April 8, 2013, 11:00 am
By Lincoln Mullen
We’ve written at ProfHacker about several different services that let you save webpages into a queue to read later: Brian wrote about “Asynchronous Reading.” Amy, Natalie, and Jason have mentioned Instapaper; I wrote about Pocket; and George mentioned Readability. These services are all basically the same. But Readability has created a new service, called Readlists.
According to their website, a Readlist is “a group of web pages—articles, recipes, course materials, anything—bundled into an e-book you can send to your Kindle, iPad, or iPhone.” Instead of adding items to a queue, you create a collection of articles with a common theme. Readlist will then create a single page with links to all of the items, with the titles and descriptions created automatically. The really useful feature is that Readlist will create an EPUB or Kindle e-book from the list, so that you or …
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February 4, 2013, 8:00 am
By Lincoln Mullen
A few weeks ago I did something which surprised my wife, and which surprised me: I bought a Kindle Paperwhite. Even more surprising, I like the Kindle a lot, and I find myself doing most of a certain kind of reading on the Kindle.
Here is a not-so-brief review of the device itself, followed by a few thoughts on the Kindle as an e-book ecosystem.
The Device
Size. First, the Paperwhite is light and small — less than half a pound, about the height and width of a small trade paperback, but a lot thinner. At that size, I never think about whether to bring the Kindle with me or not: the benefits of having it with me for the odd moment during the day outweighs the space and weight it takes up.
Screen. The Paperwhite’s screen is an e-ink display, like all of the Kindles except the Fire, and like e-readers such as the Barnes & Noble Nook. The advantage of the e-ink display over an…
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February 3, 2012, 8:00 am
By Konrad Lawson
In October Ryan showed us how you can use the text-to-speech accessibility features on your computer to proofread work. Ryan offers the example of checking the accuracy of a transcription with this method, but he notes at the end of his post that this might be helpful for proofreading our own writing. Some of us may ultimately find that synthesized voice technology is still too far behind to create a tolerable listening experience, but I personally find it good enough when taken in moderate doses.
During a session on “methods of reading,” as part of a series of discussions on technology and historical research methods I’ve been joining in on, my friend and favorite medieval Korean historian Javier Cha mentioned that he finds text-to-speech to be a great help in proofreading his own work. However, instead of using the text-to-speech features of his Windows operating system, he us…
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November 22, 2011, 3:00 pm
By Anastasia Salter
Amazon’s newly released Kindle Fire, a 7-inch full color tablet built for Amazon’s content, is the first in its popular Kindle hardware line to step out into the widening market of convergent devices. Ebook readers, once of the remaining single-purpose gadgets with a clear purpose in a tech-heavy briefcase, are now forced to compete for that space with the more nimble tablets. The first-generation Kindle Fire is a strange combination of both worlds, and while it fails to fully satisfy as either it does promise to leave its mark on our media consumption devices and perhaps even make an appearance in our classrooms or our own toolkits for travel and meetings.
The Kindle Fire has a few immediate selling points. It’s fairly light, and fits in a decent-sized purse or bag without any trouble. It’s the first time I’ve been convinced that there’s hope for this tablet size,…
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November 3, 2011, 5:00 pm
By George Williams
Amazon has just announced the “Kindle Owners’ Lending Library,” whereby “thousands of books” are available to be checked out. There are two catches, however: first, you have to own a Kindle device (software running on a computer or mobile device isn’t enough); and second, you have to have a membership with Amazon Prime, which costs $79 per year. (Amazon Prime membership means that your orders are always delivered faster, and you also have access to a section of Amazon’s video on demand library included with your annual membership fee.)
For someone who already meets these two criteria, this represents an interesting opportunity. But will it persuade people who meet neither (or who meet only one) to shell out the extra money to take advantage of the lending library? I have my doubts, but we’ll see.
