Kindle Tips

One of the mostly underutilized features of the Kindle is book lending.  About 30 percent of my books are lendable.  Lending is a bit of a pain.  You only can lend a book once.  And you only have 2 weeks to read the book before it expires.  The larger problem is figuring out what to borrow.  Unless you have lots of friends with kindles and you talk with one another about books, then it is difficult to know where to borrow a kindle book.

This is the problem that book sharing websites are trying to solve.  Book Sharing sites like Lendle.me, allow you to put the books you are willing to lend and then to search for books you would like to borrow.  I have reviewed Lendle.me and Booklending.com before, but Lendle.me recently changed owners.

While there is not much visually different, the site seems to be a bit faster, the emails you get from Lendle include advertising and most importantly, Lendle has very quietly removed the small payments for lending. It used to be that you would get anywhere from $0.02 to as much as $2.50 for lending a book.  I have loaned about 120 books and received around $50 in Amazon gift cards for lending.  The amount is not a big deal, but it was a nice bonus for the site.

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If you need a last minute gift and want something more personal than a gift card, you can now give Kindle books as a gift.

As an example I decided to give myself a kindle book to create a how-to post.  First you need to find a book that you want to give.  I decided to give A Little Book for New Theologians.   Underneath the normal purchase button on Amazon is the “Gift as a Gift Button” (see right.)

Instead of your normal checkout page you will get a gift page.

First you need to type in the email of your recipient.  You can use any email for the person you are giving it to.  But it easier if you send it to the person’s Amazon account email.

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The Verso Prologue Cover for Amazon Kindle has changed my mind about using a cover. I have used this cover for nearly three months now.

What I do not traditionally like about using a cover with the kindle is that it usually doubles (or more) the weight and it does not fold back well so that it it is uncomfortable to hold one handed.

However, the Verso Prologue is amazingly light.  It looks like it should be a fairly heavy leather cover.  But it is not.  The inside of the cover has to be some type of hard foam.  It will flex slightly, but it withstands a good bit of abuse.

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I am not a big fan of covers for kindles.  In general I like to use them without a cover.  But the most common problem with kindle is a cracked screen and covers really can help with that.

Over the next three days I am going to review the three covers I have used recently.

I do not now own a Kindle Paperwhite.  But twice in the last two months I have helped a friend replace a broken kindle with a new Paperwhite.  That has given me several weeks to play with the Paperwhite and try out the covers.

The official Amazon Paperwhite Leather cover is a totally different type of cover from the covers that Amazon made for the first three generations of Kindle.  Instead of the elastic corners of the first two generations and the prongs of the third generation, this cover uses a rubberized plastic that is form fitted to the size of the kindle.  (In the picture to the side the outer line around the kindle is the rubberized plastic holder.)

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