Archive for the ‘Kindle Love’ Category

Today Kris brought up something that I had never thought about over on her blog…insuring your ebooks. I never considered the possibility because I am a paranoid person, I back up EVERYTHING. Well most of the time at least. When it comes to books tho? I never delete an ebook unless I hate it and I always have a backup. So, let’s talk about the ways you can back up your ebooks from your ereading device.

#1 – Trust the webstore you bought it from

Most ebook retailers keep a bookshelf of all your purchases so that you can re-download them at any time. Amazon for example will let you re-download books to your Kindle directly from the Kindle using your Content Manager. You can also login to Amazon.com from your computer and from your digital library resend your files to your computer hard drive or to the Kindle. This is certainly an easy to do it if you buy all your books from one or two select stores that offer this.

#2 – Keep a copy of your ebooks on your hard drive

I believe that all ereader devices offer the ability to plug your device into your computer and download your books from the device to a folder on your hard drive. This essentially gives you a copy on your ereader and one on your computer. This may be enough for some people…. it isn’t for me. I don’t like to keep books I have already read or am not reading currently on my Kindle. Instead I keep all of my library on my hard drive and only put on the Kindle things I am reading or going to read in the next few weeks. It keeps clutter down… it makes me happy. If you are this type of person too, you want to combine this method with an alternative backup system like one of the ones below…

#3 – Make a second copy of your library on a portal drive or DVD

If you keep your library on your computer you can always duplicate that by copying it to an external hard drive such as this or by burning your books to a DVD. A DVD is like 4gb work of space so it will hold a lot of books. The problem with this is that you have to remember to back up when you add new books…. I am just not that on top of it. I do burn my books to DVD about twice a year but it isn’t my main backup plan.

#4 – DropBox
DropBox.com is a online storage service that will sync with your computer. You get up to 2gb with a free account and that is plenty of space for an ebook library. I have well over 600 books in my library and have only used 30% of my space. All you do is sign up for an account and then install a bit of software onto your computer. This bit of software will allow you to specify a “drop box folder” on your computer. Anytime you make changes to this folder it will update your online storage account with those changes, ie. you specify your calibre library as your dropbox folder and you edit the Metadata of one of your books… the dropbox software will see that and update the same files you changed in your backup files located on dropbox.com

Because of the automatic syncing it works extremely well with ebook libraries. I mentioned Calibre in the example above… I bet some of you are still not using this software. If not, why?? It is the easiest library software you will find and just had a major update that lets you add custom columns so you can mark books read! Go, download it. now.

Making Calibre and DropBox play nicely
Ok, now that you have Calibre, let’s talk about how to make DropBox and Calibre share a library folder. easy

• Step 1 – Sign up for a Drop Box account.
• Step 2 – Follow the DropBox instructions and install the software. The software will ask you to place a folder called “DropBox” on your computer somewhere and within this folder is where your library will be. Think carefully about where you want to store your books, you should obviously choose a spot where you have at least 2GB of space if you think you will fill your drop box. Unsure where to put it? Generally, your “My Documents” folder would work fine. You can see mine is put inside a partition on my hard drive called “Storage”. It has a green check on the folder because it has been synced recently.
  

• Step 3 – Once the software is installed and you can create a NEW folder within the “DropBox” folder that will be your ebook library. This folder is “mostly” public on Dropbox.com – if someone has your user id or you gave them the link they would be able to browse inside of it. You can call the folder whatever you like – I used “MyBooks” as an example, mine has a secret name

  Current Calibre Users – You do not need to recreate a library folder. At this point you can move your current Calibre folder from it’s former location to inside the dropbox folder. Example, if you have a “Calibre Library” folder in your “My Documents” you want to copy the entire folder and then paste the entire folder inside your “DropBox” folder. You can rename it if you want as we will have to tell Calibre where the folder has moved to anyway.
  

• Step 4 – Set your Calibre preferences. Open up Calibre(if you were a previous user it may give you an error saying your library is missing or it may just open up and all your books will be gone. DO NOT WORRY!). Once Calibre is open, hit the “PREFERENCES” tab along the top menu bar. Under the General tab you are going to specify the location of your ebooks, this is where you want to browse to find your “MyBooks” folder within the “DropBox” folder. Once it is set, click OK. You are done! Once you do that, if you had a previous library all of your books should now be visible in Calibre again tho it may take some time or it may take a restart of Calibre depending on your system.
  
  

Now whenever you update your calibre library, it will update your online library of books…. giving you 2 complete backups of your ebooks. If you get a new computer or lose your hard drive all you have to do is download dropbox again and it will create the folders and put all your books back into them.

If you want to go a step further and create a viewable web catalog of your books that you can can browse on your phone, check out Dear Author’s post on creating a cloud. I admit I have done it, but being a Kindle owner it would require me to keep both kindle format and epub in my library to read with stanza. Because of that I never read on my iphone unless through Kindle for iPhone. I keep mine set up tho because I like being able to browse the covers of all my books.

I hope that helps and feel free to ask any questions you may have or contribute any other backup ideas you have!

And before you even say it, no…. we are not talking about the sexy pirates. Tho I do love a good sexy pirate… especially if he is all scruffy and can talk with an accent of some kind….. hmm pirates… *dreamy look*

Anyway, before I get distracted by the idea of sexy pirates, let me say I am very happy to have a special guest posting here at KindleVixen today. The Mighty Buzzard graciously agreed to stop by and talk about ebooks with me. I am sure you are all tired of hearing me rant and rave on twitter about them and the new Agency Pricing Model that is looming over our heads today. The Buzzard brings up some great points, if only the publishers would listen. So thanks to him for being here…. take it away sexy techy dude… (I love a man who can make use of a good formula).