How about you? What features would you like to see introduced to the ebook ecosystem? …
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October 11, 2011, 11:00 am
By Mark Sample
More and more of us are reading e-books on our Kindles, Nooks, iPads, and various other e-reader devices. Usually these are books we purchase from the big players in the e-book market or download from public domain collections such as Project Gutenberg.
But have you ever wanted to create your own e-book? Maybe it’s a Creative Commons book that only exists in HTML format. Or perhaps it’s a set of blog posts. Or maybe it’s a student’s dissertation. Or even your own research notes. How do you convert these into an e-book?
One answer is Sigil, a WYSIWYG open-source XML-based ePub editor.
Or, in plain English: Sigil makes making e-books a breeze.
Sigil runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. It’s free. It looks a lot like a word processor. Simply by copying-and-pasting text from other sources or importing HTML, you can make an e-book in the open-standards ePub format. All of the major…
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August 19, 2011, 8:00 am
By Erin E. Templeton
As promised earlier this week, today I’ll introduce you to Amazon’s (other) new service, the Amazon Cloud Reader. The Cloud Reader was unveiled on August 10, and unlike Kindle.Amazon.com, this service is one that actually has gotten some stage time on the Amazon homepage. But stage time is about all it has gotten. By this, I mean that while Amazon features the Cloud Reader prominently on its homepage, you actually ge surprisingly little information about it until after you’ve installed it. After writing one post on a subterranean Kindle service, I’m not sure why I was surprised, but I was surprised nevertheless. Basically, if users click on the “Read Now” link, they are taken to an installation page, rather than an information page. Call me skeptical if you will, but I want to know what I’ll be installing before I make such a decision, but such was not an option (unless…
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August 15, 2011, 11:00 am
By Erin E. Templeton
A little over a week ago, I received a curious message from Amazon.com. I was confused at first because I had not placed an order, and unlike many other retailers, Amazon doesn’t send me random “sale-mail.” My uncertainty grew when I opened the message to learn that one of my Twitter followers was now following me on Kindle. Following me on Kindle? Huh?
Many of us at ProfHacker are fans of the e-reader. Kindles and Nooks have made appearances on both of our Holiday Gift Guides (2009 and 2010). Amy has written about Calibre, as have I). I am a Kindle devotee and have been for years. In fact, over the two plus years that I have been “Kindling,” I have sworn allegiance to my electronic love both in ProfHacker (see “Kindling the Classroom ?” and elsewhere). The device (I use a second generation Kindle 2) has changed my life for the better. For example, despite the…
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July 21, 2011, 11:00 am
By Mark Sample
We talk about travel a lot on ProfHacker, probably because conferences and research trips are a fact of life for many of us. Erin has shared best practices for international travel, Heather has talked about digital tools for organizing travel, and recently George has suggested five ways that airlines and airports could improve travel.
I have an international trip coming up myself, and as I stared at the pile of cords, plugs, adapters, devices, and computers I could take with me, it occurred to me that I should ask our readers about their tech for traveling abroad. ProfHacker has touched on traveling with tech before at. Nels revealed his essential travel gear, Ryan has given tips on using Google Voice and video chat to stay connected while abroad, and guest writer Louise A. Burnham detailed her summer of travel using no computer other than her iPad.
Louise’s post has inspired me…
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June 22, 2011, 8:00 am
By Prof. Hacker
[This is a guest post by Aram Zucker-Scharff. Aram is the Community Manager for the Office of Student Media at George Mason University where he works with student media outlets. He also manages onMason.com, a WordPressMU system for the Mason community. You can find him on Twitter as @Chronotope. Aram blogs at Hack Text and you can find him elsewhere online via Google.]
I ask for three things from my notes: that I can take them dependably, read them easily, and sort them effectively. I’ve tried to fulfill those goals with a P2 child theme built for the Kindle.
I chose the Kindle as my go-to device for a pretty simple reason: dependability. The Kindle has the longest battery life of pretty much anything digital I’ve ever used, and it rarely crashes. With the 3G edition I can access the internet nearly anywhere. While the Kindle fulfills my requirement for dependability, there were no…
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