The Kindle Chronicles

News - 1) A worldwide survey of 1,007 self-published authors for the Taleist blog shows the average annual earnings of the authors was just $10,000, and half made less than $500. The Guardian reported on the survey, and you can buy a 47-page Kindle report, appropriately titled Not a Gold Rush for $4.99. 2) Via Nate Hoffelder, news that WorldReader has figured out how to fix its own Kindles in Africa. 3) Amazon updates Kindle for iOS, Kindle Cloud Reader, and Kindle for Android. 4) eBook holdout Thomas Pynchon signs a deal with Penguin to publish his backlist as eBooks. Tech Tip - Some tips on using tools at kindle.amazon.com and an invitation to follow my notes and highlights. Please e-mail me at PodChronicles AT Gmail dot Com with your profile and books we share, to help explore social reading on the Kindle. Interview (starts at 15:37) - I interviewed author Theresa Ragan on June 6th at BookExpo America, where she was a star of the Kindle Direct Publishing/Create Space booth. Theresa is a great example of how hard work and good writing can pay off for self-publishers, and she has also signed a deal with Amazon mystery imprint Thomas & Mercer for her next Lizzy Gardner book. Click here for her self-published Kindle titles, which have sold nearly 300,000 copies in a little over a year. Content - Amazon Publishing's impressive 2012 Fall Catalog, including upcoming titles from AmazonCrossing and Thomas & Mercer. Also, my rave review of Abducted, the first of the Lizzy Gardner series by T. R. (Theresa) Ragan and, for the Kindle Fire, To Catch a Thief from Prime Instant Video, starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. And: Amazon announces a deal to had hundreds of movies and TV shows from MGM. Mentioned in Comments - eReaderiQ. Next week's guest - Kevin Eagan, author of the CriticalMargins blog about books, culture and technology. Free Webinar - Click here to register for a free webinar that I will give on Wednesday, June 27th from 3 to 4 p.m. EDT for the Professional Outdoor Media Association. The topic will be how you can publish articles in the Kindle Store, and I will be relying heavily on Kate Harper's essential 99-cent guide, How to Publish and Sell Your Article on the Kindle: 12 Steps for Short Documents. 

News - Voices of BookExpo America: Joshua Tallent of eBook Architects (which is hiring - contact them if you are an eBook developer interested in a position with a growing business based in scenic Austin, Texas) and the eBook Ninjas podcast; Jon Land, author of Strong Vengeance, a Caitlin Strong Novel, on Digital Rights Management, and Benjamin Schrager, an independent book sales representative from the Bronx who has attended every BEA meeting and their predecessors except one since 1968. Tech Tips - Allen MacDiarmid tips me off to a free or inexpensive (if you donate $10 to support it) Microsoft alternative for creating documents that can be converted to Kindle format via Calibre for transfer from your Macintosh to your Kindle. It's NeoOffice. The $79 Kindle gets a software update, to Version 4.1.0. Interview (Starts at 23:38) - Russ Grandinetti, Amazon's VP of Kindle Content, met with me at BEA for a wide-ranging discussion of eBook pricing, Digital Rights Management, Kindle Singles, social reading, and how much longer there will be a Kindle Keyboard in the lineup. He made no newsworthy predictions on the last item but did assert that he, too, has heard from customers who really love the Kindle 3. "I really, really do appreciate that feedback from people," he told me. "We've heard it." Content - Instapaper is now available for your Kindle Fire, for $2.99. So is HBO Go, making its first appearance on an Android tablet via the Fire. Theresa Ragan, who will be my guest for next week's show, is the author of Abducted and Dead Weight, the first two books of the Lizzy Gardner series. Also, James McQuivey of Forrester Research has published his highly original mix of survey data and personal essay, titled Why We Need Dad, available for $2.99 on Kindle just in time for Father's Day.

