It has been a pleasure talking with many of you and i hope that under the new ownership the site will get it’s due of new articles and attention.  My best wishes to Jared and the new ownership.

John

It has been far too long since I have held my kindle to read a book, I sold mine waiting an october release of a new design and will fate release me from my waiting or will I just need to go on and replace it with a new version 1 model?

Have you seen the new design?  Does it make you want a new one, or are you happy with the one you have?  What if the current waiting for 2-4 weeks to ship is a hint that the new on is finally coming…
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Kindlechat.com has moved hosting providers, if you noticed a less than 1 hour hiccup your my hero for actually looking at the site.  Still looking for Kindle users that would like to share tips and experiences as authors on this site.  Email me if your interested.

Are you waiting for a new Kindle 2.0?  I hear they are now delayed into 2009 with no set date for delivery, if you had a date would you wait?  Or is having a Kindle more important than having a different form factor?

Kindlechat wants to welcome Kalpanik S. to the writing staff of this website, hopefully bringing new insights through articles relating to the Kindle e-book reader.  I look forward to Kalpanik’s first article as I’m sure you will.  A website with multiple writers usually brings a nice balance as well as differing views on new releases and news to the reader base.  If you would be interested in joining the KindleChat writers email me at minezamac at gmail . com.

If you have an opinion and experiences with your Kindle and would be interested in blogging about it I am looking for a few additional bloggers to increase the number of articles for KindleChat.  The articles do not have to be solely for the Kindle, but should be focused around reading and e-reader technology or the associated products that go with the Kindle and e-readers.  Contact me on the KindleChat group under the “Looking for a few good bloggers” post.

It happened again. I was reading at lunch and realized I had not charged my kindle in quite a while. It died. ARRRGH. So I am at work, no where near the standard charger. The plug on this is not run of the mill, but I have a drawer full of old cell phone chargers.

Before beginning to use the charger I will describe later I decided to attempt to do a trickle charge with my USB cable. We’ll if your Kindle is so dead that it won’t alert your machine it is connected then your machine like mine will likely not charge the USB port to even trickle charge the unit. So I began a search for alternatives. It began with confirming that a Kindle will indeed trickle charge at all.

On page 16 of the PDF users guide it says”USB port — plug in the included USB cable to transfer content between your computer and your Kindle. Your Kindle will also accept a small trickle charge over USB that may extend your battery life if your computer’s USB port or powered USB hub provides power.” The words that matter are “small” “trickle” and most importantly “may”. In my case it was too far gone to “may”…
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So far I have now had my Kindle almost 60 days, that should constitute an acceptable period of time to reflect on the devices shortcomings and advantages. First let me say this piece may not be as positive as I had hoped when I planed on writing this a month ago, the new has worn off and my Kindle is now yet another tool I use.

I just returned from a vacation, thus the extended absence here, and I have to say I unfortunately only used my Kindle once during my trip. Now I did not use any other book at all, other that an atlas in conjunction with my GPS, but my iPod still got the lion share of use in the goings and comings of the trip in the plane.

In general my Kindle has been a huge disappointment in the area of replacing my standard Bible as there just is no real use of the book 2.0 hypertext technology by any of the major translations. In general reading it for the sake of reading is quite good, but using it in a class where you are hopping around a great deal you quickly get frustrated as I am quite comfortable moving between books in the Bible and the Kindle just has no translations that allow for that method o use well as of yet. I have hopes there will be sooner than later.

Another difficulty on this front is the very real, it has happened to me twice, gasp, failure of power. If your going to use it, just get used to plugging it in nightly before you go to bed and then this will never happen to you. But try and push it 3 days and you may be in for trouble if you use the wireless at all. For all the fear that this causes when your not with your charger I suspect it won’t happen to me again for quite some time as I have adapted to charging it just like my phone.

The actual experience of reading is still my biggest reason for using the kindle, I can sit and breeze through a book in record time with little awareness of the device at all. I have moved to a font setting of 3 and find it very readable and not to large as to make page turning to frequent, but not as small as 2 where I need my glasses for sure. Setting 1, forget about it.

How are you after a couple of months of use?  I am disappointed in the lack of real news from Amazon, I have seen a comment saying as a publicly trading company they can’t really say how shipping is going due to the impact it might have on their stock.   But surely others could comment, I had hoped my hometown newspaper would hop on board, but as o now the Dallas Morning news or the Fort Worth Star Telegram are both no shows.

So for now my Kindle has replaced my need for any Paper back or hard back I have thus far looked for.  I am about to test that on a Harry Turtledove book called the “Guns of the South” – NO GO…  Although there are 34 books from the author available, for some reason that one is not.  I got it from a fellow in passing and frankly I had hoped to get it on the Kindle to avoid reading the grimy stained book that I was so generously offered from the fellow.  Oh well, I still have 3 books not started that are awaiting my attention, but I wish there were some way to inquire as to if there were any conversion in the works.  Despite a smaller library size, the Kindle is still by far the easiest on my eyes reading experience I have, so I am still pleased to have one while others are still waiting.

Well I have had it almost a month, the reading slowed over the past week, though I attribute that to the holidays. I went back to work yesterday, I threw my back out over the holidays and noticed I had not brought it with me today at lunch when I went to read. So far the looks are dying down as people have now seen me with it for a while but the first time someone sees it is always a conversation.

So back to the crux of my question I posted over at the forum, what are your reviews like when you show it off? Are they favorable? I had one neutral review that I did not count in my review as it was by a person whom I know to be contrary to all of my technical positions. I am a Mac fan, and he is a mac hater, he immediately went into a that’s an ugly ipod, when I showed it to him he changed tact when he discovered it was not an apple product. All he had seen was that it was supposedly the ipod of books and assumed it was from Apple, that is hilarious to me. It shows that Apple advertising works too well as apparently people now just assume interesting products come from apple, great if your Steve Jobs or an apple shareholder I suppose.

But for all my positive comments I have received why did the Kindle info die so much from amazon? Why not tell us they sold 500 or 50,000? Wish the silence would be broken. Have you heard anything?

I am sure not happy that the yahoo group is down but Welcome any newcomers to the kindlechat site. I would imagine it will be back soon as Yahoo is normally very reliable and responsive. Until then, by all means, the more the merrier.

I was wondering if there was room for two strong kindle forums and I guess my answer came with the fact that we have 46 members while the initial yahoo group grew to over 700. Hopefully it will be back online soon, but until then maybe we will get the critical mass we need to really get the kindlechat forums going.

The kindle image to the right is the link to the discussion forums over at google. Click there or Click here.

So I was recently using a book that did not have a table of contents nor chapter links, so I was being beaten down by the need to press next page over 40 times. I was wishing there was a feature that would allow you to jump ahead with more than just a single page. I just learned that you can jump 5% of the book forward or backward by pressing and holding the alt key and the next or previous page keys.

That is a great feature that I can’t believe I missed, is it documented? Perhaps, but I found it while trolling the amazon discussion pages. The Amazon discussion pages are horrible, I would prefer google or yahoo to them any-day, you can’t follow what’s up most of the time. Anyway just a tip you might not have discovered.

Alt + prev or Next page skips 5% of the books length.