A Kindle Home Page

Thanks for your order from Kindle Nation!

2009-09-16T15:46:00.003-04:00

I appreciate your order and look forward to shipping your signed copy of my book by October 10, 2009. Please feel free to send me an email at kindlenation@gmail.com if you have any questions.

Sincerely,
Stephen Windwalker

2009-08-20T14:25:00.004-04:00

Kindle Store and Kindle App Links

2009-08-10T09:51:00.000-04:00

Here's an updated listing of Kindle Store, Kindle App, and other Kindle links for Kindle Nation subscribers:

http://bit.ly/FreeKindleStoreBooks

http://bit.ly/FreeKindlePromotionalTitles

http://bit.ly/ForthcomingKindleTitlesNow

Calibre
(Calibre has provided a free revolutionary app that will save Kindle users serious money while allowing us to fetch and manage all kinds of free but high-quality Kindle-compatible content. For more about Calibre see chapters 6 and 8 of FREE: How to Get Millions of Free Books, Songs, Podcasts, Periodicals & Free eMail, Facebook, Twitter and Wireless Web With Your Amazon Kindle, Kindle 2, Kindle DX, Or Kindle for iPhone App)

$299 for the Kindle 2

$489 for the super-sized Kindle DX

$199.99 for a just-like-new "refurbished" Kindle 1

Manage Your Kindle

Manage Your Kindle Subscriptions

Kindle Nation Daily Blog Website

http://bit.ly/KindleNationArchive

http://bit.ly/KindleNationDaily in the Kindle Store

The Kindle Chronicles

Kindle Gift Card

iPhone or iPod Touch for the Kindle App

No Kindle Required - The Complete "Kindle for iPhone" User's Guide

m.google.com

http://m.gmail.com

http://www.audible.com/kindle

http://bit.ly/KindlePedia

FREE: How to Get Millions of Free Books, Songs, Podcasts, Periodicals & Free eMail, Facebook, Twitter and Wireless Web With Your Amazon Kindle, Kindle 2, Kindle DX, Or Kindle for iPhone App By Stephen Windwalker of Kindle Nation Daily

http://m.facebook.com/stephen.windwalker

http://m.twitter.com/WindwalkerHere

Kindle Nation Holiday Corner

2009-08-10T09:19:00.003-04:00

Give the Gift of a Kindle This Holiday Season

Kindle DX - $489
Kindle 2 - $299
Kindle DX Refurbished - $399.99
Kindle 2 Refurbished - $219.99
Kindle 1 Refurbished - $149.99
Kindle Accessories
Kindle Gift Cards and Certificates

Or, if you have friends or family who are considering the purchase of a Kindle, whet their appetites by treating them to a paperback copy of The Complete User's Guide to the Amazing Amazon Kindle 2, an Amazon bestseller that is also available direct from the publisher with a 20% discount!

Click here to buy a copy in the Amazon bookstore or click on the Buy button below to pre-order your signed copy with a 20% discount!

A money-saving new guide for every generation of Kindle owner!

2009-08-10T06:54:00.001-04:00

Save Hundreds on Kindle Content for Just $2.99!

New in the Kindle Store from Your Faithful Mild-Mannered Reporter

Click here to order
FREE: How to Get Millions of Free Books, Songs, Podcasts, Periodicals & Free eMail, Facebook, Twitter and Wireless Web With Your Amazon Kindle, Kindle 2, Kindle DX, or Kindle for iPhone App

By Stephen Windwalker of Kindle Nation Daily

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Isn't It Ironic? That Expensive Kindle That You are Holding is the Key to "Free"
2. Find and Download Free Books from the Kindle Store
3. Find and Download Free Books from Kindle-Compatible Services (Project Gutenberg's "Magic Catalog," MobileRead and Feedbooks)
4. Find and Download Free Books from the Web
5. Find and Download Free Book Samples and Free 14-Day Periodical Trials from the Kindle Store
6. Use Calibre to Manage Your Kindle's Free Books and Other Kindle Content
7. Read Blogs, Periodicals, and Other Web Content for Free on the Kindle
a. Read Directly on the Web With the Kindle Web Browser
b. Set Up a Google Reader RSS Feed for Your Kindle
c. Flag and Send Interesting Web Content with Instapaper
8. Fetch the News, Newspapers and Magazines, and Other Content with Calibre
9. Use Kindle Nation Daily's Free Book Alerts
10. Unlock the World of Free Audio on the Kindle
11. Use Free Email, Facebook, Twitter and Other Services on the Kindle
12. Use Kindlepedia for Free Wikipedia Research on Your Kindle
13. The Mythical $9.99 Price and the ABCs of Kindle Store Pricing
14. The Politics of "Free" Books in the Age of the Kindle
15. Why Your Kindle's Free Wireless Web Browser is a Revolutionary Feature, and Why Amazon Should Keep it Free
16. Tips for Making the Most of Your Kindle's Free Features
a. Check Sprint's Wireless Coverage for Your Kindle
b. Free for You: How to Ask for and Use a Kindle Gift Certificate
c. A List of Kindle-Friendly Web Links

Free Books and Content Websites and Services

2009-07-29T14:22:00.001-04:00

Bulletin: Amazon Drops Kindle 2 Price By $60 to $299!

2009-07-08T19:59:00.004-04:00

This just in....

If you or someone you know has been sitting on the fence and uncertain whether to pull the trigger on the purchase of a new Kindle, there is big news today!

Amazon has just announced a major price cut in the retail price for the Kindle 2. You can now click on this link to place an order for the Kindle 2 for $299 and have it Friday or Monday!

The Kindle 2 was launched February 9 and began shipping February 23 at an original price of $359.

The Kindle 1, originally launched November 19, 2007 at a price of $389 and Amazon lowered its price to $359 in Spring 2008. Used Kindle 1 models are now selling for under $225 on Amazon Marketplace, with Amazon's refurbished models available for $259.99.

The Kindle DX, with the 9.7" display, continues to be sold out with a 3-to-5-week shipping backlog at its original price of $489.

It seems unlikely that Amazon would also be planning a price reduction for the Kindle DX while it is selling out. More likely: Amazon hopes that the Kindle 2 will sell out at the new price point, and thereby boost Kindle DX sales and interest as back-to-school marketing heats up.

Off Topic: Pogue's Productivity Secrets Revealed

2009-07-07T12:39:00.001-04:00

David Pogue is a great guy. I've been reading his New York Times "Circuits" columns on technology for years, and despite the fact that he doesn't know me from Adam, he responded the very same day back in late 2007 when -- before my own Kindle arrived from Amazon -- I emailed him a few questions about Kindle functionality on his review model.

The fact that he manages to be so forthcoming and helpful while also maintaining an incredible level of productivity -- one that enables him to write five books a year, file two columns a week, churn out a daily blog, speak 40 times a year and film a video every Thursday -- is something to which I can only aspire. (I only wrote three books last year, and I assiduously avoid video cameras no matter who is holding them!)

But in my interactions with hundreds of Kindle Nation members -- we are over 3,300 strong now! -- I notice that one thing that stands out about Kindlers is that we care deeply about productivity and guard our time carefully, even if only to protect our reading time. With that in mind, I want to recommend a terrific column that David wrote recently on some of the ways in which he uses technology -- his beat, after all -- to maximize his own productivity. I hope you enjoy it ... if you have time to read it:

Pogue's Productivity Secrets Revealed

A thoughtful and well-considered post from Kindle Zen: PDF and the Kindle DX: Is Amazon Serious?

2009-07-07T12:33:00.000-04:00

I'm not able to read every Kindle blog that comes along, but lately I have found that the relatively new Kindle Zen blog is calm, elegant, thoughtful, and informative. Its author, Steve Bain, recently wrote an interesting and well-reasoned post on the Kindle DX and the direction in which Amazon should proceed in addressing some serious problems with the new model's PDF functionality.

I had observed some of these problems in my original review of the Kindle DX on June 11, so I was pleased and grateful that Steve granted his permission for me to share his piece in its entirety with the citizens of Kindle Nation here:

PDF and the Kindle DX: Is Amazon Serious?

June 15, 2009 by Steve Bain

I’ve been experimenting with the Kindle DX for several days and my overall impression is very positive, but I believe that the support for PDF documents is an embarrassment for Amazon. In this post, I will offer a critique for the PDF user interface in the Kindle DX.

First some background. PDF is an open but Adobe-specified digital document format that seeks to replicate the geometrical richness of a printed page. It is a complicated format that has evolved in nine succeeding releases over fifteen years, and full implementations of the specification are difficult to develop. There are apparently several classes of PDF rendering engines that are licensable from Adobe for embedded applications and some good third party options are also available.