News - 1) TeleRead has a good roundup of the latest legal filings by Penguin (PDF) and Macmillan (PDF) in the DOJ antitrust suit and by Apple in the class action suit against the same defendants.  2) Are two units of Macmillan--Momentum in Australia and Tor in the U.S. and U.K-- paving the way for a DRM-free eBook future? Cory Doctorow thinks so, and I hope he's right!  3)  Via Andrys Basten, NPD Group suggests a stronger first quarter for Kindle Fire sales than appeared to be the case from an earlier IDC report. Tech Tips - Watchlists for your Kindle Fire videos, and some tips related to sending Word documents to your Kindle devices. Interview (Starts at 16:48) - Eric Hellman, president of Gluejar and the author of the Go To Hellman blog, explains how unglue.it is attempting to help libraries manage the challenges of the digital age. Content - "The Amazon Effect" by Steve Wasserman. Click here for The Nation's podcast interview with him. I'm still reading War and Peace. A good movie on Prime Instant Video for aerobic workouts: The 1984 Footloose with Kevin Bacon, and here's the soundtrack on MP3. Via Me and My Kindle, Rabbit Ears Books has 45 children's books for 99 cents each for Kindle Fire, including The Velveteen Rabbit.  Next Week's Interview(s) will be recorded during my visit to BookExpo America in New York City.

News - 1) Waterstones, the biggest bookseller in the United Kingdom, announces it will be selling Kindles and Kindle eBooks via WiFi at its approximately 300 stores. Managing Director James Daunt a year ago told the BBC the company was planning to create a better eReader than the Kindle. The Economist headlines the story "Strange Bedfellows." The Guardian doesn't think much of the deal. I'd like to see the American Booksellers Association do a similar deal to welcome Kindles into independent bookstores on this side of the pond. 2) Bufo Calvin finds declining activity at the Kindle Owners' Lending Library. 3) Stephen Windwalker points out you have until June 22 to let the federal court know what you think of the Department of Justice's attempt to roll back agency pricing via its anti-trust lawsuit. Here is where you need to send your statement: John Read, Chief Litigation III Section Antitrust Division U.S. Department of Justice 450 5th Street, NW, Suite 4000 Washington, DC 20530 Mike Shatzkin has already sent his comment. Stephen Windwalker offers a lively account of the background to the case. Tech Tips - 1) Shelly Crawford-Stock tells how she keeps track of who buys what Kindle book on her shared Amazon account. 2) Which device is better for sharing comments on newspaper or magazine articles, e Ink Kindles or Kindle Fire? Answer: Not the Fire. Interview (starts at 21:39) - Paul Slack is co-founder and Chief Learning Officer of the Dallas-based Splash Media, where he also serves as President of Splash Media U, the company's e-learning platform. His new 319-page book, Social Rules: A Common Sense Guide to Social Media Marketing, was released for Kindle this week at a truly great price:  99 cents. I spoke with Paul on May 3rd at Splash's Dallas studios. Click here for video of our conversation. Content - Sketch n Draw and Whiteboard Pro apps for entertaining a six-year-old grandson.  Also, Simon & Schuster gets it right with a creative, free eBook sampler of upcoming novels. The Digital Reader has more. Next Week's Guest: Eric Hellman, president of Gluejar, talking about unglue.it. Note: Pastor Mark Pierce has posted his interview with me on his Church Requel podcast.

News - CNET hosts a video "prizefight" between the Kindle Touch and the Nook Simple Touch with Glowlight.  Reuters quotes a source offering details of a front-lit e Ink Kindle Touch in July and an 8.9-inch Kindle Fire by the holiday shopping season. AdAge reports that Amazon has approached at least two ad agencies with a pitch for ads or special offers on a Kindle Fire. Tech Tips - Brett McNeil McNeill on Collections for the Kindle Touch, Tom Semple on images for the Touch, and my construction of a homemade Kindle Fire stylus to use with the 99-cent Smart Writing Tool app. It was a fun project, but afterward I ordered the real thing. Interview (Starts at 17:48) - Mark Pierce, pastor of Church Requel in Mansfield, Ohio, met me for breakfast on May 15th at the Paul Revere Family Restaurant in Lexington, Ohio. Since he had a successful career as a financial analyst before turning to the ministry, I asked him for his take on Amazon as an investment. We then moved on to technology at his church and what he has learned in the last year sharing 1,200 e-books on one Amazon account among 12 family members using about 20 Kindles and Kindle apps. After our interview, we switched microphones, and Mark recorded a separate conversation that will appear on his Church Requel Podcast Monday, May 21st. Content - Bible by YouVision, and the debut this week of unglue.it . Also: Inside Higher Ed's post on unglue.it . Thanks to Tom Atkinson and Bob Anderson for leaving the first two reviews of The Kindle Chronicles blog subscription at Amazon. If you'd like to receive blog posts directly to your Kindle, please consider a Kindle Subscription for 99 cents a month, with a 14-day free trial. And if you've already signed up, I'd greatly appreciate your leaving a review! Next Week's Guest  (Rescheduled from this week) - Paul Slack, co-founder of Splash Media and author of Social Rules, a soon-to-be-published 319-page step-by-step resource on how to use social media tools for bottom-line results.

