My New Toys

I recently succumbed to the lure of the Amazon Kindle Fire. I'm glad I did. I love it. This is my first Kindle so I have nothing to compare it to, but so far I'm happy. Although I love all things Mac, I passed over the iPad and opted for the Kindle Fire at less than half the price. It doesn't have all the options of the iPad, but I didn't think I wanted all the fancy stuff. I also liked the slightly smaller size. Among other reasons, I wanted one of these so I could download my newest book which recently became available for Kindle. I wanted to see how it looks. It looks great. There were two poems with one bad break each due to line lengths. I simply reduced the size of the font and the lines became just right. I'd noticed earlier when I added a book sample to Amazon's free desktop reader that the table of contents consisted of all blue links except the links were inactive. In the actual Kindle book, those links are active. Click on a title and you're immediately taken to that poem.

I haven't loaded on any additional books yet, but I plan to. In the meantime, I've been using my new toy to check email and hop onto the internet. Very convenient—and fast. Another feature I find very fantastic is Amazon Prime which I recently signed up for. You get a free month with Kindle, but I'd already signed up for it. At $79 per year, it strikes me as a huge bargain. Any book I order now comes with free shipping and two-day delivery. No more waiting until I have enough books to equal $25 so I qualify for free shipping. I get instant gratification, something I'm quite fond of.

Now with Amazon Prime, I can get one free Kindle book per month. I can get magazines and a good selection of movies—for free! I can't see myself watching movies on a reader, but it's nice to know that I can if I want to.

Now for my second toy, the Roku. A month or so ago I missed an episode of "Boardwalk Empire." I missed my weekly dose of violence, so I signed up for HBO GO. That enables me to get all HBO shows and movies on my computer. Since I have a big screen, watching on the computer is very comfortable. I get a weekly email now from HBO listing all the shows. In one of those newsletters, they had an offer for Roku. It's a game box, very small, about 3" x 3". You hook it up to your TV—with a USB cable for standard definition or an HDMI cable for HD. Either one is a very easy, fast setup. Once that was set up, the Roku screen appeared and took me through all the free offerings. For each one that I wanted, I had to go online, put in a code, and bingo, the channel was activated. We can get all the HBO shows, Amazon movies—again, many for free now that I'm a Prime subscriber—and a few other movie channels. I don't watch a ton of movies, but now that I can get so many for free instead of paying $5 each with FIOS, maybe I'll watch more. Of course, there's all kinds of stuff I could pay for, but for now I'm resisting any more temptation.

My Book Goes Kindle

If you'd told me a year ago that I'd be excited about having my book available in a Kindle edition, I would have said you were wrong. But here I am, a year later, excited to tell you that my latest poetry book, Temptation by Water, is now available in a Kindle Edition.

Why the change of heart? It recently occurred to me, and not a minute too soon, that this new way of publishing books and reading them is here to stay. And has several advantages. For one thing, for the author it's a great way to supplement the print edition of a book. My book has been out for a year now. Perhaps it will gain some new readers in its new form. As a reader of books, I'm also realizing how convenient it is to store and carry books in a Kindle. No more packing and carrying a heavy bag of books for a trip. They can all go onto the Kindle reader. Another nice perk is that there is no shipping fee with a Kindle book.

When poetry books were first appearing in Kindle editions, I read a lot of complaints about the results. For example, there were problems with line spacing and stanza breaks. Those problems have now been worked out. The Kindle version looks very much like the print one. Then there have been advances in the readers themselves. My ears perked up when I read the first ads and articles about Amazon's new Kindle Fire. Not only is it very reasonably priced at $199, but also it is wireless and can take you to the internet and to your email, thereby serving nicely as a substitute for the laptop.

Then right about the time the Kindle Fire announced itself, my publisher emailed and asked if I'd be interested in having a Kindle Edition. I'd asked him about that months ago, just out of curiosity. He'd recently done a prose book for Kindle and was ready to do his first poetry book. I said, Yes, let's do it. He got to work and in just a few days sent me the proof for the Kindle version. But I have no Kindle Reader. How, then, to read and proofread? A quick Google search took me back to Amazon where I discovered that they offer free downloadable Kindle Readers for computers, iPads, iPhones, BlackBerries, and Androids. So I downloaded one for my Mac and within minutes was reading and proofing my book.

In less than a week my Kindle book was officially listed at Amazon and Barnes & Noble (for Nook).

I immediately ordered the Kindle Fire, but it won't ship until mid-November. Of course, I was anxious to see how the book would look in its final form. So I ordered a copy. Bingo! There it was immediately on the Kindle app on my desktop. I am very pleased with the appearance. The Table of Contents appears in blue and all titles are underlined, making them look like active links, but they're not. Poems are single spaced and stanza breaks are correct. This Kindle App saves all orders in its library. Once my real Kindle Fire arrives, I can move any titles to that.

One note—at Amazon you can read some sample pages with the Search Inside feature. If your print book has this, your Kindle book will automatically have it. Sometimes spacing issues appear. However, if you have the free sample emailed to your Kindle app, those issues will disappear and you'll see exactly how the real thing will look. You'll find that delivery option on the right side of the Amazon page.

By no means am I'm done with print books, mine or yours, but I can see this Kindle Fire becoming a significant part of my reading.