Kindle update

Many books can be read aloud by Amazon's Kindle 2.  Some have that ability turned off by the publisher but "The Candy Shop War" is not one of them.  So, our great grandson can have a story read aloud and follow the text with his eyes, increasing his speed and comprehension.

Our family continues to share a group of Kindles on the same account, allowing all the books to be loaded and unloaded into any of the Kindles at will and for free.  That is fun.

I didn't understand that the email addresses for each Kindle were for emailing an attachment into a Kindle but not for sending a message directly to it.  Now I do understand that.  I just emailed a silly picture of myself into my Kindle and sent the same thing to Tom.  We will see what he thinks of it.

The software update for the Kindle 2 allows books and other items to be put into collections.  Just the change I need.  I plan to have 1 to 3 books in my read-now collection and not add or delete anything to that set until I am finished with those items.  Much like I keep a hot shelf of the more currently worked-on books in my office.

I do continue to find paper books of interest, such as "Cognition in the Wild" by Edward Hutchins about the distributed knowledge among modern seamen handling a giant ship. His interest is in how people share their knowledge and coordinate a complex task when no one has all the needed knowledge or hands.  That book and several others have been borrowed by a library from another library or purchased.  Trained librarians are expert at doing that sort of finding and borrowing.

Getting a book one wants for a low price and in about a minute continues to be a very attractive feature of the Kindle.  Maybe the main attraction is that 255 books take up no more space than the Kindle, weigh a total of 10 oz. (!) and never need dusting.

I am a book luster and am always finding new books I think might be worth a look.  As a grad student, I found that looking at the beginning, table of contents and a sample or two from the middle can often increase my interest or drop it.  Amazon.com is super at tempting me and supplying other books that might be of interest to a person with my set of choices.  A recent update of my favorite browser, Firefox, stopped some of the Amazon page buttons from working but they work fine in Google's Chrome browser.  So, I switch to it when I plan to be on the Amazon site for a while. 

Amazon allows multiple list creation and that has been a handy way for me to keep a record of books and Kindle books, a separate list I made for myself, that I might want to get back to sometime.