I clicked through to the settings screen and was presented with this new (well, new to me) set of options.

I think it’s terrific. I’ve been a big proponent of eReaderIQ for a while now, because it’s an effortless way for the average consumer to find Kindle deals. (For a similar service for iOS, try AppShopper.) Unfortunately, eReaderIQ’s daily email has been losing its utility lately as more and more ebooks flood the Amazon store—the amount of chaff makes it harder than ever to find the occasional grain of wheat.

This morning, I opened my eReaderIQ email and smiled. It’s a lot cleaner and better organized, and a lot easier to see whether there’s anything worth grabbing.

(Photo: peterjroberts)

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.

The website Mac OS X Automation reported it first, so far as I know. From that site:

Mac OS X Lion includes an Automator action, named Text to EPUB File, that is designed to make it very easy to convert selected text or text documents into EPUB books, ideal for transferring to iPads and iPhones. Additionally, the created EPUB books can include images, MPEG audio, or MPEG video files.

NOTE: If the source documents for the action are in Rich Text Format (RTF), any formatting they possess will be preserved, and display correctly in the EPUB document. Also, the action includes full Unicode support, so Asian and Arabic characters are preserved as well.

By default, there’s no way to access this Automator action from any apps because there aren’t any default Services written to take advantage of it. But the website above provides four Service scripts that you can use to give your copy of Lion super EPUB creation powers over groups of files, text selections, or content copied to the Clipboard.

The site also offers some tutorials on how to install the Services and how to use them, if you’re curious but not sure how to get started.

“Text to EPUB File” [Max OS X Automation]

Now there’s Delivereads, a free service that goes one step further by picking out the articles for you, then emailing them directly to your free.kindle.com email address.

Delivereads is a lot like (yes, more links are coming up) the websites longreads.com and longform.org, which both curate worthwhile articles and essays for you. But you still browse for articles at those sites and then choose which ones to email, whereas Delivereads automates everything after the initial sign up.

Whether you like what Delivereads sends will depend on whether you like founder Dave Pell’s taste in articles. He’s listed some of his recent picks on the Delivereads sign up page.

[via O'Reilly Radar]

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)

To access it, just visit Kinstant on your Kindle and bookmark it.

(On the other hand, if you know basic HTML and want to create your own customized-but-less-fancy shortcuts page, here’s a rough template to get you started.)

(Photo: Kinstant)

The website Kinstant.com is designed to serve as a pre-configured home page for your Kindle browser–just visit kinstant.com on your Kindle for a list of links to some of the most popular blogs and email services on the Internet.

It’s easy enough to set up something like this for yourself if you know basic html, but this is a quick and worry-free solution if you don’t.

Kinstant also has a couple of special features that make it a little more interesting than just a hosted page of links: there’s a one-click “egg timer” feature that starts a timer at 5, 10, 15, 30 or 60 minutes; and a basic calculator for those math problems that are a little too long to work out in your head.

kinstant.com

For instance, Microsoft’s LIT ebook format was a popular choice several years ago, but none of today’s major ebook devices natively support those files. Here are some tips for getting at those ebooks, including the newspaper’s suggestions as well as some of my own.

Note: if the LIT ebook is locked up with DRM, you may have to authorize your Windows PC first to open them.

If you’re using Windows

There are two basic paths you can take. The first is to give up on reading those LIT files on your device. Instead, install Microsoft Reader and just read them on your Windows PC.

Obviously that’s not an ideal solution. Your other option is to try to convert them into something your Kindle can read. The Washington Post suggests Convert LIT, a free app that should do the job. However, it can be a little difficult to use if you’re not comfortable with the command line interface (here’s a brief tutorial). Another option is to download ABC Amber LIT Converter, another free application that should be able to turn your LIT file into something more compatible.

(Hint: if it’s a basic text and you want to read it immediately, convert it to TXT; otherwise try the HTML conversion and then use Calibre to convert that into a Kindle-friendly format like MOBI.)

If you’re on a Mac

For newer Macs, if you can dual-boot into a Windows environment and use the above solutions, I recommend that.

If you’re sticking purely with OS X, there’s an OS X version of Convert LIT that should work for OS 10.3.5 and higher, although I haven’t tested it.