PDF rendering in the Kindle DX is generally impressive. The PDF engine for the DX is apparently based on a mobile device offering from Adobe. This was a conservative choice by Amazon and was likely the least expensive option for PDF rendering that could be licensed from Adobe. However, this PDF implementation is actually a poor value for Kindle DX customers because it does not support linkage. Linkage from PDFs to external web documents might be of questionable value on the Kindle because of the clumsy web browser. However, linkage within PDF documents is an absolutely critical feature for efficient navigation, and it is hard to understand why Amazon would deliver PDF support without this key feature. Linkage enables an active Table of Contents that can greatly ease browsing in a long technical document. Linkage also enables practical access to cross-references within documents such as to footnotes, figures, and tables.

Since there is no support for linkage, how does one navigate? Well, the Kindle DX supports these methods for navigation in a PDF document:

Next Page and Previous Page buttons
Bookmarks
Search
Go to Beginning (of document)
Go to Page

Bookmarks are not an efficient means for navigation, because they must first be set by the user. Further, the Kindle DX provides no way to name PDF bookmarks nor does it provide any context for PDF bookmarks. Rather, the user interface is simply a selectable list of the page numbers that have been bookmarked.

Search can be a useful navigation method, and especially when one is recently and deeply familiar with a document. However, search is no substitute for direct navigation because words are seldom unique within a large document.

This leaves "Go to Page" as the most broadly useful of the navigation methods that Amazon has provided for PDFs. From a document’s table of contents, you presumably estimate the page number for the start of a section of interest and then you do the following:

Press the Menu button
Manipulate the 5-way controller to highlight "Go to Page…" in the pop-up menu
Select this function by pressing the 5-way controller
Enter a page number using chorded keystrokes, Alt-1, Alt-5, Alt-3, etc.
Press enter to complete the navigation

This process could be simplified with a better UI design. First, "Go to Page…" could be the default option on the pop-up menu whenever a PDF document is displayed. Then, when a page number is being entered from the keyboard for navigation, the Kindle DX could interpret presses on the top row of keys as numbers so that there is no need for chorded entry on the cramped keypad. This would offer no disadvantage, because the page number entry field does not accept letters.

Clumsy navigation is not the only problem for PDF documents in the DX. The Kindle DX is missing a high-contrast option that would ease reading for PDF documents that were designed for color rendering. With such color PDF documents on the DX, text is displayed in shades of gray that can be difficult to read. Also missing from Amazon’s PDF implementation are support for highlighting, annotation, the dictionary, and text-to-speech. Why should any customer be satisfied that such features are missing for PDF documents?

There are literally millions of existing PDF documents that Kindle users might want to access, but a vast majority are formatted for letter-sized or A4-sized pages, and virtually all are formatted for page sizes larger than the Kindle DX display. This means that PDF pages are usually rendered in portrait mode on the DX at a size much smaller than the document developers originally intended. Even though the Kindle’s resolution is excellent, reading documents with tiny letters can become frustrating in a hurry. The solution on Kindle DX is to rotate the device into landscape mode, which usually results in roughly a 1.5X zoom and half as much page area displayed. This might be a reasonable compromise except for one major problem: It places the critical Next Page and Previous Page buttons at either the top or bottom of the display where they are inconvenient to access. I find it hard to understand why the DX doesn’t repurpose keyboard keys as alternate paging keys when the Kindle is in landscape mode.

When the DX is in landscape mode, the keyboard space bar could be enabled as an alternate Next Page button. This simple change would result no important collision with the text entry features, and would greatly enhance the usability of PDF documents in landscape mode for both right and left handed users. Another button on the bottom row of the keyboard, perhaps the Shift key, could be enabled as an alternate Previous Page button. This might result in a minor collision with existing uses, but one that is far less important than having convenient, hand-in-place access to the Previous Page function.

It is a major embarrassment for Amazon that the Kindle DX was released to customers with such a poor user interface for PDF documents. The current PDF document support should be viewed as an "experimental feature" at best, and the deficit leaves a hole in Amazon’s product line that could be a nice opportunity for competitors like Sony and Plastic Logic. The hope for Kindle DX customers is that Amazon will rapidly improve PDF usability through a major firmware update. Some improvements, like better menu organization and sane use of the keyboard, are pretty easy stuff. Others, like improved contrast options for color documents and support for intra-document linkage, might require a license for different software from Adobe, or perhaps the switch to a third party PDF rendering engine.

It has been rumored that release of the Kindle 2 was delayed past the Christmas season because Jeff Bezos was dissatisfied with early releases for the user interface firmware. One wonders who within Amazon approved of the PDF document features for the Kindle DX.

Kindle Troubleshooting 101: If You Can't Open Any of Your Kindle Books....

2009-06-30T16:14:00.000-04:00

Here's the kind of situation that I tend too easily to ignore (once I have solved it) because it seems like it must be a fluke that isn't going to occur often enough to bother bringing it up here at Kindle Nation. But after I experienced it twice in my first two weeks with my new Kindle DX, two things occurred to me:

This is a problem that Amazon should fix so that it does not keep happening.
It's definitely worth passing on the "fix" in Kindle Nation so that my fellow Kindlers can avoid the feelings of panic and despair that have come over me twice now as a result of a sudden and inexplicable inability to open any of the Kindle editions aboard my Kindle DX.

Here's the problem: suddenly none of the Kindle books, periodicals or blogs that are displayed on my Kindle DX Home screen will load. When I click on any of them with the Kindle DX 5-way, a message appears on the screen telling me that the Kindle is unable to open this document and referring me to my Manage Your Kindle page at Amazon.com, via my computer, so that I can fix the problem (I wish I had made a screenshot, but alas my panic was too intense to think of such things!). I go to my Manage Your Kindle page at Amazon.com, but it tells me nothing, and everything appears to be fine with my Amazon.com account, credit cards on file, etc. I notice, meanwhile, that my Kindle does open my Personal Docs and my Audible.com audiobooks, so it seems clear that there is not a hardware problem.

I called Kindle Support at 1-866-216-1072 and it quickly became clear that

The problem had nothing to do with anything that I could address through my Manage My Kindle page; and
It is such a common problem that the the support guy to whom I was speaking was able to cut me off 10 seconds into my description of the problem to start focusing on the fix.

He said that the problem was a "file index corruption" problem that has been occurring "in a few cases," and the solution is a simple hard boot or restart of the Kindle.

So here's the simple solution, should you face the same lack of access to your Kindle library:

From your Kindle's Home screen, press the Menu button on the side of the Kindle.
From the Menu listing, use the 5-way to select "Settings."
From the "settings" display, press the Menu button again.
From the Menu listing, use the 5-way to select "Restart."

(You can also initiate a restart by holding the power switch to the right continuously for about 20 seconds, letting it go, then sliding it to the right again, but this takes longer and puts more wear and tear on the Kindle's few moving parts).

Your Kindle will then take about two minutes to complete a hard reboot, during most of which you will see the Amazon Kindle silhouette graphic of the figure sitting under a tree reading. A progress bar will appear on the screen about halfway through, and toward the end of the reboot you will briefly (and cruelly!) be shown a nearly empty Home screen with the words "Showing all 0 items" at the top and "Archived Items (0)" just below it.

How Many Copies Can You Download When You Buy a Kindle Book? We'll Let You Know....

2009-06-29T12:11:00.000-04:00

“We face new situations every day and quite frankly we’ve never run into this problem before, but now that you’ve raised the issue please know that it will be addressed directly.”

Maybe.

Dan Cohen at the Geardiary.com blog goes into great detail sharing a blow-by-blow description of his difficulties getting a straight story from Amazon on several kinds of limitations that Kindle customers may face in downloading a Kindle book more than once.

From the Kindle Nation Mailbag: Another way to do higher math using the Kindle

2009-06-29T12:09:00.000-04:00

Thanks to faithful Kindle Nation subscriber Bob for this helpful follow-up to this week's Kindle Nation post, Kindle DX Secrets: It's a Calculator!

Hi Stephen,

In your most recent Kindle Nation, you mentioned how to do basic Math on the DX. There is another way that I use on my Kindle 2 by going online.

Most folks do not know that if you go to Google and type in ANY complicated Math expression into the search bar, Google will automatically give you the answer at the top of the search list. (Google folks are heavily into Math.) You can do the same on the Kindle.

Go to Experimental, Basic Web, Bookmarks, Google. Type in 5*log(32) by using the SYM button to put in the parenthesis and the * symbols where * means multiply, and then click on search. You'll see the first result listed is 5 * log(32) = 7.52574989

If you type in 5^32 (on a calculator, the carat symbol means to perform an exponent, so this is 5 to the 32nd power),

you'll get back the answer 2.32830644 x 10 to the 22nd power.

I'm not sure how many people would use this, but it's may come in handy some day for someone.

Love the newsletter!
Sincerely,
Bob

Her Wiccan, Wiccan Freebie in the Kindle Store

2009-06-23T07:09:00.000-04:00

Traci Hall's Wiccan yarn from Samhain Publishing, Ltd. is now free in the Kindle Store.

