indieKindle: A few little known details about the Kindle

Saturday, January 19, 2008

A few little known details about the Kindle

* CPU: The Kindle's "brain" is an Intel PXA255 processor, originally designed for

mobile phones and smart phones.

* e-Ink Display: There's a reason why the Kindle doesn't do color. Its e-Ink display involves millions of microcapsules that act as pixels that provide a sharp but easy-on-the-eyes black, white and gray display on the Kindle's 600x800-pixel screen. These microcapsules are driven by a layer of transparent electrodes that consume far less power than LCD displays. I think it ranks fairly high in the small world department that e-Ink, the company responsible for this green and literally cool technology, is right across the street from my 9-year-old's elementary school in Cambridge.

* Operating System: Your Kindle's operating system is a modified Linux 2.6.10 kernel. Amazon has complied with Linux licensing by making its modified source code freely available. Among the modifications is support for XIP (execute in place), a feature that promotes more efficient, faster use of the system's memory.

* Memory: Your Kindle is equipped 256 MB internal flash memory. About two-thirds of this memory is available for storing your documents, music, bookmarks, photographs, notes, and anything else you choose to store on your Kindle. The easiest way to see how this memory is being used is to open the "Kindle drive" while it is connected via USB to your desktop or notebook computer. You can greatly multiply the storage that your Kindle can access by adding an SD memory card.

* Battery: You can get the most out of your Kindle's replaceable lithium-polymer battery -- as much as one week on a single charge -- if you keep the wireless connectivity is switched off whenever you aren't using that feature. But it is not a bad idea to order a replacement battery just so you have one handy in the event of a malfunction.

* Connectivity: The service that Amazon calls Whispernet is actually a 3G EVDO wireless broadband service through an AnyDate modem that enables the Kindle to connect to Sprint's United States wireless data network. This service is available in most densely populated areas, but not everywhere. For more information about this service, and a discussion of the economic issues involved in providing it free or at a price, read The Amazon Kindle Basic Web Wireless Service: Why It Is a Revolutionary Feature, and Why Amazon Should Keep It Free or Cheap. The Kindle also comes with a USB cable for easy connection to your desktop or laptop computer.

Beyond all these rather dry "what's under the hood" details, the really stunning details about the Kindle, of course, involve the various ways in which it simply blows away any notion that it is just an e-book reader. Tech writer/blogger Mike Elgan did an elegant job of breaking down some of these features early on in an article entitled Why Amazon's Kindle is revolutionary on the ComputerWorld website. It is well worth reading. Mike also has a blog called The Book of Kindle.

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Free Books and Other Content for Your Kindle

The Kindle store is the best place to buy many books, articles and periodicals, but it is also worth checking out the free content you can acquire through the links below. Then scroll down for Kindle information, guides, accessories, links, and a look at the latest in fresh fiction from some of the Kindle Store's hot indie authors!

Writers & Writing Links & Blogroll

Independent Publishing Resources and Links - in Progress

BowkerLink Publisher Access and ISBN System

American Booksellers Association

Book Industry Study Group (including BISAC Subject Headings List)

International Standard Book Number Agency

Joe Wikert's Publishing2020 Blog

Dan Poynter's ParaPublishing.com

indieKindle

John Kremer's Book Marketing Blog

Reviews of Independently Published Books - Foreword Magazine

Small Press Blog

Small Publishers Association of North America

The Independent Book Publishers Association (PMA)

Amazon's Digital Text Platform for Kindle Publishing (beta)

CreateSpace - high-quality, inexpensive publishing with seamless integration with distribution channels and no setup fees

Believer

McSweeney's Internet Tendency

The Sun Magazine

Grub Street

Poets & Writers

Narrative Magazine

PEN New England

National Writers Union

Sunday, March 23, 2008

A season of renewal

Just a quick drop-by to wish an hour, a day, a season of renewal and new energies to my visitors here. I have been hard at the work of finishing my book about independent publishing -- part how-to, part anthem, about publishing both on the Kindle platform and more generally -- and haven't been here as much as I wished to be, but I'm moved this morning to re-purpose a paragraph from the manuscript and share it with you here:

By heralding and thus extending the life of the good work of others, as readers, writers, and citizens, we are casting bread upon the water. We writers have had to face up to the fact that our initial hopes, that we might happily pursue our writing lives in a Garden of Eden, assured of a loving audience as large as we had any cause to imagine, forgiving of our flaws, where all our needs would be fulfilled, turned out to be delusional. We have been banished to the real world and cursed, like Eve and Adam, to work hard for a living. But it is work that we can do, and be happy to do.
Cheers to each and all,
Windwalker

Friday, March 7, 2008

Indie Author Review Program

att'n Indie Authors: You've published a Kindle edition of your novel, memoir, how-to article or history, so now what?

If you would like to have it reviewed by one of Amazon's Top Reviewers, we can help!

We have been rounding up top 100 reviewers and others who are interested in receiving reading copies of indie work for review purposes, and building a data base by reading interest areas.

If you would like to participate, just send an email to indieKindle@gmail.com with the link to your book's detail page, a brief bio, and a reading copy of your book attached as (preferably) a Word document. Please include "Indie Author Review Program" in the subject line, and include a link to any free excerpts and your website if applicable.

Your content will be only shared with participating reviewers, whose participation will be kept confidential (until and unless they publish an Amazon review). Be aware, of course, that positive reviews are not guaranteed - reviewers will post honest reviews.

Building an audience of readers

On November 19, 2007, Amazon introduced its new ebook reader, the Amazon Kindle. Although it is yet another in a series of ebook devices, it is also much, much more than that. The Kindle sold out in 5 1/2 hours, and Amazon's production process still has yet to catch up with the demand. Whether or not you can ever imagine yourself reading books or journals on a 6-inch e-ink screen, you owe it to yourself, as a writer or publisher, to give serious consideration to what this device can do to help you connect with readers.

More than any other technological development in the past decade, the Kindle will help to provide audience for quality writing of all kinds:

* First, if you follow the steps in the articles that are available to your left, they will enable you to publish books and other content on the Kindle Publishing Platform at zero expense;

* Second, these steps provide a guide to walk you through a seamless, user-friendly process of marketing and promoting your books and other content through a powerful keyword and category search environment that Amazon has created within its "Kindle store," and the cost of this marketing power is, like the cost of publishing on the Kindle Publishing Platform, is zero; and

* Third, and most importantly, by publishing your work for the Kindle now, you will be getting in on the ground floor of the fastest growing segment of avid readers for years to come.

I am, personally, extremely resistant to the notion of telling any writer or publisher that he will ever get rich doing anything related to writing. It is not why we do what we do, and the only paths to prosperity that I know of are paved with passion. So I am not going to talk money here. It makes much more sense for you to do your own thinking on this topic.

But here are some basic building blocks for whatever thinking you may do.

* I published three short-form articles on the Kindle Publishing Platform in December 2007. In the first 15 days they were up, they sold over 15 copies. I did nothing to market them other than fill in keywords and categories for the Amazon search engine. No big thing, in and of itself, until one begins to make logical extrapolations. By the end of the month they sold 50, and another 50 in the first two weeks of January 2008.

* Whatever the small number of Kindles in circulation in December 2007, it is a no-brainer to project that there will be 20 times as many Kindles in circulation one year later, and 50 times as many in circulation a year or so beyond that. Amazon does not roll out its biggest product in years without serious market-testing and a tight plan for ramping up production.

* Can you see where this is heading? Authors who publish directly to the Kindle Platform receive, in effect, a 35% royalty and may set any price they believe the market will bear for their work. They may publish as many books, articles and excerpts as they wish. Ultimately, readers will provide the best filter to determine the success and popularity of the work that is published for the Kindle.

Whether you see the Kindle publishing opportunity as a chance to connect your work directly with readers, as a way to market-test a book project by publishing an excerpt to test response, or as a creative way to build the kind of numbers that might persuade a conventional publisher to give you a book contract, it is time for you to get started. I hope that the articles available at the left will give you a big assist with that process.

You don't need to own a Kindle to publish books or other content for the Kindle. But if you get to work with the publishing process, you may find that your royalties pay for a Kindle sooner than you would expect.