News - 1) International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that the Kindle Fire's share of the worldwide tablet market tumbled from 16.8 percent in the last quarter of 2011 to just over 4 percent in Q-1 of this year. Geoff Duncan at Digital Trends analyzes the report. 2) Target boots the Kindle. Tech Tip - Tom Semple offers these instructions on how to use the pan/zoom mode of the Kindle Touch running the latest software version, 5.1.0: - tap and hold until the '+' icon appears over the image - tap the '+' icon to zoom full screen (or 100% whichever is smaller) - pinch/spread to zoom in further, drag to pan - touch 'x' icon to exit zoom. John McCormack notes that the Touch can be used as a gallery for images. Kindle Tech Support helps me solve a nagging WiFi connection problem for my Kindle Fire. I had to enter the password of our home network every time I put the Fire to sleep. The solution: Restart the Kindle Fire by pressing and holding the power button on the bottom of the Kindle for 2 seconds and tapping "Shut Down." Hold the power button for 2 seconds to turn the device back on. While the Kindle is restarting, unplug the network router for a full 15 seconds. After plugging the router back in, wait until the router has finished rebooting before attempting to connect to your Wi-Fi network again. Interview (Starts at 12:32) - James McQuivey, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, puts Q-1 Kindle Fire sales estimates into perspective but warns that poor results in the "Moms, Dads, and Grads" second quarter would be bad news indeed for Amazon's tablet. He welcomes the Microsoft-Barnes & Noble partnership as bracing evidence of disruption in digital media. And he predicts "a mess" for e-book pricing if the federal court approves settlement terms for three of the Big Five publishers while the other two and Apple fight the Department of Justice antitrust suit in court. Content - Andrys Basten notes another good Android app for reading ePub files on the Kindle Fire. It's Mantano Reader, available in a Premium version for $4.99 and a freeone. You can't download it to your Fire from the Amazon App Store, though. From your Fire, try this link to Slideme for the download; you'll need to set up a free Slideme account. Pottermore reports impressive sales for Harry Potter ebooks. Laura Hazard Owen and Nate Hoffelder wonder what wizardly announcement Amazon was teasing early this week. NOTE AFTER AUDIO WAS RECORDED: The suspense ended Thursday morning with Amazon's announcement that it has purchased a license making all six Harry Potter books available for free borrowing at the Kindle Owners' Lending Library. Bufo Calvin analyzes results of Amazon's Thomas & Mercer mystery imprint and finds them impressive. Next Week's Interview Guest - Paul Slack, co-founder of Splash Media and author of Social Rules, a soon-to-be-published 319-page step-by-step resource on how to use social media tools for bottom-line results. Links mentioned - Grieg - 100 Supreme Classical Masterpieces: Rise of the Masters for $1.99.

News - 1) The announcement of Microsoft's $605 million investment in as-yet-unnamed Barnes & Noble entity sparks some far-out reaction.  2) The Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight is pretty cool for reading in bed, but in my opinion what it lacks in sophisticated reading tools available on the Kindle Touch far outweighs the innovative built-in light. Tech Tips - Don't forget you can share Audible content on your Amazon account. Tom Semple points out that the Kindle Touch 5.1.0 update enables zooming on larger-than-standard-size images.  Via Eolake Stobblehouse, an article by Adam Engst tipped me off to Aldiko Reader,  a good Kindle Fire app for reading ePUB files. Interview (Starts at 16:44) - I visited Dr. Temple Grandin at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, on April 30 and brought with me an array of Kindles and an iPad. Her considerations of the devices as reading aids for those on the autism spectrum were candid and astute. Her bestselling books include Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals and The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger's. The story of how she used her personal experience of autism to revolutionize the livestock business was dramatized in an HBO special starring Claire Danes. I recorded video of my interview with Temple, available at YouTube in two parts. (Part 1 is live, and Part 2 is here. will be up by the end of Friday May 4.) Jean Remple Recommendations from Paris: 1) French Kids Eat Everything: How our Family Moved to France, Cured Picky Eating, Banned Snacking and Discovered 10 Simple Rules for Raising Happy, Healthy Eaters by Karen Le Billon. 2) French Children Don't Throw Food: Parenting Secrets from Paris by Pamela Druckerman, available from Doubleday on Kindle for the U.S. audience retitled as Bringing Up Bebe: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting. The Next TKC Google Plus Video Hangout will be held Monday, May 7 at 2 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time. I hope you'll stop by during the hour to join a lively conversation about all things Kindle and e-books. If you have not participated before and would like to receive an invitation when I start the hangout, please email the URL of your Google Plus profile page to me at PodChronicles AT Gmail DOT com.  

