So I broke down and bought a Kindle. As usual, I tend to be open to trying new technologies, but don’t like being at the bleeding edge (where people get hurt). There’s no doubt that electronic reading devices have a long way to go, but there’s also little doubt that they’re the wave of the future, or at least a sizable part of it. And the technology seems to have reached a point where Kindle editions of books are a non-trivial part of the market. My own decision to get one was definitely influenced by the number of queries I received about whether my own book would have a Kindle edition. (Answer: yes.)
And now it’s arrived! So the question is: what’s the first book I should buy? An obvious choice would be Infinite Jest, as the Infinite Summer project is underway and (as I have learned) toting a thousand-page book around on a cross-country flight is less than perfectly convenient. But, of course, I already own that book. And, as Matthew Yglesias points out, you don’t want to buy Kindle versions of impressive books that you can prominently display to buff up your credentials as a person of culture. And the worst would be to display a giant, impressive book on your shelves, but one that was clearly unread and in pristine condition, even though you really did read it, only you read it on your Kindle. Worst of all possible worlds.
The idea, then, is to find a good book that I haven’t yet read, but not one that is too good — not good enough that I’d rather have the dead-tree edition. Any suggestions?
“Kiln People” a really enjoyable novel by David Brin. Perfect because it’s no longer being published (so you can’t buy it new from Amazon anyhow) but is available as a Kindle edition for $10. http://www.amazon.com/Kiln-People-ebook/dp/B000FA5QC2/ref=ed_oe_k
The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space
“I always wanted to buy a collection of those cardboard pretend-books that you find on shelves in furniture shops, but I couldn’t find them so I had to buy real ones instead.”
I was at IKEA last Saturday, in Frankfurt am Main in Germany, and there were hundreds of
what appeared to be dummy books in the bookshelves, with blank covers. Upon opening them
up, however, I saw that they were real books, in Swedish, mostly classics.
I have long been a fan of Robert Anton Wilson’s books. They are fun books to me given how much information and symbolism he packs into his stories. While being a fan and somewhat an emulator of the likes of James Joyce in style, Wilson can wander into a type of thinking akin to the likes of Deepak Chopra occasionally. That aside, overall I really enjoy the twists and turns of his books and to that end I would recommend 4 of my favorites:
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy
Prometheus Rising
Quantum Psychology
I’ve recently borrowed a Kindle and found it excellent. One good book that was recently Kindled is Naomi Novik’s “His Majesty’s Dragon.”
I went with Julian Baggini, What’s It All About?: Philosophy and the Meaning of Life. Then a couple of freebies: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Three Musketeers. But there are some good suggestions in this thread that I’ll definitely be re-visiting.
Kiln People and Jitterbug Perfume and Incandescence are all worth reading, I’d say. (Stop preemptively plagiarizing my recommendations, people!)
If I were an arrogant self-promoter, or even if I had a smidgen of entrepreneurial spirit, I would consider this the perfect time to finish converting my science-fiction novel to a Kindle-friendly format and then boost it heavily. However, whatever drive I have, the evil of Amazon’s software is stronger. I tried using the converter provided on their website to turn a PDF into something natively Kindle, and the result was horrendous. It didn’t just strip out all the formatting, it managed to add bad formatting of its own. I think there’s a way to get decent output by going from LaTeX through HTML and thence to the Kindle, but I haven’t gotten it to work yet.
PDF support is very important for those of us who wander the arXivoverse more than the real world.
Little, Big, by John Crowley. Another fabulous big book, but one that very few people would recognize on your shelf, so it wouldn’t give you any cool points. The only downside might be if the chapter- and section-headings aren’t properly reproduced in their faux-Victorian-scrollwork glory.
PDF support is great – and the Kindle DX is quite good for reading arxiv papers, etc.
Big warning: right now, the Kindle software DOES NOT SUPPORT FOLDERS. So if you want to keep a selection of papers on your kindle for reference, get used to scrolling. This is something I hadn’t seen mentioned, possibly because it doesn’t bother you until you have 50 papers lying around.
As for books, I’d recommend Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson. Unfortunately Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose isn’t available on Kindle – I suspect the instant dictionary feature might be handy.
I for one, DON’T want people (other than literally a handful of friends/ family) looking at what I read. The reason? I don’t want to see the flicker of judgment on their faces which boils down to one of the following
(a) Trying to show off how smart you are, heh?
(b) I can’t BELIEVE you read that crap.
I think the Kindle is a great idea for the bookshelves of souls like me who just want to be left in peace re. our choice of reading material (unless we get caught “in the act”).
Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland – amazingly enjoyable read, but I doubt you’d impress many literati with it 🙂
Interesting. I might have to look into getting a DX of my own. . . .
$ cd Private/papers
$ ls -1R | wc -l
436
Or not.
Another vote for starting with a survey of the books available on Project Gutenberg, and there pick a lesser-known work by a master that you don’t see in the bookstores and wouldn’t be likely to pay for the “gamble”. Try some Wodehouse. After a few books down in Kindle, your enthusiasm for traditional books may actually cool. After a few months, I found myself wishing that I could convert many of my old print favorites to Kindle to re-read them.
While I like Proportion Wheel’s suggestion, “Underworld,” I will nominate a book by one of my favorite authors, Mark Helprin. “A Soldier of the Great War.” Fantastic book. And large. Or another large tome, Pynchon’s latest, “Against the Day.”
Charlie Wilson’s War. Some of the best nonfiction ever. Great, great, great read. Or anything by neil stephenson.
Roberto Bolano — 2666
Mmm… Engadget’s review of the DX was pretty scathing,
http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/19/kindle-dx-review/
but judging on the opinions here I might reconsider getting one…
Having no folder support is unfortunate. I was thinking of putting hundreds of pdfs in it, but that sounds impractical now.
Bezos is a Bozo. They build Kindle on a unixlike (Linux) operating system and then they refuse to support folders, Duh?
You can download a bunch of books for free, ranging from classics to crime thrillers. You can go to Amazon and search for the tag “kindle freebie” .
But I probably should not recommend books to you, as you definitely should not recommend books to me. Once you recommended a reading list on CV and I tried one. I read “the Wasp Factory”. Ick. A book that I strongly wish I had never read.
The DX would be good for reading physics papers, except that
still missing is the ability to annotate .pdf. If you don’t mark papers while you read it would work.
Also missing: the ability to substitute a foreign language dictionary for the usual one, else this would be ideal for foreign language reading.
The part of the Dune series written by Frank Herbert.
An encyclopedia would be nice. I think it’ll be useful to have a source you can constantly check if you want to look up facts and don’t have wireless on your phone.
If you’re into traveling a foreign dictionary would be useful too
I totally love/hate my kindle.