This is probably a good time to remind you of a competitor, Kinstant, that offers a similar service. Kinstant’s page—also displayed via the browser—offers links as well as weather. The weather portion is nowhere near as fancy as what Kindle Weather Station offers, but on the other hand you can add your own custom links and access dozens of commonly used websites. Based simply on sheer value offered, I’d currently recommend Kinstant over Kindle Weather Station.

And finally, Kindle Weather Station also offers a free way to access the service from your Kindle’s home screen. Instead of opening up the browser and selecting a bookmark, you can download the sample of a special ebook from Amazon that will let you jump straight over to the Kindle Weather Station service in the browser. While this counts as a solution, you should know that it’s ridiculously easy to create a “Quick Links” document that you can customize as much as you want, and that can include as many bookmarks as you like instead of just one.

It’s a cool DIY approach to making a mass produced product more useful at the very personal level—although I kept wondering whether something like an iPad might be an easier route if you don’t have soldering or programming skills.

And yes, I realize this constitutes a “short post,” but I didn’t actually put much thought into it. No really, usually there’s some thought in the other ones, I swear!

[Via Teleread via Engadget via MAKE]
(Photo: eewestcoaster)

The hand-cut, stop-motion paper animations are gorgeous. You definitely can’t slice up an E Ink screen to produce such intricate and delicate shapes. On the other hand, you can’t really read the book anymore once you put your knife away. There’s always a trade off.

Here’s the full video so you can see the animations in action:

Related: “Rowling will sell the Harry Potter ebooks on her own starting in October”

Gnod’s literature section, Gnooks, includes a free service it calls a Literature Map: simply type in the name of an author who interests you, and Gnod will stop running human extinction scenarios long enough to return a nifty floating cloud of names. The closer two names are to each other, the more similar the authors are, and their proximity to your initial author indicates how closely they match his or her style.

Above is my test for sci-fi author Charles Stross. In my experience, Doctorow’s voice is nothing like Stross’, but I’m not a computer so I’m probably wrong.

Here’s one for Cynthia Ozick, who you may have noticed by now is one of my go-to names when I want to test something with a semi-obscure but highly respected living author:

And here’s another one for Charlie Huston:

Okay, so they’re not going to win any awards for visual design, but robots don’t need eyes. None of us will after the singularity, but that’s a downer of a note to end this post on, so let me close with the word “balloons.”

Update: If you want a more intimate recommendation—meaning just one author’s name instead of a cloud—you can try Gnod’s Suggestions page, where you enter the names of three authors and (hopefully) get back a fourth.

[via Publishers Weekly]

If you’re not the creative type, M-Edge is offering a nice array of pre-designed cases with retro book covers or New Yorker magazine covers.

What I love about a well-implemented custom case service, and my initial tests of this one are promising, is that with a little creativity you can create pretty stunning, unique products for about the same cost as mass-produced versions. Or you can create ridiculous ones, as in my uniporn example above, and that’s what makes this country great.

Here’s the intro video.

Officially it looks like M-Edge still hasn’t thrown the doors open to the general public, because the home page of MyEdge is still just a “coming soon!” announcement. But hey, the link works and the interface seems to be fully functional, so have fun making your own ereader case.

Update: By default, your custom case design is private. You can choose to make it public by submitting it to M-Edge’s “Style Library,” and then others can order your design for their own devices. However, by doing so you give M-Edge permission to sell your design without paying you royalties, so make sure you understand the fine print before you check the “I agree” box and share your design with the world.

MyEdge [via ChipChick]

Ebony writes that it took a long time to find the right book: “Too small and the edges would be brittle. Too large and it would just become a hassle.” I also think it takes a good design eye to find the right hardcover that adds a touch of character without becoming too jokey.

If you need more than just inspiration, here are detailed instructions on how to hollow out a hardcover book.

The project reminds me of the cases Rebindit makes (only for the Kindle 2 and iPad). Rebindit uses a machine-tooled die to cut the well into the book, which makes for a very clean finished product.

“Kindle book cover” [Elementalise.com via Business Insider]

Jottit.com

My favorite service, after testing half a dozen over the weekend, is Jottit. It starts with a deceptively simple interface — just a box to type in — but once you’ve set it up you have access to so much more. In the admin panel, you can:

• set a custom URL (e.g. “mykindlepage.jottit.com”);
• review and compare past edits;
• change the fonts and the masthead color for when you’re using a PC browser;
• add password protection at both the public and admin levels; and
• add more pages.