The final few minutes of TKC 195 contained audio errors which I have corrected in this version. There were no problems in the first 40 minutes of the podcast, including my interview with Mike Shatzkin. If you have already listened to the episode, the only information that you will find in this one that you haven't heard is the date and time of the next TKC Google Plus Video hangout. As this file states, the next hangout will be Monday, May 7 at 2 pm. Mountain Daylight Time. If you are linking to episode 195 of The Kindle Chronicles, please use this link to this revised audio. My apologies for letting the earlier episode slip out onto the Internet with the audio glitches. --Len Edgerly May 2, 2012 Denver

News - 1) Amazon beats financial analysts' expectations with its first-quarter earnings report. 2) E Ink Holdings, on the other hand, has its first first-quarter loss since 2009, thanks to Amazon's "digestion" of E Ink screen inventory that exceeded demand for the last quarter of 2011. Thanks to Sri Peruvemba of E Ink Holdings for providing me with the link to this account in the Taipei Times. Tech Tip - 1) If you have a Mac and a Kindle, you're in luck. Amazon this week released Send to Kindle for Mac, which enables you to send personal documents to your Kindle from your Macintosh computer. It works great, providing a "Send to Kindle" option from any print menu, and other handy tools. If you have a PC, you'll want to check out Send to Kindle for PC.  2) The latest version of the Kindle Fire Firmware, 6.3, made some nice improvements, but I discovered today that there's something missing from the WiFi settings. You used to be able to forget or save a WiFi network and password, but that option doesn't exist any more. I confirmed this with a Kindle support tech, because I was getting tired of entering the password for our home network every time I turned on my Fire. I think the WiFi connection itself is improved in reliability, but the customer interface took a step backward, IMHO. Interview (Starts at 6:03) - Mike Shatzkin, founder and CEO of The Idea Logical Company in New York, spoke with me on April 23rd by Skype about why there was so much hand wringing at the recently concluded London Book Fair, what's ahead for authors and readers if Amazon's dominance of the book business grows, and how his father, the late Leonard Shatzkin, who also had an illustrious career in publishing, probably would have been more inclined to applaud Amazon's disruption than is Leonard's son. Other topics mentioned: Mike's Kobo-inspired collection of blog posts, The Shatzkin Files - Volume I, Richard Kennedy of the Drongos playing "Don't Touch Me,"  Joe Konrath, "Funny or Die," Jane Litte on the Department of Justice antitrust suit, and Mike's comments on it. Content - This interview with the co-producer, Matty Simmons, made me think it might be fun to recommend watching "National Lampoon's Animal House" on your Kindle Fire. So I rented it for $2.99 and watched a half hour of it while working out this morning. Let's say it's still not for the faint of heart, so proceed at your own risk. For your reading terror, Stephen King and his son Joe Hill have a new Kindle Single titled Throttle, available for 99 cents. Mentioned in Comments - Is Jeff Bezos now "dictator for life?" The New York Times's account of the small publisher who removed his books from Amazon. All of Beethoven's symphonies for just $5.99 at the Amazon MP3 Store. Readdle. The case for paper, by a paper company, and its useful Knowledge Center. The Next TKC Google Plus video hangout will be Monday, May 7 at 2 p.m. Mountain Time. If you'd like to receive an invite, please email your G+ profile page URL to me at PodChronicles AT Gmail DOT Com. If you have no idea what that means  and you want to participate in the hangout, email me and I'll be glad to walk you through it. Next Week's Guest - Dr. Temple Grandin, author of The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger's, discussing how the Kindle and other technology can benefit those with autism and other disabilities. If you are unfamiliar with Dr. Grandin's work with animals, which revolutionized the livestock industry, you owe to yourself to to watch the BBC's unforgettable 2006 profile of her titled "The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow," available at YouTube in five parts, as follows: One, two, three, four, and five.

