• To make it less appealing to thieves.
• To elicit sympathy from nosy coworkers, non-crazy subway riders, or cute coffee shop patrons.
• To uncover anti-Kindle people in your midst — just watch to see who smirks with delight.


Here's the actual .jpg if you want it for yourself.

• To trick your spouse into buying you a second Kindle.
• To remind yourself of the frailty of material possessions.
• To play a prank on your Kindle-owning parent.
• Because you’re weird like me.

Once I got it on my Kindle, I acted all sad and showed it to my boyfriend, who totally fell for it. He even pressed the screen to make sure it was fake. I don’t think it’s as convincing up close — the cracks aren’t sharp and three-dimensional like they would be in real life — but like most pranks, if you sell it well then people fall for it.

This was Nate’s idea over at The Digital Reader, by the way, and the pattern for the crack comes from lachlan.dean. (The text is a page from “The Fuller Memorandum”.) I’ll probably try to make some other versions if I get bored in the coming weeks, and I’ll put them all up on the Screensavers page so you can download them.

1. At the top of the product page for books you’ve purchased:

2. Under the “Your Orders” list of books on the “Manage Your Kindle” section of the Kindle Store:

As of this morning, very few titles seem to have the feature enabled. It appears that all titles without DRM (see this post for details) have it enabled, but the feature is much rarer on DRM’ed titles.

You can tell whether a book is lendable before purchase by checking under the Product Details section, where there’s now a new category named “Lending.”

As for the feature, it’s pretty much as expected and in line with what Barnes & Noble offers on the Nook–the loan period is 14 days, during which time you can’t read the title, and you can only lend a title once. So yeah, it’s not restriction-free lending, but more of an optional loan-once coupon you can redeem on certain titles.

Only U.S. customers can initiate loans, says Amazon. If you live outside the U.S. and you receive a loaned book, your ability to accept it will depend on what geographical rights are available in your area.

Update: Here’s a little more information regarding how lending works on titles, taken from Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (DTP) FAQs. Every book published through the DTP, meaning virtually every indie book, has lending enabled by default. However, on titles where the publisher is taking the 35% royalty rate–which is required on anything priced below $2.99, and optional on anything priced between $2.99 and $9.99–publishers can opt out of the feature. This means that not every DRM-free ebook will necessarily have lending enabled, especially after today. However, if lending was enabled when you bought the book, the feature can’t be taken away even after the publisher turns it off.

Amazon Kindle Lending [Amazon] ]]> http://booksprung.com/kindle-ebook-lending-is-now-available/feed 8 http://booksprung.com/yes-there-are-drm-free-ebooks-on-the-kindle-store http://booksprung.com/yes-there-are-drm-free-ebooks-on-the-kindle-store#comments Thu, 30 Dec 2010 02:42:39 +0000 Chris Walters http://booksprung.com/?p=4476


When the Kindle first came out, everything Amazon sold had digital rights management, or DRM, to prevent unauthorized copying. This DRM is also how publishers restrict how many simultaneous devices can display the book, and whether or not text-to-speech is enabled.

But about a year ago, Amazon started giving independent publishers the option to skip the DRM when uploading titles through their DTP system for the Kindle Store. What this means in plain English is that you can now find DRM-free titles for sale on the Kindle Store, although you’re most likely to find them among indie titles.

How to tell if a Kindle title has DRM

There’s no DRM field in the product listing, but it turns out there’s an easy way to tell: just check under product details whether the title has device usage set to unlimited. If so, there’s no DRM.

Should you care?

If you just use a Kindle or Kindle software and trust Amazon, this DRM issue doesn’t really matter. If you’re one of those consumers who uses multiple devices, or who switches from one type of device to another, or if you like to have multiple formats of every ebook in your library (by creating new formats using Calibre, for example), then you’ll find non-DRM’ed titles easier to work with.

Is converting a DRM-free Kindle title against your license agreement with Amazon?

Probably, but I’m not sure. Here’s the actual language from the license agreement as of July 2010:

“[Amazon] grants you a non-exclusive right to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Kindle or a Reading Application or as otherwise permitted as part of the Service, solely on the number of Kindles or Other Devices specified in the Kindle Store, and solely for your personal, non-commercial use.”

The phrase “or as otherwise permitted” sounds promising, but the actual product page of a DRM-free Kindle title only mentions reading platforms in two places: up near the top under a drop-down list of what platforms the title is available for, and under product details in the “Simultaneous Device Usage” category. I’d like to imagine that since the drop-down list says what’s available and not what’s permitted exclusively, especially when the other category is set to unlimited, then that leaves room for personal format shifting. I’m not a lawyer, though, and I’m not at all confident that a judge would agree with my reasoning, so don’t point any fingers at me if you regret any Kindle file conversions.

(Photo: Ashley R. Good)

Want to know how to make your Kindle environmentally friendly? Read at least 23 books on it, says consulting firm Cleantech. At that point, you’ll have caught up with the carbon emissions from print books, and each ebook you read after that will add a smaller amount to your carbon footprint than if you’d stuck with print.

These numbers are based off of several rough estimates: analysts are guessing that the Kindle’s CO2 footprint is around 168 kg, compared to about 7.5 kg for one book. The Kindle estimate doesn’t include any extra energy used to keep your ebook stored on a server or to display it, but Slate’s Brian Palmer notes that any such energy costs are likely very small compared to the primary Kindle number.

That’s for CO2. If you want to look at water consumption, Palmer points out that the printing of a book uses about 7 gallons of water, versus about 79 gallons for an ereader as well as 2 cups per ebook. (I like to imagine that the water is compressed into book/ebook form, because it makes this whole conversation even sillier.) Based on those numbers, you need to read about 12 ebooks on your Kindle before you can start outpacing the environmental impact of print.