What can you buy for a dime in the Kindle Store?

2009-06-22T14:10:00.001-04:00

Now selling for one thin dime in the Kindle Store, The Caliphate:

And here it is listed with 37,079 other titles that you can get for under a buck to read on your Kindle 1, Kindle 2, or Kindle DX.

Throw Out the Kindle Baby, But Keep the Bathwater

2009-06-21T19:41:00.000-04:00

Technology blogger Mike Elgan posted a very smart piece - Elgan: Why the iPhone doesn't matter - in which he argues a strong point, much more elegantly, that I have been making since the Kindle first appeared: that the device is almost always secondary to what it connects us with. While he focuses primarily on the iPhone, he carries the point over to this smart observation about the Kindle and its baby-faced assassins:

A similar phenomenon is happening with other devices. For example, the Amazon Kindle is by far the best selling e-book reader. But the Kindle hardware device is nothing to write home about, especially the first one, which was a piece of junk. What's great about the Kindle, and the thing that makes it "better" than the Sony Reader and even better than all the color "Kindle Killers" that have been demonstrated in the past year, is the Amazon Kindle Store. Hardware doesn't matter. Network is everything.

Kindle DX Drop Tests, Intentional and Otherwise

2009-06-21T17:24:00.001-04:00

Although I said in my Kindle DX review last week that I lacked the courage to put my new Kindle DX through any intentional drop tests, it turns out that it did not take long for such a test to occur on its own. On Saturday morning I was getting back into my car at Starbucks in Cushing Square and the DX slipped out of the makeshift holder I had improvised for it. My naked and wholly unprotected 19-ounce Kindle DX experienced a straight vertical fall of about two feet, directly onto an asphalt parking lot surface. Fortunately it landed, just as I would, on its backside. I sheepishly picked up the Kindle DX, checked for dents, cracks, or scratches, determined that it remained pristine, and placed it on the empty front passenger seat beside me.

Although I did not have time to arrange for candid video of my personal Kindle DX drop test, it may come as no surprise to you that Amazon has posted its own video: of its own Kindle DX drop test, not mine. You may view it here.

Wire Up and Tag Kindlepedia to Educate Yourself Any Time on Any Topic

2009-06-21T17:22:00.000-04:00

First, a tip of the hat to Edukindle creator Will DeLamater and Kindle Formatting author Joshua Tallent for creating the Kindlepedia tool discussed here and for Kindle Chronicles podcaster Len Edgerly for bringing it to my attention by featuring it on his program recently, and to old friend, author, teacher, fellow traveler and classmate of Len's and mine Ned Stuckey-French for getting my thoughts percolating about the pedagogical possibilities here.

I can't imagine that there is a single Kindle owner anywhere in the world who is not already familiar with Wikipedia, the online crowd-sourced encyclopedia with over 13 million collaboratively written articles, about 2.9 million of them in English. In addition to the fact that it is the 7th most popular website in the world according to Alexa, Wikipedia is a very high-profile part of the Kindle experience already, since it is featured as a prominent channel for any user-initiated Kindle search along with Google, the Kindle Store, the Kindle's onboard dictionary and its library of ebooks and other documents:

The opportunity for readers to move quickly and easily -- using the Kindle's absolutely free wireless 3G web browser -- between content on their Kindles and the kindof supplemental references and information that they will find on Wikipedia is bound to enrich the educational usefulness of the Kindle, and not just for college students. My 11-year-old son moves seamlessly between his life and Wikipedia explanations of the few remaining things he does not understand, and I am learning more slowly to do the same. By leaving the door constantly cracked between any content that we are reading and Wikipedia's rich universe of information and content, the Kindle offers astonishing potential for us to place the words that we read in the kinds of rich historical and cultural contexts that makes them more vivid than they could ever be in a traditional book, no matter how much we may love print on paper.

But Wikipedia is more than just a place to visit for a few seconds here and there in the margins of one's reading experiences. The rich and extensive content to be found there is worthy of reading time all its own, and offers inquisitive readers an opportunity to move organically -- or whimsically, for that matter -- across dozens or hundreds or thousands of "articles" in ways that allow the construction of remarkable aedifices of personal knowledge and contextual understanding. Thomas Wolfe may have arrived at Harvard in 1920 with the dream of reading every volume in the university's Harry Elkins Widener Library, but I cannot help but think that he might have enjoyed his self-education more, begun it earlier, and avoided the constant need to wash the dust from his hands if his times had allowed him access to a Kindle with an always-on Wikipedia connection.

Now, Edukindle creator Will DeLamater and Kindle Formatting author Joshua Tallent have collaborated on an extremely useful and elegant new application, called Kindlepedia, that allows Kindle readers to create a Kindle "book" within a few seconds from any Wikipedia listing and transfer (download) it to a Kindle either via USB or Whispernet for offline reading and research at one's leisure. Not surprisingly, given Joshua's virtuosity with Kindle formatting issues, the resulting Wikipedia-based "book" arrives on a Kindle in an elegantly formatted, easy-to-read state, with external web links intact so that a reader is never more than a click away from extending one's research even further, including references beyond Wikipedia. Here are the steps, and just for fun I'll use the Wikipedia article on one of my favorite underappreciated baseball players, Bernie Carbo:

On your computer, go to the Kindlepedia page on the Edukindle website at http://www.edukindle.com/downloads/kindlepedia/. (No need to try to do this Kindlepedia procedure directly from your Kindle; I have already tried and it does not work).
Type in the URL of the Wikipedia entry from which you wish to make a Kindle "book" in the entry field in the center of the screen or, if you are relatively certain that a brief keyword or phrase will produce the desired article, you can try that:

Click on the "Create Kindle Book" button, and within a few seconds you will see a new screen with these buttons in the center of the display:

Click on the "download" button and note from your computer's dialogue box (or a quick file search, for, in this case "Bernie_Carbo.mobi") the location to which the downloaded file is being be served on your computer.
Transfer this "Bernie_Carbo.mobi" file to your Kindle either by sending it as an attachment to your @kindle.com email address (in which case Amazon will charge you 15 cents per megabyte rounded up and send the converted file to your Kindle via Whispernet) or, for free, by connecting your Kindle to your computer via USB, copying the saved file from your computer to the "documents" folder in your Kindle's main directory via Finder, My Computer, or whatever file management program you use with your computer, and using the "Eject" Kindle command to disconnect the Kindle from your computer.
You should now find the Kindle-formatted "Bernie Carbo" book at the top of your Kindle's Home screen if your Home display is organized to show all documents, most recent first:

As with any other Kindle book, click on "Bernie Carbo" and begin reading or let your Kindle read the content aloud to you. While reading, you'll be able to click on any live web link such as the Baseball-Reference link shown here

to extend your research to, say, viewing Carbo's lifetime stats:

Okay, if you are thinking that this great new research tool is going to curse you with an unmanageably long list or catalog of "books" on your Kindle, let's revisit a Kindle Nation piece from March 9 (which referenced a Kindle Chronicles podcast from March 6) on A Brilliant Way To Apply Tags To Organize Your Kindle Content:

Amazon's failure to provide user-defined content management folders or labels is one of the major disappointments offsetting the many improvements that we have seen with the Kindle 2, but a Kindle owner named Larry Goss has developed an elegant work-around system that allows him to "tag" any title on his Kindle. To hear his approach, check out the March 6 edition of Len Edgerly's Kindle Chronicles podcast. Larry's idea is detailed in the show comments section a little over two-thirds of the way into the podcast. The gist of it is that you can use any Kindle's annotation feature to "tag" your content by genre, status, or any other qualifier as long as you create "words" that would not otherwise be found in your documents. For example, I might create two tags for science fiction novels on my Kindle, and thus annotate the first page of each either with SWSCIFIREAD or SWSCIFINEW, to signify Stephen Windwalker's science fiction novels read or unread. Once the annotation is saved, books with a particular tag will display in the search results whenever you enter that tag. Yes, it is a work-around, but I hope you will agree that it is brilliant in its elegant, workable simplicity, and join me in thanking Larry and Len.

For my purposes, I just create a tag, er, annotation, at the beginning of each of these Wikipedia-based books. The first four letters are always "swkp" for "Stephen Windwalker Kindlepedia" and subsequent letters are the briefest and most simple tag for the content, so that for the Carbo content, I simply open the file on my Kindle, choose "Add a Note or Highlight" from the Menu, type in "swkp carbo," and click on "save note" at the bottom of the dialogue box. Then I will find the content anytime by typing in "swkp carbo," whereas typing in "swkp" will show me all my Wikipedia-based content and typing in "carbo" will show me all Carbo references on my Kindle. Fortunately, if I forget some of my own tags, I can also access them by selecting opening the "My Clippings" file on my Home screen.

Kindle DX Secrets: It's a Calculator!

2009-06-21T17:20:00.000-04:00

Congratulations to BlogKindle for this very cool Kindle DX find!