News - 1) More commentary on the Department of Justice's antitrust action against Apple and five publishers over e-book price collusion: Brad Stone and Felix Gillette in Bloomberg Business Week, Mike Shatzkin, and Stephen Windwalker.  2) Kindle Touch 3G goes worldwide sooner than expected, via Andrys Basten. Tech Tip - A comparison of Audible audiobooks on the Kindle Touch/Kindle Keyboard, Kindle Fire, and Kindle for iOS. Recommended: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. Audible sounds better with this Phillips speaker for $19.99. Interview (starts at 27:28) - Doug Lance, 22, a recent graduate of Western Michigan University, is making a decent living with his eFiction magazine, available at the Kindle Store for $1.99 a month. I spoke with him by Skype on Monday, April 16, but contrary to what I say in the podcast, I don't think it was a Casper-Kalamazoo connection. The pleasing aliteration led me astray. He's in Michigan, but it's too late tonight to fact-check the correct city. NEXT MORNING: And the answer is, Ann Arbor! Content - Laura Hazard Owen's e-book Bestsellers Breakdown. Amazon Publishing inks an exclusive deal for Bond, James Bond. If you like to tango, $5 will get you a reason to move: the La Revancha Del Tango album by Gofan Gotan Project. The best thing about the Sketch n Draw app for your Kindle Fire is the price - free. I found the ads distracting, and it seemed to take too many taps to pull up the drawing tools. Still, you can make some cool designs with it when you should be doing something else. Next Week's Guest: Mike Shatzkin.

News - 1) The Department of Justice files an anti-trust suit against Apple and five publishers, three of whom have settled out of court. Click here for the 36-page Complaint and here for the Proposed Final Judgment as to defendants Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster. For a look at where at least one of the alleged conspirators' meetings took place, click here. 2) Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos talks about The Power of Invention in his Letter to Shareholders. Tech Tips - RepliGo Reader app for reading PDFs on your Kindle Fire. Amazon's 5.1 update for Kindle Touch. Interview (Starts at 24:02) - I spoke with Jim Cheshire, author of My Kindle Fire, by Skype on April 10. Other links of interest: MyAmazonKindleFire.com - The My Kindle Fire companion site. The "On" podcast that Jim did for Que, including a tip on using LastPass with the Kindle Fire and also on using ES File Explorer to access files on your network without having to pay for an app. (The podcast is available via iTunes and Amazon as well.) Jim's review of Kindle Fire. Jim's first visit to The Kindle Chronicles in 2008. Content - Kids Place - with Child Lock app for Kindle Fire, Readability, John Tayman's A Single Story, and War and Peace.  Upcoming Guest - Mike Shatzkin for TKC 195 on April 27.

News - 1) Devin Coldewey of TechCrunch has the Kindle scoop of the week, with his first-person description of a new e Ink Kindle with a front-lit screen, apparently coming to the market later this year. 2) Amazon announces "eBooks Kindle en Espagñol Español." 3) CNET UK reports the Kindle Fire is coming to the U.K. and Europe "sooner rather than later," with a video review. 4) Google pulls the plug on its eBooks reseller program for independent bookstores. The American Booksellers Association promises an alternate way for bookstores to sell ebooks. Neil Strandberg of Denver's Tattered Cover Bookstore agrees it can be done, with a lot of work. Tech Tip - Two more things the Kindle Fire can't do compared with the Kindle Touch: Text to Speech, and swipe up or down for the next or previous chapters. Are you planning to give a used Kindle to someone? The process we use to prepare Kindles for E-Books for Troops might give you some ideas. Click here for information on donating a Kindle for use by a U.S. Soldier overseas. Interview (Starts at 20:53) - Panio Gianopoulos, publisher and creative director at Backlit Fiction, sees a bright future for Young Adult literature. I reached him by Skype in Los Angeles on April 3rd to learn more about the innovative plan his startup company has for revolutionizing YA with old tricks and new technology. Click here for a well-done Forbes profile. Other links mentioned: The Encyclopedia of Exes: 26 Stories by Men of Love Gone Wrong by Panio Gianopoulos, Joel Stein's essay, Panio's response, and A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Content - My rave review of The Start-Up by Sadie Hayes, published by Backlit Fiction. An edgy test movie for your Kindle Fire: "I Think My Facebook Friend is Dead." And BookBub will email you a manageable dose of one free-book suggestion a day, like this one: The Price by Alexandra Sokoloff. Audio Note: After using GarageBand to create TKCs 1 through 191, with this episode I have moved up to Logic Pro 9, a powerful audio editing program that I have just begun to learn. One objective was to increase volume levels to match other podcasts I listen to. I would love to hear feedback from you on how this episode sounds, and how you listen to the podcast - earbuds while running? Bose speakers at your desk? In the car? Any suggestions would be appreciated!

