Talk:Amazon Kindle

Kindle "location numbers"

I think it would be interesting for the article to cover Kindle "location numbers", which are Kindle's sort-of analogue to page numbers. On two fronts, though, I don't really know enough to write very definitively:

First, is there any kind of definition of what exactly a location "is"? In the book I'm skimming now with my OS X Kindle application, there are somewhere between maybe 1 and 10 "locations" per screen of text. It appears that locations do not map one-to-one to anything "normal", e.g. "screen of text", "word", or "sentence". My guess is that locations are invisible tokens that are located at particular word or perhaps character offsets. But what system is used to determine where, exactly, these tokens are inserted?

Second, what is the general story about whether it's possible to map Kindle "locations" to normal book page numbers, for the purpose of making or looking up citations? Here are a couple of articles that are at least related:

• http://www.edukindle.com/2008/08/page-number-versus-position-on-kindle/
• http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2009/09/how-do-i-cite-a-kindle.html —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.165.82.38 (talk) 06:32, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the link to the page number article and discussion. The article, and the comments that follow it, highlight three issues this article needs to explore: the price and accessibility of this new medium, and its implications.

One might add a fourth question: How to cite a Kindle. The question in my mind is not how to cite a Kindle, but whether to do so. Which is to say, in this instance there is the added dimension of the implications of the Kindle for Wikipedia.

I suppose the phenomenon is so new, and the growth so explosive in this field, that these implications may not yet be known. I do not see a detailed, authoritative work on this subject. Nevertheless, it seems important.

Aquib (talk) 16:50, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

British Library deal

Does anyone want to add some material on the deal done between Amazon and the British Library allowing for (presumably out-of-copyright) Victorian texts to be distributed on the Kindle platform?

Also, I have the Kindle app installed on my iPad and iPod touch. Should I put up screenshots on Commons of something out-of-copyright? –Tom Morris (talk) 21:14, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

Amzn.to

Wikipedia avoids using URL shorteners because of the possibility of WP:Linkrot and spamming; see WP:EL#Redirection_sites. If this problem with the anon adding Amzn.to links doesn't resolve itself in the next day or two, would someone please leave a note at User talk:XLinkBot to request that Amzn.to be added to the list? Thanks, WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:23, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

The article has been protected now for 1 week, that should stop the additions of the shortened links, at least for now. --Funandtrvl (talk) 02:31, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

Yes, why is this still semi-protected? The amzn.to links, while not desirable, are fine. amzn.to is now Amazon's official short URL and they will not link rot or get redirected somewhere else. Links that were restored are not the ideal links and also appear to contain a -20 referral code. For example, the following URL is given for the DX: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0015TCML0/ML0-20, while the preferred URL for this product is http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0015TCML0 or http://amzn.com/B0015T963C

I have fixed this (I prefer the latter form, but used the former so people wouldn't think it was an external link shortener). RoyLeban (talk) 09:29, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

amzn.to is owned by bit.ly. Amazon owns the short domain amzn.com. White 720 (talk) 17:19, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Let's add a section discussing some user modifications

Many of us have jailbroken or hacked our kindles for things like:

- more fonts

- different screensavers

- faster page loads

How about a section on this? It is a valid part of the kindle experience.

See here for more info on what can be done: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=88004 —Preceding unsigned comment added by RedHab (talk • contribs) 10:54, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Yes, that's interesting Aquib (talk) 13:22, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Definitely. I cam here looking for that information Wassname (talk) 20:57, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Topics related to the Kindle and rights to digital material; interoperability and common standards

Kindle ebooks may not be resold [[1]]

The question of borrowing or checking ebooks out of a library and how these relate to the Kindle. Although I did not completely grasp the implications for the Kindle (the article is a year old and I have seen some pdf files work on my Kindle), this article had some ominous overtones. [[2]]

Another older article on library borrowing etc [[3]]

-Aquib (talk) 00:00, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

There is also the input side of things since Amazon expects you to format stuff up for their tool before submitting the books. Hcobb (talk) 00:11, 3 December 2010 (UTC)

Section for additional capabilities?

Each Kindle model has capabilities beyond book reading that are significant to note, especially when you group them together and see the evolution of the device. For example, the Kindle 1 had (unsupported) GPS and SD cards, while the Kindle 3 sports a full web browser, mp3 player, and an (as-yet-unsupported) microphone. Bikeduckquack (talk) 05:12, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Kindle Development Kit

This section talks in the future tense about events planned for February 2010. Did these events eventually occur? Leonard of Vince (talk) 04:26, 29 January 2011 (UTC)

Privacy, rights concerns

Amazon gather a lot of information from the Kindles, such as your locations, and what you are reading. Here is the source . Perhaps we should have a section about this. And perhaps remote content removal could be included, as the core issue is your rights/privacy not Amazons business model. Wassname (talk) 21:01, 29 January 2011 (UTC)