Turns out that the Kindle DX works as a calculator, complete with basic math as well as some commonly used trigonometric functions. Just type a formula (2+2, 2*2, 2-2, 2/2, etc.) as you would type any search term at the Home screen and the solution will appear on the top line of your Home display. Who knew? Well, BlogKindle did!

Don't forget to use the ALT key to make the Kindle DX's QWERTY keyboard's top row render numbers.

Curious about Kindle sales numbers?

2009-06-21T17:19:00.000-04:00

Curious about Kindle sales numbers?

If so, there has been plenty to chew on in the last few days.

Let's just establish up front that, in the long run, the most important Kindle sales numbers involve calculations of how many Kindle books -- or any other e-books, for that matter -- are being purchased and downloaded. Those are the numbers that are going to make a difference to authors, publishers, readers, and booksellers of every variety. For instance, it may be a good thing for Sony that the company has sold XXXX units of its ereaders in Japan, say, or globally. But until I see evidence that publishers and authors are experiencing significant sales of their ebooks to Sony device owners, those hardware unit sales numbers won't have traction for me.

On the subject of U.S. ebook sales, let me suggest the following very interesting and informative posts and links....

Joe Konrath's A Newbie's Guide to Publishing: You may already be familiar with Joe Konrath (or his alter-ego-de-plume Jack Kilborn) via Kindle Nation Daily, but in addition to being a fine author of suspense and horror fiction Joe is engaged very actively in experimenting with and thinking and writing about the world of book publishing from an author's perspective here in 2009. Joe has shared more information about actual Kindle edition sale and royalties, overall ebook downloads, and his approach to marketing and promotion than any other author writing today, and there's plenty to learn from what he has to say in his posts Ebooks and Free Books and Amazon Kindle, Oh My; Helping Each Other and Amazon Kindle Numbers.

Morris Rosenthal on Kindle Sales Rankings: On another front, the guy who has done more than any other commentator to parse Amazon Sales Rankings and their meaning over the past decade, author and indie publisher Morris Rosenthal of Foner Books, has turned his attention very useful to the meaning of Kindle Store Sales Rankings in a recent post entitled How Many Kindle eBooks Are Selling Based On Amazon Sales Ranking. Although I believe Morris is off by about 600,000 in speculating that there are about 600,000 Kindles currently in use, his overall calculations and research are very well-founded and they strongly suggest that Joe Konrath and I will soon be joined by hundreds -- and eventually thousands -- of other authors for whom revenue from Kindle sales alone begins to provide something like a livable income. Morris also makes a fascinating argument that, among those of Amazon's top bestselling titles that are available both in print and Kindle editions, there is now a 1:1 ration in sales units between the two. When seen in an overall context wherein this ratio moves strongly in favor of print editions as sales numbers decline out the long tail, this model seems generally consistent with Amazon's recent (and, at the time, stunning) announcement that, looking back over an unspecified historic period, Kindle editions sales had accounted for somewhere between 26 and 35 per cent of all sales when both print and Kindle editions were available. If you want to be present and accounted for as the ebook revolution continues to unfold, I highly recommend you follow Morris' posts.

Indie Authors and the Kindle Bestseller Lists. Even among bloggers who write about all things Kindle, there is occasional some confusion about, well, all things Kindle. Among those who commented on the above posts by Joe Konrath, one blogger focused on what Joe's success might mean for self-published authors. (Joe, by the way, is not a self-published author, although he is certainly one who is taking the bull by the horns and restructuring the traditional hierarchical relationship between authors and publishers). Trying to focus in on whether "self-published" authors could earn "a decent living" publishing for the Kindle, the author of the iReaderReview blog asked his readers "Do you think by 2011 self-published authors will be able to hit the Top 25 [in the Kindle Store sales rankings]?"

Not to crow, but it's worth mentioning here that my self-published guide to the Kindle 1 spent 17 consecutive weeks in the #1 position in the Kindle Store during the Spring and Summer of 2008 before going to paperback in late August, and my Complete User's Guide To the Amazing Amazon Kindle 2 spent some time in the top 15 when it came out earlier this year. There have, along the way, been other self-published titles in the Kindle top 25, and they have not only been books about the Kindle. But while it will continue to be interesting to plot the progress of individual titles, I suspect the more interesting sea changes will be those involving the kind of publishing perestroika that I write about in my Beyond the Literary-Industrial Complex: How Authors and Publishers Are Using the Amazon Kindle and Other New Technologies to Unleash a 21-Century Indie Movement of Readers and Writers, including its chapter "Rebel Distribution and Amazon's Marketplace of the Mind: You Need a Publisher Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle." As these sea changes evolve, the "self-published" label will cease to exist in any meaningful way except inasmuch as it means "smart," and will be replaced a kinder, gentler sense of "indie author" and "indie publisher" that is embraced by readers, by authors who previously had chosen traditional publishing routes, and, of course, by the DIY renegades among us.

Free Kindle Nation Shorts - I:3, 6.12.2009 - "Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store" a short story by Robin Sloan

2009-06-21T17:14:00.001-04:00

Welcome to Free Kindle Nation Shorts, No. 3, a striving-to-be-regular Friday feature of the Kindle Nation Daily Blog. As we continue to form new bonds with indie-minded authors and publishers, I am very pleased to have connected with author Robin Sloan, who has graciously granted his permission to share his "short story about recession, attraction, and data visualization," Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store. If you like the story, I hope you will visit Robin's website and make a connection there. In addition to being a talented indie fiction writer and self-described "media nerd," Robin is also one of the creators behind one of the smartest videos ever uploaded, a future history of the media circa 2014.

(We also hope and intend to send this as a PDF file within the next 24 hours for your convenience. If you have any trouble transferring the story to your Kindle, I should mention that this Free Kindle Nation Shorts feature is part of the added value for subscribers to the Kindle Nation Daily blog in the Kindle Store. Subscribers will find that Free Kindle Nation Shorts are sent automatically and seamlessly to their Kindles. )

Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store
Robin Sloane

This short story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author. Copyright © 2009 by Robin Sloane

IT'S 2:02 A.M. ON A COLD SUMMER NIGHT.

I'm sitting in a book store next to a strip club.

Not that kind of book store. The inventory here is incredibly old and impossibly rare.
And it has a secret-a secret that I might have just discovered.

I am alone in the store. And then, tap-tap, suddenly I'm not.

And now I'm pretty sure I'm about to snap my laptop shut, run screaming out the front door, and never return.

* * *

I SHOULD START AT THE BEGINNING.

I lost my job in the slumped-over spring of 2009. I applied for dozens of replacement gigs but was rebuffed, again and again. And I took only the coldest comfort when the companies doing the rebuffing were, themselves, forced out of business months later. I probably couldn't have turned them around single-handedly. Probably.
The job I lost was at the corporate headquarters of the New Amsterdam Bagel Bakery. I designed bagel marketing materials. Menus, coupons, posters for store windows, and, once, an entire booth "experience" for the bagel industry trade show.
I also ran the website.

Now, months into my unemployment, I'd started watching for "help wanted" signs in windows, which is not something you really do, right? I was taught to be suspicious of those. Legitimate employers use Craigslist.

And sure enough, the 24-hour book store did not have the look of a legitimate employer:

Now, I was pretty sure that "24-hour book store" was a euphemism for something. It was on Broadway, in a euphemistic part of town. I spotted it on my way to a bar with a "recession special" happy hour. The place next door had a sign with neon legs that crossed and uncrossed.

But inside-yes, of course I went inside-it wasn't sketchy at all. Just the opposite: It was stuffy.

Stuffy and claustrophobic. Imagine the volume of a normal store turned on its side: It was absurdly narrow and dizzyingly tall. And the shelves went all the way up-five stories of books. The whole place was dim and dusty; you couldn't even really see the ceiling.

There were ladders that clung to the shelves and rolled side-to-side. Those usually seem charming, but here, stretching up into the gloom, they just seemed ominous. No way would I even touch one of those ladders.

Unless, of course, I filled out the application for the open clerk position, and pressed it into the wrinkled hands of Mr. Penumbra, the shop's owner, and pleaded my case, citing my senior thesis on Swiss typography (1491-1519), and started to argue for the graphic novel as serious literary form (as well as boon to a bookseller's business, because you know, kids these days, they're growing up with manga, and I could help you out with that, I could stock a whole new section)-

In which case, if I did all that, old Mr. Penumbra might have pinched his eyes, looked me up and down, and said, "Well, that's all fine... but can you climb a ladder?"

If all that happened, I might then, hypothetically, find myself on one of those ladders, on the third floor, minus the floor, of Penumbra's 24-Hour Book Store.
The book he's sent me up to retrieve, "de Guilford's Inquiry," is about 130% of one arm-length to my left. Obviously, I need to return to the ground and scoot the ladder over. But down below, Mr. Penumbra is shouting: "Lean, my boy! Lean!"