Of course, if you don’t care about or are skeptical of environmental issues, you can still take comfort in the longterm cost savings. If you’re a heavy reader who doesn’t go to the library very much, an ebook device can save you quite a bit of money over the years, especially if you take advantage of freebies and promotional pricing. (I can’t believe how many free books I’ve acquired through the Kindle.)

“iPads and Kindles are better for the environment than books” [Slate/Washington Post]

(Photo: oskay)

Fireworks, flags, and general summer grooviness. Grab these free July 4th themed screensaver images–there are 8 in all–in a zip file below, or jump over to the Free Screens section for others.

• Kindle Screensaver Images – July 4th Theme

Just in case you didn’t know, Kindlerama is available on the Amazon Kindle Store under the blogs section. It’s the easiest way to access Kindlerama on your Kindle, and fresh content is pushed out as soon as I post it.

If you haven’t tried it out, remember that every newspaper, magazine and blog comes with a free 14-day trial period, so you can give it a trial run and save your 99 cents if you decide it’s easier to just read it online.

I haven’t promoted the subscription version much on the blog because I don’t want to be a salesman for my own stuff here. However, Amazon temporarily deactivated it for about 4 hours last week and in the process booted all of my Kindle subscribers, so I’m starting from square one. That means if you used to read this on the Kindle, it’s still available, despite whatever Amazon told you last week about it no longer being for sale. (I’ve been asking for some insight into what happened, but I’m not getting very far.)

Hey, if you do subscribe and decide you like it, feel free to leave a review. I could use some friendly praise on the page!

Thanks,
Chris

Update: There’s better information on the “How to enable custom screensavers” page, including a chart that identifies all the possible Kindle models as of December 2010.

Original post:

If you bought your Kindle 2 used or received it as a gift, you might not have any idea whether it’s the original U.S. wireless version or the later International wireless version. Heck, even if you bought it from Amazon you might not know. Here’s how to tell.

1. Look on the back of the Kindle for the serial number.

2. If it starts with B002, it’s the original U.S. model (uses Sprint’s 3G network).

3. If it starts with B003, it’s the newer international model (uses AT&T’s 3G network, at least in the U.S.).

Normally you won’t need to know this, but you will if you plan on installing your own custom screensavers or replacing fonts on the Kindle 2.

Thanks to kindleboards for this tip!

(Photo: ToastyKen, David Sifry)

Uh oh, Amazon took my books back.

I must admit, it’s hard for me to come to terms with the idea of a company retaining any control over something I’ve paid for, even though networked devices by their nature must participate within a larger group. I suspect this will be one of those attitudes that dates me as future generations grow up within such a system and learn to accept it. But books are a special case in that they can contain revolutionary, heretical, or otherwise controversial ideas, which is the sort of stuff that people in power, or people seeking power, like to control. Call me crazy and paranoid, but I never want a government or legal agency wielding power over my books. Never.

“Amazon Clarifies When It Will Remove Kindle Books” [Consumerist] (Photo: alshain49)

However, I MUST WARN YOU: before you buy a Kindle you have to make peace with a very serious aspect of book ownership. In particular, you have to give it up.

You see, you don’t “buy” books on the Kindle. If you actually read the user agreement, you’ll note that what you pay for when you click the “buy” button next to a title is a license to access Amazon’s rights-protected copy of that book. Yes, they let you download a copy of the file for backup, but what you own is a license. Not that copy.

(And if you’re buying via the iPhone app and you don’t physically own a Kindle, you can’t even download those backup copies.)

If for any reason Amazon decides to pull a book–and they’ve done it at least a few times in the past year–your license no longer works. After all, what would it be used on? The book is gone!

As long as you’re cool with that, it truly is a great little device and a great store. You just have to change your expectations of what “ownership” means when it comes to books.

If you can pay $50 to $100 more, consider a Sony Reader device. The books are still rights-managed and locked, but you actually get to own the files, which is an important distinction.

You can tell a lot about a person based on what he's reading... right?

Kevin Maney’s new article in The Atlantic, “The Kindle in Crisis,” doesn’t have a whole lot of new stuff to say on the topic of whether the Kindle is a good device or a bad device; if he wanted to talk about how the Kindle is inconvenient, there are plenty of usability and design issues to consider that he doesn’t.

I do think this quote is funny, though:

For example, the Kindle lets readers down with respect to one subtle but powerful element of the traditional book’s appeal: its role as an identity marker. Pulling out a particular book on an airline flight or in a doctor’s office can mean staking a claim to being a particular kind of person.

I’ve read a similar comment once before (see section III), and both times it made me smirk and lapse into my later teenage years, when everyone and everything ran the risk of making me seem “pretentious,” perhaps the worst fate that could befall me at that age. As a result, I lost pretty much all desire to use consumer products as cultural signifiers. Since a book is rarely handmade, isn’t it, too, a consumer product–the same as flashing a Nike logo on a shirt, or carrying a purse festooned with goofy YSL monograms?

My point, I guess, is that I don’t want other people to judge me based on what I’m reading, and I don’t read for other people. Or at least I strive not to (nobody’s perfect).

So that’s  a point for ereaders, as far as I’m concerned. Unfortunately, I can’t go so far as to say that they make you look less pretentious, since you’re trading off book jackets for a “lifestyle device” that, like it or not, will generate a lot of opinions about you among strangers.  Just note the animosity many have toward people with tell-tale white iPod earbuds.

“The Kindle in Crisis” [The Atlantic]

(Photo: Ed Yourdon)