I didn’t love the editing interface when you’re trying to use it on the Kindle, but it was manageable. I also thought that while the web mode display on the Kindle is readable, it’s a little narrow. However, the article mode display is nearly perfect.

Pen.io

Pen.io was announced last week, and it’s what prompted me to compare these services in the first place. Its big strength is that it produces highly readable, clean text displays, and with a simple tag you can even create multiple-page entries. On the Kindle, however, the multiple-page feature doesn’t work in article mode, and the Pen.io display is too wide in web mode, which means the Kindle layers a zoom box over the page.

Like Jottit, Pen.io also lets you choose a custom URL and use basic HTML markup to format your text. If you expect that you’ll spend more time accessing this page on a PC browser than a Kindle browser, the zoom feature might not bother you so much.

Wrttn.me

Wrttn.me is, in some ways, the best of the three: not only does it have many of the same editing features as Jottit, but you can even add your own CSS to a page for extreme customization. Kindle web display uses the full width, which is good, although the font is a little small. Article mode is pretty much perfect.

One thing I don’t like is that the public URL, which isn’t customizable, is different from the admin URL, so you end up managing two URLs for one page.

I found Jottit to be slightly easier to use if you’re spending a lot of time on the Kindle, but I think this comes down to personal taste. (I have a soft spot for tiddlywiki-style sites — don’t ask — so Jottit feels more like an old friend.)

Summary

All three services let you use basic HTML or simple markdown tags to apply basic formatting, and all three work pretty well on the Kindle 3, so the best solution for you will partly be a matter of taste.

One thing I discovered is that you might have trouble getting the Kindle’s article mode to work if you just include lists of links, because the Kindle browser looks for paragraphs to figure out what’s an “article.” If you get an error when choosing article mode, try adding a few paragraphs of text to the bottom of your list. In my experience, Jottit.com was the only service that didn’t have this problem.

There were four other services I also looked at — notepad.cc, write.fm, publ.ca, and tidypub.org — but they’re all missing crucial features. Three of them don’t let you make edits after saving your text, while notepad.cc essentially lacks a save button, meaning you can never preserve what you’re typing. In my opinion these four services are almost useless right now, so I’m not recommending them. However, if you still want to try them out, publ.ca and tidypub.org are the two with better Kindle interfaces.

Finally, right after getting this post ready to publish, I came across a new service called Quicklyst. I haven’t tested it yet, but The Digital Reader says that overall it’s pretty good.

So, what am I supposed to do with these things?

I’ve listed several use cases below, but to my mind these notepad services are ideal for creating a personalized start page on your Kindle. You can add your own links from your Kindle or a PC web browser, then bookmark the page on the Kindle for easier access, and update the links or add notes directly from your Kindle whenever you feel like it. I’ve also included some starter code for such a page at the bottom of this post.

Here are some other ideas:

Idea #1: Participate in a virtual book club
Say you and at least one other person are reading the same book, but you’re not in the same location. You can leave notes about the book, theme, coffee you’re drinking, etc. and your friend can add her own comments as well. You create a shared document that you can access from your PC web browser later.

Now that Amazon has launched “Public Notes,” you can also manage this sort of thing using your Kindle’s built-in notes and highlighting features. It’s more convenient because you’ll be able to read and leave notes within the text, but there are two potential drawbacks. The first is that Amazon’s system works best on Kindle texts, so those reading other editions might not appreciate it. The second problem is that there are some privacy issues: you can’t control who accesses your public notes, and you can’t limit access to just one title.

By comparison, if you use a web-based service, then anyone with a browser can also access the notes, and at least one service will let you password protect the page.

Idea #2: Publish to the web from your Kindle
It’s a very simplified way to post text-only content from your Kindle device, without the need to go through the more robust (meaning complicated) backend of a traditional blog. Because these services are almost all text-only, they’re very Kindle friendly.

But don’t expect to create a real blog this way, meaning you can forget about menus, connected pages, and archives. Don’t expect it to be a permanent solution, either. If you use one of these services to publish from your Kindle, you should also regularly save the published content elsewhere, either as a real blog or a private backup.