And boy, do I ever want this job.

* * *

SO, THAT WAS A MONTH AGO.

Now I'm the night clerk at Penumbra's, and I shimmy up and down that ladder like a monkey.

You should see me lean.

If I'm retrieving two books, I'll place the ladder halfway between them, dash up, and then, forty feet off the ground, I'll clamp a hand on one of the rails, and lean way out so

my arm
my body
and the ladder

form a skinny right triangle.

If I do this on both sides of the ladder, I can stretch across a span of a hundred books. It's fun.

Unfortunately, I am not required to do it very often
.
Let me tell you: Penumbra's 24-Hour Book Store does not operate around the clock due to an overwhelming volume of book-buyers.

In fact, whole nights go by without a single customer. Just me, my laptop, and the dusty heights.

But oh. That single customer.

There is, I have learned, a community of very strange men clustered in this part of San Francisco. They visit the store late at night. They come wide awake, and completely sober. And they are always nearly vibrating with need.

For example:
The bell on the door will tinkle and before it's done, Mr. Tyndall will be shouting, breathless, "Kingslake's! I need Kingslake's!" He'll take his hands off his head (has he really been running down the street with his hands on his head?) and clamp them down on the front desk.

"Kingslake's! Quickly!"

Mr. Penumbra has a database, believe it or not. The books aren't shelved according to title or subject (do they even have subjects?) so the database is crucial. It runs on an old Mac Plus, but I copied it onto my laptop and, over the course of a few customer-free nights, mapped it onto a 3D model of the store. (If this sounds impressive to you, you're over 30.)

So now I will just type in K-I-N-G-S-L-A-K-E and the model will rotate and zoom in on aisle 3, shelf 13, which is only about thirty feet up.

"You have it? Oh thank goodness, thank you, yes, thank goodness," Tyndall will say, almost whimpering. "How much?"

And this is the crazy part. I haven't sold a book in this store for less than two hundred dollars. Many are much more expensive than that. Penumbra's database will tell me that "Investigations" by Reynold Kingslake is $1,800.

Not a blink.

After I do my monkey business on the ladder, Tyndall will write a prim check and slide it across the desk. "Thank you," he will breathe, and then the bell will tinkle again as he hurries back out onto the street. It will be three in the morning.

* * *

THEY ALWAYS PAY. Not one has ever balked. Where do these weird old men get all this money?

This is one of the things I ask myself when I sit here alone, after Mr. Tyndall or Mr. Raleigh or Mr. Fedorov has left. I think I know them all at this point. I think of them as a strange fellowship, but I have no evidence that they know each other. Each comes in alone, and never says a word about anything other than the object of his current, frantic fascination.

I have no idea what's in those books they pay all that money for. In fact, it's part of my job not to know. After the ladder test, back on the day I was hired, Mr. Penumbra said:

"This job has three requirements, each very strict."

1) "You must always be here from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. exactly. You must not be late. You cannot leave early."

2) "You may not read, examine, inspect, or otherwise touch any of the books in this store-unless you are retrieving it for a customer."

I know what you're thinking: Dozens of nights alone, and you've never cracked a cover?

No, I haven't. For all I know, Penumbra has a camera somewhere. If I sneak a peek and he finds out, I'm fired. My friends are dropping like flies out there; whole industries, whole parts of the country, are shutting down. I need this job.

And besides, the third rule makes up for the second:

3) "You must keep precise records of all purchases. Time. Amount. The customer's appearance. His state of mind. How he asks for the book. How he receives it. Does he appear to be injured. Is he wearing a sprig of rosemary on his hat. And so on."
I guess under general circumstances, this would feel like a creepy job requirement. Under the actual circumstances-selling rare books to mad scholars in the middle of the night-it feels perfectly appropriate. So, rather than spend my time staring at the forbidden shelves, I spend it writing about the customers.

The basics-which book was purchased, its price, the time-go into the database. The rest goes into a giant, leather-bound logbook. It's all mine; Mr. Penumbra pulled it out from under the front desk on my first night, heaved it open, and, on the first page, he wrote my name.

I have to say, I feel pretty proprietary about this book. I try to take clear, accurate notes, with only an occasional literary flourish. On quiet nights, I describe the weather.

Sometimes I draw pictures, like this one, of Mr. Tyndall tonight:

So I guess you could say rule number two isn't quite absolute. There's one book I'm allowed to touch in Penumbra's 24-Hour Book Store. It's the one I'm writing.

* * *

MR. PENUMBRA WORKS THE DAY SHIFT. He starts at 6 and finishes at 10 p.m., if you can believe it. That's a long day for an old man. I see him every night and every morning. If we've had a customer, he usually compliments me on my observations, but then probes even deeper.

"Very good rendering of Mr. Raleigh," he'll say. "But tell me, do you remember, were the buttons on his coat made of mother-of-pearl? Or were they horn? Or some kind of metal? Copper?"

I have to admit: It does seem strange that Mr. Penumbra wants all this information. But when people are over a certain age, you sort of stop asking them why they do things. It feels dangerous. What if you say, so Mr. Penumbra, why do you want to know about Mr. Raleigh's coat buttons?, and he pauses, and scratches his chin, and there's an uncomfortable silence-and we both realize he can't remember?
Or what if he flies into a rage and fires me on the spot?

It's true that I can't really imagine him enraged. However, it's also true that my roommate Dan just got laid off last week and he's probably going to move back to Sacramento. In this economic environment, I prefer not to test old Mr. Penumbra's boundaries.

Mr. Raleigh's coat buttons were jade.

* * *

DURING THE DAY, after my shift at the store but before my vampiric afternoon sleep, I spend a lot of time at the cafe down the street from my house. It's called "Supply and Demand."

The gimmick is that during the day it's "Supply," a coffee shop, and at night it turns into "Demand," a bar. The bar is a total meat market, but the coffee shop is efficient and well-regulated.

So that's where I was, sitting at a tiny table, slurping one of those giant mugs the size of your face, working on my 3D model of the store.

I'd souped it up so it could show you not just where the books were located, but which were sold, and to whom. They lit up like little lamps in the blocky 3D shelves. They're color-coded, so the books purchased by Mr. Tyndall lit up blue, Mr. Raleigh's were green, Fedorov was yellow, Imbert orange, and so on.

But now the shelves were disappearing when I rotated them too far. So I was sitting there, trying to figure out why, when a voice piped up from over my shoulder:

"Are you into data visualization?"

I turned. Why yes, girl with chestnut hair cropped to your chin and a red t-shirt with the word "BAM!" printed in mustard yellow, I am into data visualization.

"Me too," she said. "Actually, I do it for a living. I work at Google."

Google! This girl must be a genius. Also, one of her teeth is chipped in a cute way.
Well, take a look at this, I said.

She sat down and I showed her the bug in my book store. Soon her hands were on the keys, fluttering through my code, which was a little embarrassing, because my code is full of comments like "hell yeah!" and "now, computer, it is time for you to do my bidding."

But Kat (her name was Kat) thought it was cute, and she was, in fact, a genius. She tracked down the bug and fixed it in the time it took me to drain my mug. And then, tap-tap, she made the shelves render more realistically, with a cool sort of wood-grain texture.

Then she said, "Have you thought about doing a time-series visualization?"

This sounded like a nerd's way of asking another nerd out on a date, so I said I hadn't, but that I was super interested. We made plans to meet at Supply and Demand the next day.

* * *

THAT NIGHT, AT THE BOOK STORE, I started working on the new visualization, thinking I could impress Kat with a prototype. I am really into the kind of girl you can impress with a prototype.

The idea was to animate through the purchases over time instead of just seeing them all at once. I got a simple version working by midnight, and immediately I noticed something.
The lights were following each other.

Mr. Tyndall would buy a book from the top of aisle 3. Three days later, Mr. Raleigh would do the same. Not the same book (Penumbra's has only one copy of anything), but one very close. Another week, and Mr. Fedorov would follow-even though Mr. Tyndall had already come in again and gotten something from the bottom of aisle 1. He was a step ahead.
I'd never noticed the pattern because the purchases were so spread out. Imagine hearing a piece of music with six days between each note. But here, sped up, it was obvious. And it was as if they really were all playing the same piece, or dancing the same dance, or solving the same puzzle.

Maybe some were just better at it than others?

The bell tinkled. It was Mr. Imbert-solid, compact, with his bristly black beard and sloping newsboy cap. In a hurry, I scrubbed through the visualization to find his place in the pattern. An orange light bounced across my laptop's screen, and before he said a word, I knew he was going to ask for a book right in the middle of aisle 2. Maybe a book like Prokhorov's-
"Prokhorov's Interpretations!" Imbert wheezed. "It is essential!"

Halfway up, I felt dizzy. What was going on? No daredevil maneuvers this time; it was all I could do to stay on the ladder as I pulled the slim, black-bound volume off the shelf.

