michael’s thoughts

collected

Disappointed About Kindle Newspaper Options

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

I am taking a journalism class this semester as a way to ease back into the academic world and finish up my degree.  Part of the class is to stay on top of the news, which I am generally good about.  I listen to the BBC World Service, NPR, and have a subscription to The Economist.  But I do not read a daily newsprint newspaper.

I’m not overly excited about the idea of subscribing to a paper edition of The Washington Post or New York Times and I’m also not a big fan of reading the paper on a computer screen.  I was hoping this might be a good push to motivate me to pick up a Kindle.

Unfortunately from reading the reviews of the New York Times on Amazon’s Kindle store, it appears that the Kindle edition is abridged.  I could understand that some photographs and perhaps even charts wouldn’t translate well to the Kindle edition, but it turns out that they don’t even publish all of the stories in the Kindle edition.  That really disappoints me as I’m not going to buy a Kindle and pay the somewhat expensive monthly subscription charge for an abridged edition of the newspaper.

If they change that in the future I will be a customer, but for now I think I’ll stick with the web edition.

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Categories: media, tech | Comments

Amazon Should Launch a Desktop Kindle

Friday, March 13th, 2009

Amazon recently launched an iPhone Kindle application that allows you to read your purchased books on the iPhone.  In fact, you don’t even need to have a Kindle to use it.  It seems to me that the next step would be to launch a desktop or web based Kindle interface.  I can think of a lot more use cases where people would want to have access to their Kindle purchases from a computer when they might not have their Kindle available.

In other Kindle speculation, Tim O’Reilly mentioned the idea of marrying the Kindle with O’Reilly Media’s Safari book subscription service.  I think this is a great idea.  In fact, it’s such a great idea that if they do it I may buy a Kindle.

Call me old fashioned, but I don’t really love the idea of buying digital copies of novels, biographies, etc.  I really enjoy having a printed book.  I think a better model would be a “dual use sale”.  If I cold buy a physical book on Amazon and pay a small charge, perhaps $2, to also have it available immediately on the Kindle that would interest me.  I still want to have the physical book and I’m not interested in purchasing the content twice for different formats.

Barring a business model change in the publishing world that would facilitate that, I would love to have a Kindle for reading technical material.  Books, journals, conference proceedings, etc.  If Amazon can get the PDF support on the Kindle to the point where a PDF technical document looks as good as their proprietary e-books, I would buy one.

Having Kindle access to the Safari library would be similarly appealing.  So much so that I expect I would buy a Kindle and subscribe to Safari if that integration were available.

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Fix for wp-amazon in WordPress 2.3.1

Sunday, November 11th, 2007

I use the excellent wp-amazon WordPress plugin to insert Amazon associate links into this site. Unfortunately the version from the web site hasn’t been updated in a long time and it doesn’t work in the newer releases of WordPress. In looking at the support form I found a link to this patch.

I followed these instructions and lo and behold it worked. Posted as a public service to other WordPress users.

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Categories: tech, tutorial and how to | Comments

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