Hasta La Gadget!

A few nasty rumors were circulating that Barnes & Noble wouldn’t accept its own gift cards for ebook purchases, but thankfully, the outfit has come clean today to refute those claims. ‘Course, it’s possible that this change in policy was a direct result of all the bickering, but either way, the company will be accepting physical gift cards and online gift certificates as payment for ebooks really, really soon. The cards will work on purchases made at B&N’s website and through the Nook itself (not to mention “other devices using the B&N eReader software), and we’re told that the new policy will be in full effect come “mid-December.” In other words, all those gift cards you just purchased as stocking stuffers for to-be Nook owners are good to go. Phew.

[Thanks, David]

Barnes & Noble accepting gift cards for ebook purchases starting mid-December originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One of the Kindle’s sweetest features is Whispersync, which lets you put down one device and keep right on reading on another, just from where you left off. This means that you can read at home on the Kindle itself, but when you find yourself in a long queue at the store, you can keep reading on your iPhone. This idea of the “book” existing independent of the device is a rather forward thinking one. If you live in the United States.

Along with the crippled, half-baked international launch of the Kindle, Amazon has still not made the “Kindle for iPhone” application available for its overseas customers. The only place to find it is in the US app store. Since I used my iPod Touch almost exclusively to read books for the past year, this is pretty annoying. Perhaps there is a workaround?

It turns out there is. Thanks to the iTunes Store option to choose “none” as a payment method, you can sign up for a US iTunes account with nothing more than an e-mail address (not the one you normally use), a real address and a cellphone number. Any free applications are then available to download, and best of all, when you hook up your iPhone or iPod Touch the application just syncs.

So does it work? Yes. I launched Kindle for iPhone and input my Amazon login. All my purchased books were there, at exactly the place I had left off on the Kindle itself. And while this is a rather big deal for any foreign Kindle and iPhone owners, this experiment shows that US travelers will have access to Whispersync via their cellphones whilst abroad.

None of my newspapers showed up, and neither did any books or documents I had loaded on there myself, so this is limited to the books bought from the Kindle store. But hey, it’s free. If you know how to get it.

Product page [iTunes]

See Also:

• Crippleware Alert! International Kindle Gets No Web Access Outside …
• Hands-On With the International Kindle and Its Surprise Web Access …
• Amazon Kills U.S. Kindle, Cuts International Price
• Amazon Dumps Sprint for Kindle 2, Embraces AT&T
• International Kindle Now Shipping: The Good, the Bad and the …

You bought one of Amazon’s International Kindles and now you regret it. Not only can you not access the web (apart from Wikipedia) but you can’t even buy from Amazon’s full range of Kindle books. Worse, your local newspaper probably isn’t listed, and if it is, it comes without pictures. And if you want to read your favorite blogs, you’re completely out of luck: Not even the for-pay option is available to you.

Fear not, poor non-U.S. buyer, because we’re here to help. Here’s how you can un-cripple your International Kindle.

First, you’ll need sources for your books and other content. Thankfully, there is an internet, and while nobody but Amazon will sell you DRMed content that works on a Kindle, plenty of alternatives exist. Google books and the Gutenberg Project you know already — these are great if you like Jane Austen and they’re free.

But if you want newer titles, things are more troublesome. E-books are currently mired in the same foolish protection schemes as music was a few years back. The answer is, sadly, piracy, and while we don’t recommend it, Google or the ancient but still very active usenet is all you need to track down almost any title.

And then there is free content. Many newspapers publish everything online, and there are some great long-form blogs suited to e-books. There is also Instapaper, the beloved “read-later” service that clips and reformats web pages for, well, reading later. Instapaper has a little-known beta service that will mail clipped articles to your Kindle, stripped of junk and nicely formatted, once a week. You’ll have to pay Amazon’s data charges, but as these are text files they’re rather small, so it won’t cost much. It is also the best way to make your own, custom newspaper.

So, you have a lot of legally acquired but poorly formatted books, along with the addresses of your favorite blogs and newspapers. How do you get all that onto the Kindle?

Calibre is a clunky piece of software with looks only a mother could love. It is also very powerful, kind of like an iTunes for e-books, and runs on OS X, Windows and Linux.

The first trick is file-conversion. Amazon’s own service works well enough, but you have to mail in the files and wait to get them back. It also has trouble with complex documents.

Calibre can crunch pretty much everything into a format your Kindle can read. It’ll rescue hideously formatted text files, adding paragraph and page breaks where none could be seen before, and it will even squish pictures down to a smaller size. For most people, the presets will be enough, but you can dig in and get your hands dirty with regular expressions and advanced options.

And once you’re done, you can retrieve cover art and metadata from the internet and add keywords for easy sorting. Is this starting to sound familiar?

From there, you can send books direct to the Kindle (or other reading device — most are supported) and even delete old ones. It really is like iTunes for books.

Calibre’s best trick, though, is its Fetch News feature. This works just like podcasting, only it’s for text (and pictures). Choose from a built-in list of newspapers and magazines (Wired.com is in there) and it will scrape the site at scheduled intervals and crunch the articles into an e-reader-friendly form. When you plug your Kindle into the computer, Calibre sees it and automagically sends the new issues across. They’re formatted just like the newspapers you might buy from Amazon.

Dig a little further and you can add custom sources. Plug in the URL of a newsfeed, choose persistence and schedules and you’re good to go. Calibre will grab any new items and package them up into an e-newspaper for you. It can even grab your feeds from Google Reader or Instapaper (and it does a better job that Instapaper’s own solution).