It was a bargain at $300. The bell tinkled, and I was alone again, and for the first time, Penumbra's 24-Hour Book Store felt not just strange, but sinister.

* * *

BACK AT SUPPLY AND DEMAND. The air is crackling with wi-fi; Kat and I are having the only spoken conversation in the entire place.

She's wearing the same red-and-yellow "BAM!" t-shirt as yesterday, which means a) she slept in it, b) she owns several identical t-shirts, or c) she's a cartoon character-all of which are appealing alternatives.

I don't want to come out and confess that I work at the official book store of the da Vinci Code, but I do want her mega-brain applied to this problem. So I just play the visualization.

"You made this last night?" she says. "Impressive."

We watch the lights curl around each other. We watch again. And again.

Kat bites her lip and thinks hard, which is very attractive. "You know," she says, "something about this looks... recursive."

I have nothing to contribute at this point.

She says: "But there aren't that many data points. We might just be making up the pattern. Is there some other series we can add to the visualization?"

Well, I say, I've got this big leather logbook. But it's not really data... just descriptions. And it would take forever to type it all into the computer, anyway.

Kat's eyes light up. "A natural language corpus! And an excuse to use the book-scanner! Want to bring it down to Google tomorrow?"

Her lips make a pretty shape when she says "corpus."

* * *

NOW, MR. PENUMBRA HAS NEVER specifically forbidden me from taking the logbook home.

But he hasn't specifically forbidden me from inviting all my friends over for an after-hours book store party, and I'm pretty sure that's not allowed, either.

Anyway, he only checks the logbook if I tell him something interesting happened during the night.

Nothing interesting happens during the night.

There's a tiny flashlight attached to my keychain, and I shine it around the store, looking for the tell-tale glint of a camera lens. (They do this in movie theaters, to find pirates! And in the army. To find snipers.)

Not a single thing glints in Penumbra's 24-Hour Book Store.

I can't stop squirming. If fidgets were Wikipedia edits, I would have completely revamped the entry on "guilt" by now, and translated it into six new languages.

Finally, it's quarter to six. The thinnest tendrils of dawn are creeping in from the east. Friends in New York are logging onto the internet and posting funny links.

I close my laptop, sweaty palms flat on the lid. Here's the plan: Instead of returning the logbook to its slot in the front desk, I'm going to put it in my messenger bag, in the laptop compartment. My laptop will stay at the book store today, tucked into the logbook's slot.
I have a hundred explanations (with branching sub-plots) if Mr. Penumbra nabs me.

The bell tinkles. "Good morning," he says. "How was-"

No customers quiet night gotta go Mr. Penumbra see you later. I say it in one breath, already moving. I try to look ill, which isn't hard, because I feel terrible.

He pauses, then smiles a lopsided old-man smile. "See you tonight."

I'm out the door, and twenty minutes later, I'm on the train to Mountain View, clutching my bag, and my book, to my chest.

The rumble and sway puts me to sleep.

* * *

WHEN I WAKE UP, Google is nothing like I imagined.

The main campus is a crystal castle, spiking up out of the gray lawns of Silicon Valley and glinting blue-green in the morning sun. This isn't a metaphor. It's really crystal, and it looks organic, not architectural. Google grew it.

Kat is explaining all of this to me right now.

Offices started as tents and pavilions. Roads and sidewalks were marked off with chalk and string. The crystal grew over and around all of that, like a coral reef. But it's not for looks, and it's not structural, either. It's functional. The crystal is somehow computer memory, processing power, and fiber-optics all in one. It radiates wi-fi. It runs on sunlight.

Kat points a long, brown arm towards the tallest crystal spike, gleaming at the very center of the campus. "That's one of our database shards," she says. "Your email is in there. Along with every video on YouTube. A bunch of DNA sequences. And almost every book ever written."

Mr. Penumbra's shelves don't seem so tall anymore.

Wide walk-ways curve into the crystal campus. Kat leads me to a low, rectangular tent. There's a hand-written sign pinned to the canvas: "BOOK-SCANNER."

* * *

The inside of the tent feels like an army field hospital. The hardware is all very hard. Lots of wires and clamps. Harsh flood-lights look down on an operating table surrounded by long, many-jointed metal arms. The air stings like bleach.

And there, patiently waiting, are the books. Stacks and stacks of them, piled high on metal carts. Big books and little books. New best-sellers and old tomes that would fit in at Penumbra's.

The Googler presiding over all of this looks like a college freshman. His name is Jad.

"Kat warned me this might be a challenge," he says. "But we'll see. The scanner's pretty good."

He sets my logbook up on a metal frame and tells us to step back. His fingers go tap-tap behind a bank of monitors, and the book-scanner leaps into action.

The flood-lights start strobing, turning everything in the tent into a stop-motion film. Frame by frame, the scanner's spidery arms reach down, grasp page corners, peel them back. I've never seen anything at once so fast and so delicate. The arms-I can't tell if there are four or eight or sixteen-stroke the pages, caress them, smooth them down. This thing loves books.
At each flash of the lights, two giant cameras snap images in tandem. I sidle up next to Jad, where I can see the pages of my logbook stacking up on his monitors. The two cameras are like two eyes, so the images are in 3D, and I watch his computer lift the words right up off the pages. It looks like an exorcism.

Jad's fingers go tap-tap again. "Wow, we need to allocate more processing power," he says.
Because the data is so complex?

"No," he says. "It's your handwriting. It's really bad."

Okay. I walk back over to Kat, who's leaned over as close to the book-scanner as you can get without risking a metal arm in the eye.

"This is awesome," she breathes.

It really is. I feel a pang of pity for my logbook. All of its secrets, coaxed out in five minutes flat by this super-smart hurricane of metal and light. Books used to be pretty high-tech, back in the day. Not anymore.

* * *

I WALKED AWAY EMPTY-HANDED.

Which is to say, I walked away with the knowledge that the high-resolution images of my logbook, along with the digitized text and Jad's analysis of that text, were waiting for me in Google's crystal database, accessible anywhere, anytime.

Like right now.

It's 11 p.m., I'm rested after an afternoon of strange, spidery dreams, and I'm ready to visualize.

I retrieve Jad's analysis via an unprotected wi-fi network from next door named "bootynet."
Now, computer, it is time for you to do my bidding.

By 2 a.m., I've got the new data piped into my visualization, and by 2:02 a.m., I am ready to run screaming out the front door of the store.

* * *

HERE'S WHAT I SEE:

1. The store, looking very nice in 3D, with a convincing wood-grain effect.

2. Just as before, a swarm of colored lights bounce through the shelves; each one is a customer.

3. But now a set of symbols have joined them: a tiny fedora for customers with hats, a cartoon rose for customers who smell (good and bad), a little Eiffel Tower for customers who mutter to themselves in French. There are a million ways to describe these guys; Jad's algorithms have read them all out of my logbook and organized them into categories. So now I see those categories move through the shelves, too.

The lights and the symbols all leave trails. The trails are like brush-strokes. And if I rotate the 3D model so that, on my screen, I'm viewing the store from the perspective of the front desk-from where I'm sitting right now-the brush-strokes fit together. They form a picture.

It's a face.

It's a face I know.

It's a picture of Mr. Penumbra.

* * *

THE BELL TINKLES and he walks into the store. A coil of fog follows him.

Why I haven't fled, I don't know. Dark curiosity, maybe. Or a lingering sense of clerkly responsibility.

Tonight, a computer program showed me a picture of Mr. Penumbra. A computer program that I did not design to show me pictures of people. And definitely not pictures of wrinkled, old-

Actually. Wait. I realize now, as I see him in the gray morning light, that I have made the common mistake of assuming that all old people look alike. The picture drawn out by the data on my screen isn't Mr. Penumbra. Same nose, but Mr. Penumbra's mouth is wider. His cheeks are rounder.

"Good morning," he says. "How was-"

I have to tell him. It's a terrifying thought, but the alternative is to sit quietly at my desk as a vortex of weirdness spirals around me. (That describes a lot of jobs, I realize, but this is potentially a special kind of magick-with-a-K weirdness.) Well, that or quit.

So I swivel my laptop and tell Mr. Penumbra I have something he should see, if he's interested, but if not, you know, no big deal, we could always do it tomorrow, and-
He's interested.

He holds his glasses at an angle and peers down at my screen. At first, his face is slack, and I'm afraid he doesn't understand what I'm showing him, or that the tiny lights have given him a tiny stroke.

But then he says, quietly: "Hello, Elzevir."

* * *

I THINK HE'S ABOUT TO FLY INTO A RAGE. He looks like I feel when I'm about to fly into a rage: skin pulled tight across the cheeks, mouth not working like it's supposed to. I'm not afraid of him-leaning in close like this, I'm reminded how old he is-but maybe I should be.
The bell tinkles. We both turn.

It's Kat.