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There’s been a lot of chatter lately about REP. It’s gotten me to thinking about ebooks in general and piracy. Now I could go off on a rant but I’ve been coding a lot lately, so I’m going to go for logic this time even though there’s been no evidence that publishers are swayed by things like that.

Publishers, you are competing with piracy. It makes no difference that you have legal right to distribute the material and they don’t, they’re still competition. Further, they’re not going away. If the RIAA and MPAA combined can’t do a damned thing to even slow piracy, you’re certainly not going to with much shallower pockets. You have to offer more value than pirates if you want to make a sale.

Let’s have a go at the math behind this nebulous term “value”. Start off with the value of the content of an ebook to the customer (Its value to you doesn’t matter. At all.), call it $C for content. We also need to value the convenience of the distribution method for the customer, call it $E, because their time and effort is valuable to them. We’ll need to valuate any moral repulsion they have to violating copyright and not contributing anything to the author (Yes, only the author. Customers don’t give two shits about publishers.), call it $M. Of course we need the price of the book, $P. Because you seem to want to use the hell out of it lately, set $F equal to the fear of jail/lawsuits. Conversely, there is the defiance of heavy-handed methods that the user feels, or $D. One last bit, cross-title (hopefully) targeted advertising on the site of purchase, $A. Believe it or not, this last one does have value to the customer as well as to you; they want to be able to find other books they’d like.

So we have for publishers legit distribution chanels:
$C + $E + $A – $P – $D = total value to customer

and from piratical channels:
$C + $E + $A – $M – $F = total value to customer

Recognize that since we have factored in morals and fear, the customer will be going with the choice with higher value every single time. Now $C is the same value in both channels, so we can effectively discount it for this discussion but you should keep in mind that it exists when considering the math of release windows because you set $C to zero if you don’t release what the customer wants before the pirates.

In $A, you should have an incredible advantage over piracy but you seem to not want to invest much into it. So you have only a very small advantage that you could lose at any time.

Using $F as a method of devaluing piratical distribution channels hasn’t worked very well for movies or music. Do you assume that you have some innate attribute that will cause it to work for you? Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. But let’s assume a very small positive value here just for argument’s sake even if it will increase $D for a good chunk of potential customers.

Experience has shown that you can increase $M by getting authors to connect positively with their fans. Negative comments from authors or publishers have no effect on $M and serve only to increase $D. Always. Every. Single. Time.

Increasing $E is the most important place you really should be able kick the hell out of the pirates but you’ve instead chosen to let them have an overwhelmingly commanding lead because of the need to control the material through DRM and exclusive hardware. People want to be able to get a book in a click or two and they’d like to be able to shift format for use on their device of choice. Forget control. It’s an illusion. You never had it and you never will. Worry about your total value to customer. If it’s higher than the pirates’, you will win.

Lastly, there’s $P. Pirates will always have the advantage over you here, what with $P being zero in their case. So, tell me, how does increasing $P, thereby decreasing your total value to customer, help you compete?

I’m not going to bother summarizing. I don’t feel like going back through all that and shortening it to fit in one paragraph. Make yourself some bullet points or an outline or something. Office guys like that kind of crap.

~The Mighty Buzzard

Ever wished your kindle books had a differenet font? Well lucky for you, they can. You can change the default font on your kindle with a simple hack. Only stipulations are that this ONLY works for the K2, specifically those with 2.3 version software. If you have a K2 and have turned on your wireless anytime in the last few months, chances are that includes you. You should also make note, that with any future Kindle software updates you may need to remove the font hack, update and then reinstall the font hack. I will include uninstall info below as well.

Anyway, here we go. Remember, it may seem complicated but if you do it step by step its easy peasy!
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I haven’t blogged about my Kindle in a while and thought that I would take the occasional Tuesday to go over my favorite tips, tricks, and hacks. Our first trick? Getting your own custom screen saver on your kindle. If you are wondering why you would want to do this…. I give you exhibit A…. my Kindle loaded with some of my favorite yummy men as screen savers. (note the lighting is bad so the pics are darker/off color than they are in real life…. sorry, It seems some troublemakers have hidden my camera!)

With that eye candy in the back of your head, let’s get started. Remember, it may seem complicated but if you do it step by step its easy peasy!
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Well good news for us Mac lovers out there…. (which really shouldn’t be debatable) …. Kindle for Mac is now available for download from amazon.com. It is about time, I was really tired of Amazon emailing me daily flaunting its Kindle for PC app. This means Mac users everywhere can now read books bought from Amazon on their Macbooks and iMacs. We can also now sync a book we are reading on the Kindle to the one we are reading in the Kindle for Mac application. All very handy.

Now the bad news…. the app appears to be a beta version and is pretty basic. It has a great sidebar that will let you view notes/bookmarks that you have made in a book (from your kindle), but you can’t edit or create new notes or highlights while reading in the Kindle for Mac application. You can create bookmarks, and those will sync across your different devices along with your last page read.

All in all, a good start and you should definitely download it (Free!), but I want more. Amazon.com owns Stanza which makes a really kick ass reader for iphone, they can do better than this.