[Forty-five minutes of swearing, struggling, three suppressed attempts to throw the damn thing through the window, and one general network failure later]
I haz a Kindle that works.
‘Course, I don’t have anything to put on it yet, but that’s Step 2. Even with the slow erosion of Amazon.com
Three words – Baen Free Library.
Is that Amazon link a general referral? I buy RPG books and such every couple months and would happily route it through your referral.
What was the problem? I plugged mine in to charge when I first got it and once that was done, I turned it on, perused the quick start guide, clicked on the link to Amazon and “bought” my first book (I have “bought” in quotes cause my first book was a free classic). And yes Jay, the link is a general referral. After my first few purchases via the Kindle itself, I started using Moe’s link to Amazon to purchase the rest so he’d get a few pennies from them for each purchase. As for the Baen Free Library (and a number of others) there IS a way to convert open source e-books to the amazon format, but it’s complicated and I finally gave up trying to figure it.
Laura: a combination of trying to figure out the network settings, accidentally erasing the network settings, and my home computer’s freezing up inexplicably several times. It eventually fixed itself.
Jay/Phil: as I understand it, if you go through the link anything that you buy at that session gets credited. So if you see bloggers on other sites putting up Amazon links, then I encourage people to use them to shop (that goes for lurkers who wouldn’t give a conservative/Republican the time of day, too: somebody that you like is an Amazon affiliate). Particularly if those other bloggers need the revenue stream more than I personally do, which is probably most of them. 🙂
In addition to Baen, there are simply tons of free books in the Kindle library. F’rinstance, if you haven’t read A Princess Of Mars in a while, you can find just about all of Burroughs’ works either free or cheap. I picked up the entire Mark Twain for about $5. Lots of good choices.
While we’re on the topic, let’s say I want to buy something other that what you have listed. How does that work? If I click on the amazon link, surf around and buy something else, how do you get the credit for it? (Don’t go refinancing your mortgage or anything like that, but if I’m going to buy from them I’d just as soon hit your affiliate store as not).
Just concentrate on building up a good library of the many free classic works. That should tide you over for some time. You can haz Great Books!
Laura, the Baen stuff already comes in kindle-compatible format, but what you want is Calibre. Essentially everything that you’d get from everywhere comes in one of three formats, epub, mobi (kindle), and PDF, and Calibre converts between the three with a click of a button. Now, PDFs may or may not convert well, because they’re about the most lousy format out there (they come from a desire for content creaters to specify the page layout and not allow it to change, so ebook readers in general handle that poorly because their screens are not standard page sizes). But epub and mobi both convert to and from each other well.
Thanks skip! Gonna check this out. I felt like I was being held hostage for awhile when Amazon listed the pedophile book (since removed so I started checking around for a way to convert other formats. I had little luck. I’ll try Calibre.
Your point is an excellent one. As one of those skin-flint conservatives who never give money to blogs, this seems a good way to support your wonderful commentary. Good for me (free), good for Moe (cash), good for Amazon (cheap advertising). I’ll try to remember to do this for my next book purchase. Still leaning towards an Ipad, though. Can you buy downloads for it through Amazon yet?