Otherwise, I suggest you try the online conversion service:

If you want to use a web service

Try Zamzar.com. I’ve had mixed results with the service in the past–sometimes it works fine, sometimes I never receive the file from them at all and have to start over after waiting a day or so. However, the service does promise to convert LIT files directly to MOBI format, which will display on your Kindle.

(Photo: pacomexico)

…three things–autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward–are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.

If so, you’re not alone. Over 1,600 Kindle readers have highlighted that sentence from Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers, making it the most highlighted passage of all time on the Kindle “Popular Highlights” website.

Popular whaaa? It’s a new service Amazon just released at the end of April, and it anonymously collects highlighted passages saved by readers and combines them. Any passage that at least three customers have highlighted is considered for the list, and then Amazon’s system ranks and displays them.

If the privacy issue doesn’t bother you (it doesn’t bother me, as it’s not personally identifiable information), it can be fascinating to see what people are drawn to. Outliers may contain the most highlighted passage, but it’s not the most highlighted book. That belongs to Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, with the Holy Bible (NIV) coming in second.

What else do people love to highlight? Well, all of the passages that make up the top 10 that aren’t from Outliers or The Lost Symbol are from from William P. Young’s The Shack.

View these lists for yourself at kindle.amazon.com/popular_highlights.

To test it, I shipped an out-of-print book from my library and paid for only the most basic, nondestructive scanning service. (You can drop the per page cost to 8 cents if you don’t ask for the book back.) Davide Bianchini, the co-founder of Blue Leaf, says that they use a custom built overhead photo-based scanner, as well as an industrial page-fed scanner for the cheaper, book-gets-destroyed option.

After ordering it and paying via PayPal, I bought a padded envelope and shipped the book via media mail. Eight days later I received an email with a link where I could download the files, and two days after that the physical copy of the book was back in my possession via USPS Priority Mail.

As for cost, I spent just under $29, including shipping, for one 288-page hardcover. That should make it clear that the service isn’t being positioned as an alternative to buying e-books from publishers; it seems more suitable to the rare or out of print titles in your library (or for authors with out of print books they’d like to sell digitally–more on that below).

You should also know that Blue Leaf raised its prices since Teleread’s first mention. The base fee is now $17.95, and the per page fee is 5 cents. If I repeated this experiment today, the total cost would be $33.91.

The company offers a menu of additional-fee services: if you want a text-to-speech file, a Kindle-ready file, or a backup on disc, you can buy it separately. To provide these additional services, the company maintains backups of the original scans for at least six months. If you’re not keen on the company keeping a backup copy, you might want to check first; Bianchini says that they “usually comply” with archival opt-out requests.

As far as quality goes, you can see for yourself. Below are portions of two pages from the PDF file Blue Leaf sent to me. The book I sent included photos and maps, so I’ve included one of those pages as well. (Although this is in greyscale, color scanning is offered).

Click the images to view full-size.

And here are the results of the OCR process.

You can see that mixed language texts are problematic for Blue Leaf’s OCR software. Bianchini says the software can recognize 186 different languages, but it has problems if you combine them. The usual suspects cause trouble–things like diphthongs and accented vowels. Bianchini says that they’re looking into improvements to the OCR engine, but for now you can expect good results with single-language texts, and not so good results with the random foreign word or character.

Skewing remains a problem, although this certainly isn’t unique to Blue Leaf. I found one page within the file that was unreadable because it was so distorted, so I contacted customer service and asked them to investigate. I was concerned that I’d have to send the book back for re-scanning, but they were able to correct the problematic page using their archival copy and return a corrected file in less than 24 hours.

Before going this route you should be aware of two other things:

And finally, if you’re an author with out of print books that you want to convert into a print on demand template, Blue Leaf offers a “publisher ready” service for $16. That gets you a formatted and cleaned up PDF file with standardized margins, embedded fonts, and other adjustments required by POD services like Lulu.com. However, it won’t correct “processing artifacts such as page skew,” notes Bianchini. I didn’t test the service.

Blue Leaf Book Scanning

This review first appeared on Teleread.org.