News - 1) This just in: Reuters reports that a settlement in the anti-trust investigation of Apple and some of the Big 5 Publishers may be reached in a few weeks that would end the so-called agency model of e-book pricing. 2) Scientific American in its 60-second science podcast reports on a survey highlighting advantages young readers see in the Kindle. Click here for the research paper cited. Laura Hazard Owen reports on Association of American Publishers data showing a big jump in e-book sales in the children's/young adult category. 3) Le Figaro and TechCrunch report that the Kindle Touch is coming to Europe on April 27. But, alas, no Fires anytime soon. 4) TheNextWeb reports that Amazon is readying three new Kindle Fires this year. Tech Tip - You will miss the good, old one-click method of buying an e-book when you start here and travel to Pottermore. But it's worth the effort to land a Harry Potter book on all your Kindle devices. And with no discernable DRM, you can download an ePub copy to your computer and convert it to Kindle format with Calibre for very convenient personal use. Also, click here for info on the Kindle Fire 6.3 download. Interview (starts at 22:54) - Margaret Atwood, the award-winning author of The Handmaid's Tale as well as forty other books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, which has been made into a new documentary film, spoke with me by telephone on March 29th from Toronto. Her dystopian short story, "I'm Starved for You," was published this month by Byliner and is available as a Kindle Single for $2.99. Atwood, who maintains a lively and generous presence on Twitter, says e-books have revived the opportunities to publish short stories as traditional magazine outlets have declined. Would she advise a major younger author not constrained by current publishing contracts to make a deal with Amazon's New York publishing arm? Will there be a sequel to "I'm Starved for You"? Listen in for some surprising answers. Content - Amazon's new Weekend Deals and two apps for the Fire: MapQuest (with faux GPS capability provided by Skyhook) and Xiant Mobile, a new email app. Next Week's Guest - Panio Gianopoulos, who founder of Backlit Fiction . Next Google Plus TKC Video Hangout - Monday, April 2, at 2 p.m. Mountain Time. Please stop any time during the hour for an informal chat about Kindles, e-books and everything else. If you are not in my TKC Hangout Circle, just email the URL of your Google Plus profile URL to me at PodChronicles AT Gmail DOT com for an invitation.

