Where to begin?

I just got a kindle for mother's day! I'm excited but a little overwhelmed. I'm not very good with technology but like the idea of being able to have so many books in such a portable format.

The main thing I'm not "getting" is how to tell if a book will have an easy to use format (i.e. interactive table of contents, etc.) when I purchase the book. Maybe this is because I've been trying to buy free books. I'm mainly interested in classic literature anyway. For instance, I bought an Edgar Allen Poe collection of short stories, but you can't see each story in the table of contents and therefore can't just jump to a particular story.

Anyway, is there a website where you can purchase books for the kindle that has good reviews of the layout of the books on the kindle? Not looking for actual book reviews.

Also, any other suggestions for me as far as getting to know and love my kindle?

Thanks!

You might want to check out www.kindleboards.com

All kinds of good Kindle info.

Congratulations on having a new Kindle!

Occasionally a book description on Amazon will state that a collection has an interactive table of contents, but not always. The best thing about the classics is that many of them are free, so you can download and see whether the layout works for you. Other than checking the book descriptions and any attached reviews for clues, I know of no way to know for sure.

For more recent titles, the tables of contents are usually interactive. And for most titles, assuming you have a K2, Ki or KDX, moving the 5-way button to the right will usually take you to the beginning of the next chapter. This is also true of magazines, where you will be taken to the next article.

Well, if you're getting the free books, the simplest thing to do is download them, see if you like the format, and if you don't then you can just remove them from your Kindle hard-drive (though they'll still be available to you on the "Manage Your Kindle" page on the Amazon site). What do you have to lose, if they're for free? I will observe, though, that the free public-domain classics available from Amazon's Kindle Store usually are rather poorly formatted and don't usually have very good TOC linkage.

You might want to try Feedbooks | Mobile if you're a bit more obsessive-compulsive (like I am) about good TOC linkage. I've generally found the Feedbooks formatting superior to any other freebie source.

Now, slightly off the subject of your original post, but here's one BIG caution about the Kindle Store. The Buy This Book Now link is the default selection when you get into the Kindle Store's description page, and it's awfully easy to down-push the 5-way button accidentally. If that happens, you've bought the book! What should happen, though, once you click the Buy This Book Now link, is that a second page will come up asking you if you bought the book by mistake, and that will give you a chance to cancel the purchase. If you don't cancel the purchase right away using that page, though, then you're going to have to go through the hassle of calling Amazon's Customer Service to cancel the purchase.

Also, even though you cancel the purchase immediately and don't have to call Customer Service, it's going to take a few days for your money to be refunded electronically to your credit or debit card, so Amazon gets the benefit of the "float" on the interest during that period. Sneaky, so just be aware and be careful, especially with potentially expensive purchases!

i"m really tempted to buy a kindle, even though I'm
not sure I want to read books electronically, I just
think they look neat and I love toys. but is it as simple as they say it is to download books? I don't have high
speed internet at home and I'm wondering if I need
it to download material.
Also is the device as easy to use as they say it is?

You don't even need to own a computer to download to the Kindle.
You turn on the Kindle, turn on the wirelass connection, select Kindle store from the menu, select the book you want, select buy this book and within 2 or 3 minutes the book will be on your Kindle ready to read.
Nothing could be simpler.

You do need a computer to download to Kindle if you're not within range of the 3G wireless connection. The likelihood is that you'll be within 3G-range, but coverage in some parts of the country can be a little spotty.

You also need a computer if you want to access the "Manage Your Kindle" page on the Amazon web site. Accessing that page isn't essential to downloading, but you'll probably run into situations down the road where management of your Kindle's settings will be easier to accomplish from the "Manage Your Kindle" page rather than doing it on your Kindle directly.

Even with a dial-up modem, though, you'll still have sufficient access to the Amazon web site for anything you'll want to do with your Kindle. If you're not within 3G-range for wireless download directly to Kindle, though, you'll have to download to your PC, and some of these files can be big if you're using a dial-up. For example, Danielle Trussoni's Angelology runs 748kb, and a download of a combo-file of the "complete" works of Charles Dickens (costing only $2.99, being in public domain) runs over 20 megs. You'll have to be the judge of whether you want to download something of that size over a dial-up connection.

The good news is, Amazon has a very generous no-questions-asked 30-day return policy and they don't charge any restocking fee. (But check this out and make sure the policy still applies, or better yet call Amazon Customer Service and be sure. I'm an early adopter, and I upgraded from K1 to K2 as soon as K2 was released, so it's been quite a while and policies could change, but I doubt that's the case.) Give it a try and return it (in the same condition you got it, including all accessories) if you find it isn't working out for you.

Thanks for the two messages above for clarifying things for me. Have people found the prices of ebooks going
up recently? When I read messages from a year ago
here it seemed as if no one was willing to pay more then 9.99, but many of the titles I looked up in the
kindle store were 14.99 now.

8>> Prices in the Kindle Store of current best-sellers have probably been going up a little in recent months. I think the reason for this is, believe it or not, the competition that Amazon's encountering from other eReaders. This is an unusual situation in which competition doesn't work to the benefit of the consumer but rather of the supplier (in this case, publishers and authors).

Publishers are now in the position of being able to demand that eBook stores (such as Kindle, Nook, Sony, and now Apple) charge higher prices. If Amazon refuses to go along, then the publishers can simply cut them out of the market and go with competing eBook stores. The ultimate consumer (in this case, readers), however, can't so easily switch from one eBook store to another because we're made investments in eReaders and don't intend to buy multiple devices. Hence the competition among eBook stores is proving a boon to publishers and authors but not to readers.

That's just my take anyway.

There are still a lot of books, in fact the overwhelming majority of the Kindle Store's inventory, that are priced well below $9.99. That figure of $14.99 that you're seeing is mainly for current, just-released books that are in high demand.

Thanks for the information CurrerBell..interesting and
useful to know.

If your interested in the classics, here are some great places to get books for free.

gutenberg.org
Search for the author, or book title. Mainly .txt and .mobi formats, but they do have an experimental kindle format

manybooks.net
Same deal there, plus they have a genere devoted to classics. Many different formats, including .mobi and kindle.

freekindlebooks.org
Smaller collection, but good source. Even though the name is freeKINDLEbooks, the files are .mobi. Which is fine, as that format works very well. In fact, I am finding I prefer that format.

Both the manybooks, and freekindlebooks site have basically the same books as gutenberg.org. I have found that books in the .mobi format are actually a bit "better" than the kindle formats. But also, the .txt format will work as well, but might not have interactive TOC, or notes. Some do, some don't.

But, you do get what you pay for, these are all free, in the public domain, books. So, sometimes they might not be the most "eligent" of formats, but the contents of the books are there.

I bought a Kindle last year just before going back to the middle east as a contractor. It is a wonderful way to carry a lot of books with you. I currently have nearly 180 volumes loaded on the Kindle, and some are huge. Complete works of Jules Verne, all six volumes of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, Complete Shakespeare, Complete Shelly, and many more. Currently all of those take up only 256MB of the memory. So I have a long ways to go to fill it up. Much more transportable than dead tree books.

Hope this helps,

Bill Masom