Ok let’s get a few things out of the way first, since these posts always illicit “I read on my iPad just fine, neener neener.”
- Reading on a backlight bugs my eyes.
- Reading on my iPad is one distraction after another. Bam new push about a tweet. Bam new article just downloaded. Bam another tweet. Now a message from a friend, why what did so and so post recently? etc. etc.
- Kindles are light. I read on the elliptical and hold it when i read. You spend an hour on a machine holding your iPad up and tell me how your arms feel.
Ok now to my point. I recently decided to hijack my wife’s Kindle Touch. She wasn’t using it. I’ve long had and loved what’s now called the Kindle Keyboard. But over the weekend really thought about how often I type on my Kindle. Not often. I highlight a lot of things, and when I make an annotation, it’s usually only a few words. So why lug around a larger kindle that’s a bit heavier? Also Amazon scraps old model support faster than Apple, so the Kindle Keyboard won’t get any new features. Heck the touch might not either but it’s got a few newer ones already.
De registering her account on the Touch, easy. Resetting to clear her data out, easy. Even registering my account on it, easy. Here’s where the process takes a dump. The reason it sucks… because of (shocker) DRM.
I use collections on my Kindle; Sci Fi, Fantasy, Fiction, Business, a few others. I’ve taken to simply storing my books on the kindle vs. removing from device when I finish reading. It’s nice to have all the books there, especially if I want to look something up I know i read a while back. The Kindle indexes all the books on it.
Now you might think it’s as easy as when you get a new iDevice. Restore from back up, etc. You’d be wrong.
And my library isn’t as big as many others.
Instead what you have to do (Found on the kindle support forums) is manually (via the devices archived items view or the Manage my kindle website) bring each book down to the new device. One at a time. For me that meant picking from all but a few of my 202 books, clicking “send to” then the device I wanted them to show up on.
Then once that was complete, wait while the Kindle indexes all the books.
Then (yeah there’s a lot of “thens”) go into archived items -> Menu -> retrieve collections. Viola, your other registered kindles show up, and with a tap you select the kindle you want to import collections from. Unfortunately the collections are really just meta data, so the books have to be on the device first, and fully indexed. A few while later, you’re all set, new device, collections from your other device.
What a waste of time and effort. Why? From what I’ve read it’s a DRM thing, each device you download the book onto imprints it’s PID on it (The unique ID of the device). so simply copying over the entire library from one device to another can’t work, because the books need to be associated to this new devices PID. What a bunch of shit. There’s at least a few easier solutions I can think of off the top of my head. One would be…
I already have to associate a kindle with my Amazon account, logging in on the device. Why not associate the books with my account (maybe a unique ID based on my account) vs. the device I’m keeping them on. That would enable a new kindle to simply import from another so long as it’s tied to the same account. You can limit the number of devices just like Apple does, etc.
Why punish the consumer who buys a new device? It was a 30 minute(ish) problem this weekend with 202 books, what about when I own 500 books? 1000 books? Amazon (and publishers) expect me to grab a snack, a cup of coffee and sit down to start manually downloading each book i own, all over again.
Talk about an incentive to not buy a new Kindle very often.
Of course I could take the time to strip the DRM out of each book i buy, up until now I was happy to play along with Amazon’s DRM solution, but I’m re-thinking that now.
The other thing I’m currently really proud of is 360|intersect. It’s an event I’m organizing that’s 100% different than I’ve ever done before. It’s not a technical event, not a hackathon, or summit. They easiest way to describe it, is TED minus the Douche baggery. It’s a group of awesome speakers, from across the events I’ve done and beyond, talking about what they’re passionate about, what makes them awesome technologists.
