Sunday, 29 January 2012

Hello Kindy

Image by Accretion Disc
One of my aims for 2012 (which I blogged about here) was to make better use of my Kindle. Become buddies and improve our friendship. Last weekend I had a go at getting to know it better...

I had a pop at downloading various e-books. Mostly fiction with a few autobiogs thrown in for good measure. No other type of document, but that’s okay to start off with. I’m finding the whole e-book format thing a little tricky – for the life of me I can never remember which formats the Kindle can read. So, I took a look at Calibre software for the first time too. It’s open source and is used to help manage e-book collections by converting different file types etc. On first glance it looks fairly user-friendly and I’m looking forward to becoming familiar with it.

Feeling more confident, I dabbled with a .pdf document, but with less success. The Kindle accepts them, but something wasn’t quite right and usability was zilch. The text size couldn’t be altered and I’d have to scroll along to reach the end of a line. Will have to play around with these a bit more methinks.

There's still lots to find out with the Kindle (or Kindy, as I've nicknamed it), but so far one of the things I find quite fun is the selection of screensavers, and not knowing which will appear next. (Small pleasures and all that...)

At work, we are hoping to buy an e-reader for staff and student use. At Christmas we upgraded our e-book license to downloadable multi-users. However, our e-book platform providers inform us that our e-books are not compatible with Kindles so we are looking at alternative, reasonably-priced models. One of my tasks for this week is to research the Kobo devices. All in the name of work, honestly... it’s a hard job, but somebody has to do it...

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