It’s far from polished, and under the hood the Python scripts which go out and do the dirty work sometimes cause your computer’s fans to spin up like leaf-blowers, but it works, and it is almost ridiculously powerful. It is also free and open source, and exactly the kind of thing we will likely never see from the likes of Amazon, Sony or Apple because of licensing restrictions.

For the small inconvenience of plugging your e-reader in every morning, you can turn it into what it should have been all along: The all-media reading device found in a million sci-fi novels.

Product page [Calibre]

Product page [Instapaper]

Instapaper on Kindle [Instapaper Blog]

See Also:

• Crippleware Alert! International Kindle Gets No Web Access Outside …
• Hands-On With the International Kindle and Its Surprise Web Access …
• International Kindle Now Shipping: The Good, the Bad and the …
• Kindle Goes International — With a Little Help From AT&T

A few forward-thinking libraries in the UK have started offering ebook downloads as an alternative to borrowing physical copies of books, and the local public’s reaction has been one of overwhelming enthusiasm. Seemingly attracted by the idea of being able to collect and return books without having to actually attend the library, Brits have been eagerly joining up to the new scheme. Free downloads that last for 14 days before self-deleting can be had either in the library or at home, and transitioned onto your Sony Reader, iRex iLiad, or that new hotness, B&N’s nook. Naturally, the proprietary-format Kindle isn’t invited to this party. We’ve already seen a similar initiative in the USA, and can only hope this kind of convenience becomes mainstream before too long.

Filed under: Handhelds

Ebooks making libraries popular again, can do nothing about your 80s scrunchie originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Oct 2009 07:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In a stealthy yet significant move, Amazon has dropped Sprint as its wireless partner for the latest versions of the Kindle 2 e-book reader. From now on, new Kindle 2s, in the U.S. and worldwide, will be powered exclusively by AT&T’s 3G network.

“Due to strong customer demand for the new Kindle with U.S. and international wireless, we are consolidating our family of 6-inch Kindles,” says Drew Herdener, spokesperson for Amazon.

The move was announced in a quiet update to Amazon’s product page for the Kindle rather than through a press announcement.

The move is a big blow to Sprint, which was the first U.S. telecom carrier to experiment with supporting mobile devices beyond cellphones and netbooks. It also means AT&T has all but cornered the wireless-connectivity market for e-readers. In addition to the Kindle 2, AT&T’s network forms the backbone of the new Sony touchscreen reader and Barnes & Noble’s recently introduced Nook e-reader. All that’s left for Sprint? Providing service for Amazon’s XL-sized Kindle DX, and supporting all the existing Sprint-connected Kindles.

When Amazon introduced the Kindle in 2007, the company highlighted wireless downloads of books as the device’s unique feature. The move helped the Kindle gain an edge over Sony, which had introduced its e-reader earlier but without wireless connectivity.

Earlier this year, Amazon offered a second-generation Kindle called Kindle 2 and a big-screen reader called the Kindle DX. Kindle 2 has a basic browser and lets users check text-heavy sites such as Wikipedia. But the devices were restricted to the United States.

Finally, this month, Amazon debuted an international version of the Kindle 2. It was the first Kindle to use AT&T’s network instead of Sprint’s. Kindle DX is still not available outside the states.

“Now that they are selling a Kindle overseas, it makes sense for them to have just one product that they can sell in all markets,” says Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research. “And, since, in most of the world GSM is what is used, having a single product helps drive down costs for Amazon.” Sprint’s network is based on the CDMA standard.

That doesn’t mean Kindle buyers who bought their device before October will be switching to AT&T.

“Existing Kindle users, owners of the first- and second-generation Kindles and Kindle DX, will not notice any change to their experience. They will continue to utilize the Sprint network in the U.S.,” says Herdener.

And at least until Amazon introduces an international version of Kindle DX, Sprint will continue to be in business with Amazon.

“Sprint still powers the Kindle DX,” a Sprint spokesperson told Wired.com. “So it is not accurate to say that our relationship with Amazon is over.”

Meanwhile, for Kindle users, the switch from Sprint to AT&T raises questions about reliability of service. Weighed down by heavy data use from the iPhone, AT&T’s U.S. network has become congested, leading to slow connectivity and dropped calls.

And with about 3 million e-readers expected to be sold next year, could AT&T’s network face additional strain? Not really, says Golvin. “The type of connection that the Kindle needs is different from that of a phone, since there is no voice component, only a data component,” he says. “The actual capacity consumed by all Kindles now and those coming on to the network is very, very small compared to the rest of the network.”

Kindle users are also less likely to notice small delays or disturbances in the network, says Forrester’s Golvin. Unlike a web page, downloading a book does not require near–real-time display of different components.

“On an e-book reader, the congestion is invisible,” says Golvin. “The downloaded book arrives when it arrives, and a few seconds’ wait does not change much.”

See Also:

• Hands-on with International Kindle
• Barnes & Noble Unveils Kindle-Killing, Dual-Screen ‘Nook’ E-Reader
• Amazon Kills U.S. Kindle, Cuts International Price
• International Kindle Now Shipping: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
  
• Kindle Goes International — With a Little Help From AT&T
• Review: Amazon.com Kindle 2
  
• Review: Amazon.com Kindle DX

Top photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com
Homepage photo: Gubatron/Flickr