"Oh... hey," she says. She can tell something's up; there's tension in the air, to go with all the dust.

Mr. Penumbra turns back to me with narrow eyes.

"Go," he says. "See you tonight. 10 p.m. sharp."

* * *

I EXPLAIN EVERYTHING to Kat over waffles. I'm feeling particularly warm towards her at the moment, as her timely intervention might have saved my life. Or at least my job.
I show her the new visualization, and the creepy old face. The face of Elzevir.

"Well," she says, "this is probably a world-record. Most labor-intensive steganography ever."
Steganography?

"Putting a hidden message where nobody would think to look for a hidden message. This qualifies, big-time. Sure, it's amazing that these guys are acting out this picture, week after week. But who would even think to record their habits in the first place?"

Well, technically, that would be Mr. Penumbra. See: rule number three. My job.

She pokes her fork at me. "There's no question, then. You were supposed to find this."

Funny. The look on Mr. Penumbra's face didn't exactly say "congratulations."

* * *

THE NIGHT THAT FOLLOWED was my last at the book store.

When I arrived, Mr. Penumbra emerged from the shadows of the shelves and dropped himself down at the front desk like a sack of potatoes. The oldest, thinnest sack of potatoes you have ever seen. The sack of potatoes you would never buy at the store, even if you were going to a potato party and just needed a lot of potatoes, no matter what.

"This is very strange," he sighed, "but not entirely surprising."

I thought, but didn't say: Oh, I'm pretty surprised. By the ancient human face on my computer screen.

"You realize," he said, looking up at me with those narrow eyes again, "it doesn't work this way. There are no shortcuts."

I said nothing.

"An investigation of the fellowship must be done on paper. It must produce a book."

Please allow the following series of question marks to represent the blankness of my stare:

?????

Mr. Penumbra cocked his head. He said, "Haven't you read any of the volumes here?"

Of course not! Mr. Penumbra, that's rule number two! Don't read the books. My cousin just moved to Florida because they're closing the state of Michigan! I follow the rules.

He laughed a little, and shook his head. "I guess it's one thing for a computer to help you find the answer," he said. "But we've now arrived at a point where you don't even need to ask the question anymore."

Well, what, uh, what's the question?

"The book store is the first question," he said, and raised his arms, as if to circle the strange space around us. "Why does it exist? Why does Mr. Tyndall buy a book at midnight on the 9th of June, and why is he wearing green rubber boots when he does it? You're obviously curious."

I nodded.

"But the final question," he said, "is how do you live forever?"

* * *

"WELL," Mr. Penumbra said, "I need to consider what comes next." He stood. "This will be your last shift. Please close the store in the morning. I will send your final paycheck."

The bell tinkled. He disappeared into the fog.

No. No! He didn't fly into a rage, but I still got fired.

There were no customers that night. When it was time to go home, I flipped through the bank of light switches-I didn't even know there were light switches-and watched the gloomy shelves disappear, one by one.

It felt like dousing a lighthouse.

* * *

MY FINAL PAYCHECK CAME IN THE MAIL, as promised.

It was for $300,000.

Yeah.

There was also an invitation. Written in Mr. Penumbra's hand, it said: 303 Clement Street. Friday. 10pm.

* * *

IT WAS A BURMESE RESTAURANT called Mega Mandalay with a sign on the door that said CLOSED FOR SPECIAL EVENT. Inside, everything was warm and golden.

They were all there. Mr. Penumbra at the head of the table, flanked by Tyndall, Raleigh, and old Fedorov. There were many more I didn't know, men who seemed even older still. Some in crazy costumes: tunics, tuxedos, salwar kameez. Even a few women; one had her gray hair styled in a sort of Vulcan bowl-cut. They were all jabbering at each other, waving their arms and laughing. They all seemed happy.

Penumbra saw me as I walked in. He rose: "My brothers and sisters! Here's the one who didn't bother to write a book!" They all clapped, and there was some cheering, and Imbert whistled.

Penumbra motioned for me to sit beside him. I expected everyone to stay focused on me, as I had clearly just solved some Indiana Jones-caliber mystery of the ages. But they were all still jabbering and laughing. It felt like a reunion.

"You are in the presence," Penumbra said, "of a fellowship more than 500 years old. We have been around for as long as books have."

Tyndall leaned in from Penumbra's other side: "A brotherhood bound by binding!"

"It was conceived by Mr. Elzevir," Penumbra continued, and motioned to the other end of the table, where the ancient face from my computer screen was grinning and hoisting a tall glass of beer. Wow.

"He imagined a society devoted to the great promise of the book: That by writing, you can earn a kind of immortality, as your words pass into other minds, far removed from your own by distance and time."

"And," Fedorov said, his mouth full of rice, "when accompanied by certain numerological rites"-pause to swallow-"bibliographic longevity can be converted to biological longevity, as well."

"Yes," Penumbra said, "I suppose that's the important part."

"No kidding," I said quietly.

"Some would say our society has, ah, devolved," Penumbra said, "for we now read only the books written by our membership. Books which are filled only with observations of other members. And references to other books filled only with observations. And so on."

Tyndall leaned in: "No Proust here!"

"But the formula persists," Penumbra said, "and so do we." He was silent a moment. "Until now."

* * *

I TOLD THE STORY TO KAT later that night. The tea-leaf salad hadn't quite soaked up all the beer, and she was a little confused and weirded-out when I rang her doorbell at three in the morning, but now I was trying to be as clear as possible:

Mr. Penumbra knew that books wouldn't last forever. He knew something else would come along. But for the longest time, nothing did.

If I'd gone to work at the store ten years ago, or a hundred (it wasn't in San Francisco then; it was in London) maybe I would have started noticing the patterns without the help of a computer. Maybe I would have started sneaking peeks at the books, copying out passages, finding connections. Maybe I would have drawn Elzevir's face in pen, on paper. (It would have taken years.)

If I'd done all that, maybe I would have joined the fellowship. Maybe I would have become one of them.

Instead, I used a laptop. I used Google's book-scanner. I made something fundamentally incompatible with 500 years of history: a computer program.

I broke the spell.

"I don't get it," Kat said. We were sitting at her kitchen table, cradling mugs of tea. "Why couldn't the visualization just be your ticket to immortality?"

I was surprised that she asked, because even I knew the answer. Computer programs don't have the same longevity. It was doubtful somebody could get my visualization to run in six months, let alone six years, or six hundred. There was something very special about the book and the way it lasted. The way it got passed from hand to hand, from mind to mind.
Until now.

There was a long silence.

"So," she said softly, looking down into her mug, "what happens to Mr. Penumbra? And the rest of them?"

He said he's closing the store. He said the fellowship would fade away-not all at once, but gradually.

And then he said one more thing, as we were all leaving the restaurant.

* * *

"HERE'S THE TRICK, MY BOY," Mr. Penumbra said, wrapping his long, thin arm around my shoulder. The halo of gray hair around his head was a little messed up. He was a little drunk.
"Forget the store. Forget the numerological rites. Just make something that will last. And then, in a hundred years, or a thousand, someone will find it, at three in the morning, exactly when they need it most. And you'll live again."

I must have looked dubious, because he said:

"Just because it's changing doesn't mean it's over. Your Google genius and her friends will build new kinds of books. All of us in the fellowship, we'll live again. We'll meet here, at this restaurant. There will be samosas, and tea-leaf salad, and more beer-"

(Tyndall heard this from further up the sidewalk, and shouted to the sky: "More beer!")
"-and we'll all live again." He paused. "But your place at the table isn't assured. Not yet."
He let me go, and smiled. "You'd better be there."

And then they all disappeared into the fog.

* * *

SO WHAT NOW?

There's a FOR LEASE sign stuck to the front of the 24-hour book store. Inside, it's empty.
I'm dating Kat, and I try to talk about things other than strange old men and immortality.
I spent my huge Penumbra payout on an apartment. A tiny, tiny San Francisco apartment.
And I found a new job, just part-time, making animated web advertisements for the one insurance company that's still in business.

With the other part of my time, I'm researching the life of a guy named Ajax Penumbra. I'm trying to piece it all together, trying to understand him.

It turns out he knew a lot of people in this town. It's just that most of them died in 1906.

But I'm following the clues, one by one. What will I make of it all? A book? A movie? Super Book Store Bros., the video game? I don't know yet. But I'm going to try to make it so wonderful that somebody else will want to carry it into the future for me. And then hand it off to somebody else. And somebody else after that.

Because I've got to meet old Mr. Penumbra for dinner.

* * *
* * *
* * *

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Rachel Leow for a tweet on November 15, 2008: "just misread '24hr bookdrop' as '24hr bookshop'. the disappointment is beyond words."

Thanks to Andrew Fitzgerald for feedback on an early version of this story.

Thanks to Betty Ann Sloan and Jim Sloan for feedback on an early version, and for special investigations into book-leaning.

