Kindle Paperwhite

Look what Santa dropped home as a pre-Xmas gift.Thank you Santa oops Shrinivas

Got this in a preBlack Friday sales thread found at slickdeals

Welcome Kindle 10th Gen

So specs first

-8 gb of storage(more than I need) v/s 4 GB in the basic

-300 ppi (pixels per inch) 2x of the basic Kindle @ 167 ppi

-Flush screen

-water resistant

Frankly I can’t really justify buying this instead of the basic kindle.I had bought two ( for friends) during my trips to the US( at around 96 USD each after tax) but que sera sera.

So this deal for the same number ( around 97 USD seemed like a good deal) ,considering that normal price in India is 13K, so I basically got it for a 50 % discount.

With that , I would also recommend to get a Niyo card. This card gives a very low markup, same as VISA and has no conversion charges etc.Saves me a lot of money.The above link does not have a referral FYI.

The main reason I got the Kindle was , drumroll please, to read.I had books but the thought of lugging them around to read in my commute seemed Herculean.

OK,first thoughts.

Looks really nice.Display looks as if its actual paper. In fact, I forgot my kindle in my office since I kept it on my desk and the display didn’t catch my eye at all.

What confused me at first was that the display does not turn off at all. You can long-press the power button to switch off the screen but even then it remains on.Only the screensaver goes away.Used to switching off mobile displays,I found it odd.Then I remembered tha eink displays consume power when changing states aka page refreshes.

Btw , I had bought this kindle with special offers ( basically you get ads as a screensaver).But I have not seen any ads until now. I had an apprehension that perhaps Amazon might not allow me to use the device since it is basically discounted due to the ads but nothing like that, yet.In any case, i guess you can load books via USB.

Lets see how to add books to the kindle I had associated the kindle with my Amazon prime account during setup. As you can see in this linkSupported formats, only the following formats are allowed

-Kindle Format (.MOBI, .AZW) -Microsoft Word (.DOC, .DOCX) -HTML (.HTML, .HTM) -RTF (.RTF) -Text (.TXT) -JPEG (.JPEG, .JPG) -GIF (.GIF) -PNG (.PNG) -BMP (.BMP) -PDF (.PDF)

So, basically we would want to convert all books to the mobi format.

Calibre to the rescue.Calibre is a pretty good ebook management service for converting and collating your collections. Frankly I haven’t used all of its goodness.

Once you download and install it, you can select a folder and it will find all the ebooks there.

On 2nd screen of the welcome wizard, you should choose your kindle device.

On the next screen, you should fill up the email address from your amazon account as above.You can obtain the same by going to the manage your devices link in Amazon Manage device .Copy paste the email mentioned .It is of the form (Amazon account email account+ random alphanumeric combination@kindle.com) You can edit this email address to your liking too. Kindle has this nifty feature that you can send all types of supported formats to this email account and it will land up on your Kindle once it connects to WIFI.

Also note that there is a whitelist of email addresses that can send to this email address.To access this visit Approved Personal Document E-mail List under Preferences and edit the relevant device. You can add email addresses from which you want emails to be received.

Once you copy the email address into Calibre, you can proceed and then can convert your books to Mobi format and have Calibre email them over to you.

Enjoy your books.

A small list of books that I’m reading:

-Why we sleep

-Elantris( 2nd time)

-Sapiens