option.

So the fact that this is a one stop look is great news.  But the implementation is awful. At least it is awful for those of us Kindle users that have large libraries.  I have a large kindle book library (around 3500 kindle books and nearly 700 audiobook.)

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I have spent the weekend with the new Kindle Paperwhite and I am ready for the final review.

Visually, it is almost indistinguishable from the first Paperwhite.  It has the exact same dimensions (so keep your cases). The only external differences is a very slight difference in the font that says Kindle on the front and on the back it says ‘Amazon’ instead of ‘Kindle’.  That is it, buttons are the same, case is the same.  Weight is supposed to be slightly less, but honestly I can’t tell a difference.

Screen

The light is the biggest feature of the Kindle Paperwhite and it is slightly better on the new version.  Dedicated eink Kindles are different from tablets (like the iPad or fire).  Tablets have color LCD screen that make light by shining it out at your face.  The Paperwhite has invisible threads of light running through the screen and shining it down at the text.  This means that there is much less light that comes out from the screen (although it is not zero) and that means much less wear on your eyes.  Personally, it makes a big difference.

The new lighted screen has a much less blue tint and is more white when the light is brighter and less gray when the light is low. There was a complaint about the first Paperwhite that you could never white turn off the light, but either you can now turn off the light or it is so low I can’t detect that it is on.  (Left is new Paperwhite, right is the original Paperwhite.)

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Oyster is an all-you-can-read ebook subscription program.  Commonly described as Netflix-for-Books.  Officially it was opened up in September, but it is still in a private testing phase.  I signed up and have used it for the last three weeks.

My overall impression is fairly positive.  When you sign up you are asked to choose five books from your computer browser.  These five books will be in your account to get started.  The main problem is that on the computer, there is not a search function.  So you have to look through book covers sorted into categories.  These are their most popular books, so you should not have too much problem finding books you are interested it.

Once you complete the registration process (pretty basic) and give your credit card information ($9.95 a month but with a free one month trial) you are emailed a link for the iPhone app (you can just find it in the app store as well). Once you sign into the app on your iPhone, you can search for books, load the books that you chose on your computer, and update your profile (connect to Facebook or Twitter, search for friends that are on Oyster, list your favorite books, add a picture and write a bio).

Oyster has a good selection of books, they claim 100,000 books, but Smashwords has also said that their entire 250,000 book catalogue of independent authors will be added soon.  I was able to find CS Lewis, Ursula Le Guin, NT Wright, Margaret Atwood, Susan Howatch and a lot of other books that I actually want to read.

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Overnight Amazon released three new Kindle Fire Tablets.

The Kindle Fire HD now starts at $139 making it the cheapest of the tablets, just $20 more than the new Kindle Paperwhite.  It will start shipping on Oct 2.  This is a slightly different version of the Kindle Fire HD that was released at $199 last year.  The processor is faster (1.5 GHz dual core instead of a 1.2 GHz dual core).  But the screen has the same specs.  It also comes with a smaller 8 or 16 GB of memory instead of the 16 or 32 GB of Memory from last year’s model.  Presumably to save money, it also has dropped the ambient light sensor, camera and microphone (so no Skype or video conferencing).  The battery is also rated at 10 hours instead of last year’s 11 hours and takes 2 more hours to fully charge.

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