Idea #3: Publish your writing to a group
Narrowcast your short stories, essays and poems to a group of friends, fans, classmates, or forum members. Another way to do this would be to collect everyone’s Kindle email address, and ask each person to add your email address to their “approved senders” lists; going the notepad route sort of does this in reverse, where the Kindle owners in your group simply visit a single URL each time. This is an easy way to get your content onto their Kindles and web browsers without having to deal with email addresses, spam filters, or formatting problems.

Idea #4: Create an editable start page for your Kindle
(This is the one I mentioned above.) Create a page of links using one of these services, then bookmark the page on your Kindle. Now you have a page of quicklinks that you can customize directly from your Kindle as well as from a PC browser.

Just remember that this isn’t meant to store confidential information; if you don’t use a service with password protection, it’s possible that your links could be seen by strangers, and even on the password-enabled sites you’re relying on an unproven third-party website to store your data.

Here are some sample quick links to get you started. Just copy the contents of that text file and paste it into any of the three services I recommended above, and you’ll have a beginning template that you can then customize to your liking. Remember, though, that you may have to add some paragraphs of text to force your Kindle to render the page correctly in article mode.

(Photo: Dr Stephen Dann)

Take for example a book on American politics, not because that kind of book is fun to read, but because such a book always has two characteristics: a strong point of view that practically begs for counter arguments, and debatable errors either in actual facts or in the interpretation of them.

With Public Notes, now a noted public figure of an opposing political bent can read and annotate a Kindle edition of a new book by someone on the other side of the argument, and the reading public can tune into that person’s highlights and notes from within the original text.

It’s a virtual annotated edition, and one that only exists temporarily. The author of the notes can remove them or disable public access to them at any time, or a reader can choose not to follow their annotations the same way I don’t follow certain celebs on Twitter.

Earlier this week I was laughing to myself about how much fun it would be to add funny or satirical notes to someone’s book, but the big problem was that almost nobody would want to read my notes.

But if Glenn Beck were to annotate Rachel Maddow’s book, and Rachel Maddow were to annotate his, I bet you’d have a considerable amount of interest from consumers. You’d probably sell more of each book to readers who would normally avoid your book.

For now, this seems more compelling to me with nonfiction categories like politics, memoirs and media/journalism criticism. But I can imagine too that public annotations from authors could be used by publishers as a sort of “blurb on steroids” — the key difference being that annotations are actually added content, and therefore added value, that only Kindle editions can currently offer. [Edit: For example, imagine seeing a tweet that says John Hodgman has added hilarious annotations to Jay-Z's "Decoded" -- for a select few, this meta-entertainment would justify the purchase of the Kindle edition over another edition.]

And then there’s the possible bad news: will publishers and authors freak out over this? Do they understand its potential? Will the Authors Guild, or some executive, or a famous author accuse Amazon of producing new works, and therefore infringing on copyright? My guess is yes, and like text-to-speech the feature may get hobbled before it can really take off.

But since I think this can sell more books in the end, I’m hoping that everyone involved on the publishing side of the business embraces it wholeheartedly. And, while I’m blue-skying this stuff, that Amazon hasn’t managed to somehow patent it.

Update: This post was picked up by Teleread, and in the discussion over there the author Michael W. Perry lists some other ways public notes could be interestingly used:

• to provide academic annotations for popular fiction (in his example, dates throughout the Lord of the Rings books);
• to provide author asides and explanations, e.g. in mystery novels;
• to create stopgap corrections or explanations between editions, so that authors are able to engage in an ongoing dialogue of sorts with their readers.

He also notes that ideally, high value public notes could be turned into a bonus feature that you’d pay for, so that in turn the author is compensated.

(Photo: romana klee)

As usual, as soon as I gave shape to the idea, the universe spat it back in my face in some way or another. Me and this universe, we’re gonna have a throw-down one of these days. Not 18 hours after I typed out my Gaga example, I came across this Flickr set of an illustrated “book” presentation of Lady Gaga’s song “Telephone.” (I swear I didn’t know about this before today, even though it was posted last September.)

Sure, it’s not “real” in the sense of being an actual product for sale. Also its visual appeal is partly due to the vintage effect of the illustrations, inking and fake paperback texture.

But whether or not you like Gaga, that particular song, the corresponding crazy-assed video featuring Beyoncé, or drawings of ladies at country clubs, I argue that this is still incredibly cool looking. And if I ever manage to get my notes formed into a cohesive post, you’ll see why I think it’s not as far-fetched a concept as it first appears.