Oops! Amazon Glitch Pulls Back Freebie on Carla Neggers' The Widow

2009-06-12T10:42:00.000-04:00

Yesterday we shared news about a zero-price promotion on Carla Neggers' novel The Widow. The source of the information was Amazon's own Kindle Blog, so you would think that when they allow the author to post "From June 8 to 12, readers can download The Widow free to their Kindle," the Kindle marketing wizards would try not to make her look like a liar.

Here's a screen shot of Amazon's Kindle Blog:

The zero-price promotion was, of course, still in effect when we sent it out the post last night, but as you can see from this morning's screenshot of the Kindle Store product page for The Widow, Amazon has now bumped the price up to $5.76. That's bound to be a disappointment for the author and publisher as well as for Kindle Nation citizens and anyone who paid attention to Amazon's Kindle Blog.

What was Stanley Marcus' question again? Yes. Who's minding the store?

It's 7 pm EDT June 10, 2009 - Kindle DX Release Day - Do you know where your Kindle DX is?

2009-06-10T19:14:00.000-04:00

Today is Kindle DX Release Day for Amazon, and anxious Kindle DX buyers have been checking their emails all day for those "Your order has shipped" messages. My DX will arrive tomorrow, and I am sure I will have impressions to share. Meanwhile, Engadget has posted a nice 29-photo gallery of an early Kindle DX unboxing, and Steven Levy of Wired.com has posted a balanced review of his test run.

Get your order in now and you can still get your Kindle DX this week with 1-day shipping.

Kindle DX is Back in Stock on Its Release Date -- What's Up with That?

2009-06-10T19:13:00.001-04:00

Was the Kindle DX ever out of stock?

Since last week the new Kindle's Amazon product page has been stoking the flames of gadgeteer anxiety with messages claiming that freshly placed orders would ship within 7 to 10 days. New orders placed yesterday, June 9, showed a delivery date of June 16 (June 15 with one-day shipping). Naturally, Amazon exposed itself to various forms of criticism, most notably:

customer frustration that the company seemed not to have learned from the recurring stock-out problems that delayed Kindle 1 shipments from November 2007 to April 2008 and again from November 2008 to the launch of the Kindle 2 in February 2009; and
suspicions that Amazon was purposely raising the specter of a Kindle DX stock-out problem to gin up sales of the new model, and get as many orders as possible in the pipeline before the announcement of the iPhone 3G S and the intriguing Iceberg Reader app for the iPhone and the iPod Touch this week.

Whatever the underlying problems or motivations, Amazon now appears to have solved the problem before it even begins shipping the Kindle DX today.

Here's a screenshot of the Kindle DX product page as of 10 am EDT today, June 10, showing the DX is back in stock. Order yours today and you should have it this week!

Three additional tips, while you are at it:

Don't forget to order the Amazon Kindle DX Leather Cover while you are at it. The new Kindle is too large, ungainly, and vulnerable to use without a cover, and unlike the Kindle 1 the cover is not included.
I'm not recommending the $109 Kindle DX two-year warranty, but you should be aware, if you want it, that it must be ordered within 30 days of your new Kindle DX ship date.
Finally, don't mistake I made on my original Kindle DX order. Amazon will let you set up a Kindle DX order using your bank account (as opposed to a credit card), but then will unceremoniously cancel your order a few days (or now, perhaps, a few hours) later without any useful communication, customer service assistance, or opportunity to change your payment method. I'm guessing they've probably thrown out about a half a million dollars worth of Kindle DX orders with this snafu, but what's a half a million dollars?

Update: Just to verify one other thing. Kindle DX orders placed this morning with one-day shipping are indeed now showing a delivery date of June 11.

Free Direct eBook Downloads to Your Kindle: Get Over 23,900 Free Books For Your Kindle at ManyBooks

2009-06-04T19:14:00.000-04:00

Want to enjoy great, well-formatted reading on your Kindle, but beginning to feel like you are contributing a little too much to keeping the wolf from Amazon's door?

Don't want to fool around with transferring ebooks to and from your computer via USB connection? You may be amazed at how easy it can be to download free books directly to your Kindle over the Whispernet, without any need for a computer!

Try ManyBooks, one of the favorite websites used by Kindle owners to find and transfer free books for their Kindles. As you can see with the image above at the right, ManyBooks and its current catalog of 23,905 free books is also nicely optimized for viewing on your Kindle or on any other mobile device.

Just follow these steps to make ManyBooks a regular part of your Kindle browsing, all at absolutely no cost:

Use your Kindle keyboard to type mnybks.net from your home screen or from within any content you are reading on your Kindle. This is the ManyBook mobile URL. If you are reading this piece as a Kindle Nation daily blog article directly on your Kindle, you can go to the ManyBooks mobile site directly just by clicking here.
Push your 5-way (Kindle 2 or DX) or scrollwheel (Kindle 1) to the right to select "go to" or "google" to enable the Kindle's web browser to bring you to the ManyBooks website or a Google listing of ManyBooks links.
No need to type a prefix such as http:// - the Kindle will take care of that.
Use the category links or keyword search feature at the ManyBooks mobile website to find a book, and click on it to begin downloading it directly to your Kindle via Whispernet.
Click on the "Mobipocket/Kindle" download option from the next screen, and you will see the screen prompt above, at right. Click OK to continue, give the book a moment to download, and you should find the title on your Home screen when you check for it.

Too Cool for School? Thousands of Students Will Be Rocking the Kindle DX This September

2009-06-04T16:09:00.001-04:00

By the time your kids (or grand kids? or you?) get to college to begin Fall 2009 classes, thousands of college and grad students all over the United States will be rocking the Kindle DX. If $48 9 for a Kindle Dx sounds expensive -- and it does -- just check out the average amount that college students have to pay for textbooks these days. It's over $900 for hardcopy textbooks, or about $4,000 over the course of a four-year college education. You don't have to be a math whiz to figure out that if a Kindle DX can save a student 10 to 15 per cent on textbook costs it will pay for itself.

(Editor's Note: The Kindle DX ships next week, by June 10. In fact, if you click here to order a Kindle DX and select 1-day shipping (just $3.99 with an Amazon Prime account), you should have your Kindle DX by Wednesday or Thursday, June 10 or 11. If you want to take it one step further and qualify for a new Amazon Prime account without having to fork over the $79 annual Amazon Prime fee, just click here for a free one-month Amazon prime trial!)

Amazon has been getting its ducks in a row to make the Kindle DX the must-have gadget for college students all over the country by lining up the major textbook manufacturers that publish over 60% of American textbooks to publish Kindle editions and by creating special Kindle pilot projects and Kindle DX review programs -- some of them involving free Kindle DX units and free textbooks for a small number of students! -- on several college campuses:

With complex images, tables, charts, graphs, and equations, textbooks look best on a large display [said Amazon in a May 6 press release]. Leading textbook publishers Cengage Learning, Pearson, and Wiley, together representing more than 60 percent of the U.S. higher education textbook market, will begin offering textbooks through the Kindle Store beginning this summer. Textbooks under the following brands will be available: Addison-Wesley, Allyn & Bacon, Benjamin Cummings, Longman & Prentice Hall (Pearson); Wadsworth, Brooks/Cole, Course Technology, Delmar, Heinle, Schirmer, South-Western (Cengage); and Wiley Higher Education.

Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University, Princeton University, Reed College, and Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia will launch trial programs to make Kindle DX devices available to students this fall. The schools will distribute hundreds of Kindle DX devices to students spread across a broad range of academic disciplines. In addition to reading on a considerably larger screen, students will be able to take advantage of popular Kindle features such as the ability to take notes and highlight, search across their library, look up words in a built-in dictionary, and carry all of their books in a lightweight device.

“The Kindle DX holds enormous potential to influence the way students learn,” said Barbara R. Snyder, president of Case Western Reserve University. “We look forward to seeing how the device affects the participation of both students and faculty in the educational experience.”

Kindle Nation Daily will be closely tuned in to this major campus roll-out of the Kindle DX and we'll be sharing a wide range of helpful information here each week to assist the student set in getting the most out of their new Kindles at the least expense, including

getting the right textbooks and instructors' PDF course packets
sharing, reading, and listening to lectures, lecture notes, and other course content among multiple Kindles and kindling students
synching up and reading Kindle content between your Kindle Dx and your iPhone or iPod Touch
making use of the Kindle's powerful search, annotation, highlighting, clipping, and bookmarking features; and
discovering how easy it is to use the Kindle DX (or Kindle 1 or 2) in a pinch for email, texting, tweeting, Facebook status checks, checking your favorite team's in-game progress, or web browsing

If you or someone you know has already purchased a Kindle DX (or is considering doing so) you'll want to get ahead of the curve by checking this spot for the soon-to-be-released user's guide, The Amazon Kindle DX - Too Cool for School: How to Get the Most out of Your Kindle DX In College, Graduate School, and Life.