News - 1) Suzanne Collins is the all-time top Kindle author, Amazon announces. To celebrate, they're giving away 12 Kindle Fires and 12 copies of her Hunger Games trilogy in a sweepstakes that ends March 25. And there's also a movie opening based on the first of the trilogy, getting good reviews. 2) Amazon updates Kindle for Android, as reported by BrothaTech at PCMag's appscout. 3) Pestered by Nick Bilton of The New York Times, the feds are taking a fresh look at whether you can read your Kindle and other gadgets during takeoff and landing. Don't hold your breath... Tech Tips - Darlene gets some help organizing the titles on her sister Deb's Kindle, using screenshots and collections. HOW TO MAKE SCREENSHOTS ON YOUR KINDLE: Original Kindle, Kindle 2 and Kindle Keyboard: Hold down the Alt and Shift Keys while you press the letter G. $79 Kindle: Press the 'menu' and 'keyboard' buttons down at the same time and then release. Kindle Touch: Push the home button then touch the screen. In each case, you will find the screenshots in the Documents folder when you connect your Kindle to a computer with the USB cable. From there you can open and print as needed. WHAT TO DO WHEN YOUR FIRE CAN'T GET YOUR BOOKS FROM THE CLOUD: (via Judy and, at KindleBoards, Betsy the Quilter) - click the settings gear at the top - select More.. - select Applications - select Filter by > All Applications - click Amazon Kindle - click the buttons "Force Stop", "Clear Data" This restores all the books to the cloud. Interview (Starts at 13:55) - James McQuivey, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, looks ahead to the future of e-ink Kindles and the looming War of the Tablets between Apple and Amazon. I spoke with James on March 20th by Skype. Content - Three for the Fire: TurboTax, 250+ Solitaire, and Feedly. And, how watching "Page One: Inside the New York Times" led to my renewal of a monthly subscription to The Times with an unexpected extra. Other Links - Brian Matt's report on Cheap Hotspots. Tom Semple on a feature of the Kindle for PC update: I don't think Amazon has announced it officially, but there is a recent update to K4PC and it supports Kindle Format 8 (KF8), mostly: - K4PC will download KF8 if the ebook is available in that format (to try it, download a sample of any O'Reilly-published title or at least a recent one such as "Machine Learning for Hackers") - K4PC supports fixed-layout KF8, but you have to side load it (i.e. it has to be Digital Rights Management (DRM) free. It won't download wirelessly from Archive and you can't select K4PC as the Deliver To.. (as of now anyway). Seems like they need to change something on the servers to allow it. - 2 column layout is not enabled with reflow able KF8 - I think there are going to be sync issues, since the calculation of Locations depends in part on the specific HTML markup used, which in general is different between mobi and kf8. This will go away as other apps and devices become kf8 capable but not all will be upgraded. Note that Personal Documents service is currently hostile to KF8, you can't even email directly to Kindle Fire with the send-to-kindle windows app with 'storage' option turned off, it always strips the kf8 out. But PD service doesn't work with K4PC anyway so it is moot at this point. Next Google Plus Video TKC Hangout: Monday, April 2nd at 2 pm Mountain Time. Next Week's Guest: Novelist Margaret Atwood, who has just published I’m Starved for You from Byliner.

Intro - Omar L. Gallaga reports that South by Southwest Interactive registration this year was up nearly 27 percent compared to last year, to a total of 24,569. News - 1) Amazon updates Kindle for iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch just in time for the arrival of the iPad - 3rd generation. Is the screen better than the iPad 2? Absolutely. 2) Laura Hazard Owen reports on a survey showing college students are switching to tablets and e-readers. 3) Should you buy a refurbished Kindle Fire for $30 less than the new ones cost? Maybe. Tech Tips - Piotr Kowalczyk's EbookFriendly site is a good source of information and tips about the Kindle, including his method of using Twitter for quick links to Kindle samples or purchases.  Also, I'm still having trouble with my Kindle Fire's WiFi connection. Interviews - Daniel A. Cohen (starts at 13:12), author of The Ancillary's Mark: A Novel and Masters of the Veil, the first of the Veil trilogy, described his experience as an author in the Era of EBooks. His publisher is Spencer Hill Press. At the same gathering, Bytes and Books, on March 11, hosted by Shelton Interactive and Cave Henricks Communications, I spoke with Todd Sattersten (starts at 20:28), author of Every Book is a Startup: The New Business of Publishing, available at O'Reilly Media in DRM-free multiple formats for $9.99 and at the Kindle Store for $5.03. Other publishers mentioned: Harvard Business Publishing and Hay House. On March 12, after moderating a panel titled "Publishing Models Transforming the Book," Rachel Deahl spoke with me about how Amazon is perceived from within the traditional publishing industry. She is Senior News Editor at Publishers Weekly.  Content - The Man Who Wrote Old Yeller: Fred Gipson, Texas Storyteller by Mike Cox, Penguin's Book Country, and a free TED app for Kindle Fire. Upcoming Guests – Next week: James McQuivey of Forrester Research. TKC 191 on March 30: novelist Margaret Atwood, who has just published I’m Starved for You from Byliner. Other topics mentioned - "Do E-Books Make It Harder to Remember What You Just Read?" in Time Magazine.