Lady Gaga – Telephone [Andrew Kolb @ Flickr, via omgblog.com]

The story I bought is essentially unreadable for now, because it’s been “dehydrated”: there are just uniform placeholder terms where proper nouns and unique descriptions should be. But I knew this when I bought it. I launch a simple, open source program built to handle complex search-and-replace functions, and it connects to a public domain website where various templates are stored. From that site it retrieves a “Harry Potter” template that a fan has made, and uses it to replace all the placeholders with names and places from Rowling’s saga, then produces a final .epub file.

Now I’ve got a new, unauthorized Harry Potter book.

Because lots of people use this system, the markup language is fairly uniform and growing more so, and it therefore produces a largely error-free final version. There are a couple of errors big enough to impact readability, and later when I have time I report them as bugs to the template website, so that someone else with more time or interest than I have can make adjustments to the template, or so the author can see them and correct her original text.

A wholly formed and unauthorized Harry Potter novel would clearly be a violation of U.S. copyright law, but the process is decentralized so that neither the author of the new work nor the template website is responsible for the final creation of the infringing work. In fact, other templates are available that would turn the story into a brand new work with original characters and places, or that would let a reader personalize it with friends and local places. If you’re feeling perverse, you can apply a Vampire Chronicles template and giggle at Lestat, Louis and Claudia as mystery solving young wizards vampires.

I’m not sure it could be done today. It might be too complicated to implement a markup language that would decisively erase any infringing content but allow accurate replacement from any number of third-party templates. It might demand a strict writing style or format that would prove too limiting artistically. It might simply be considered too deliberately infringing in intent to survive legal scrutiny, especially in countries like the U.S. where copyright power rests in the hands of large corporations who have an interest in locking away content forever. On the other hand, BitTorrent has legitimate uses and has managed to survive these many Internet years.

But my intent is to point out that there are existing and undiscovered applications of technology that will completely explode the existing copyright regime. It might come much sooner than we think, and make the ebook explosion look like a firecracker.

I’m a little surprised that original authors haven’t already started engaging directly with fanfic authors to extend their own fictional series, although I suppose the looming shadow of the Copyright Specter tends to sour most of those sorts of relationships before they can be developed. (Greg Bear and Neal Stephenson come the closest with The Mongoliad, but their terms of service force you to transfer away all rights for anything you contribute, which reduces the collaboration back to the zero sum game of the status quo.)

Am I really advocating for advances in copyright infringement? I think so; after growing up in a world where the majority of my shared public culture is under corporate lock and key, I’ve started to become a copyright punk.

I’m against the current implementation of copyright law for cultural reasons, because I think it’s reached a point where it’s become detrimental to our shared heritage. There are millions of humans who will be born, grow up, produce new creative works on the shoulders of past artists, and die, all while “Gone with the Wind” remains under copyright and locked out of the public domain.* In 2007 a filmmaker can create an original work that incorporates 80-year-old public domain blues recordings, then be unable to sell her film because of licensing issues for the underlying compositions. Other songs disappear entirely because copyright forbids distribution, even though the rights holders abandon those works and fail to properly preserve them. TV shows and movies don’t use the Happy Birthday song because of a (disputed) copyright claim on it, so a living artifact of our present culture regularly fails to be accurately represented or preserved in other works. And right now, a fanfic sequel to “The Catcher in the Rye” (set 60 years later but using the same character) can’t be published in the U.S. because J. D. Salinger successfully sued to prevent it.

If some person or group can manage to bypass copyright by pushing the actual act of infringement to the private citizen level, where no company (hopefully) has the right to witness or record it, then it could be truly disruptive. The next move in the copyright wars would be for corporations to buy legislation that makes the necessary software illegal, but in the end that might be a good thing: I remain hopeful that the more abusive copyright law becomes, the higher the likelihood that it will finally trigger some badly needed restructuring.

 
* Alice Randall’s “The Wind Done Gone,” published in 2001, retold the events of Mitchell’s novel from the point of view of a slave, but Randall had to remove all direct references to Mitchell’s world and still had to appeal an injunction before she could finally publish the book. It made it to print in part because the publisher incorrectly categorizes it as a parody. (Return to the text.)

(Photo: erichhh)