I have been reg­u­larly using Ubuntu Linux and Mac OS X Leop­ard on my iMac and Mac­Book for about a year now. Dur­ing that time I have found Linux tools to com­ple­ment my Mac tools so I can do just about every­thing I need on either sys­tem. Given that, I thought it would be inter­est­ing to com­pare the cost of each system.

Mac Software: $3,622.55
Linux Soft­ware: $0.00

It seems that Ama­zon has lis­tened to their cus­tomers’ feed­back. They cre­ated a great microsite, kindle.amazon.com, for man­ag­ing your Kindle’s notes and high­lights. On this site you can:

1. View a list of all books you pur­chased from Amazon.com for your Kindle
2. Review all notes and high­lights for books pur­chased from Ama­zon. Note that you will not see notes for con­tent that you have added man­u­ally via usb :(
3. Rate all of your books
4. See user com­ments and other details

Here is the email announc­ing the microsite:

Our cus­tomers have told us that they love being able to add high­lights and notes to their Kin­dle books. We want to make it pos­si­ble for you to access your high­lights and notes directly from a Web browser too. So we’ve released http://kindle.amazon.com, an online tool that enables you to do just that.

To try it out, go to http://kindle.amazon.com, sign in with your Ama­zon account, and sim­ply select one of your books where you have added high­lights or notes.

We hope you enjoy this new fea­ture. If you have feed­back please send it to us at amazonkindle-feedback@amazon.com.

The Ama­zon Kin­dle Team

Here’s a few screen­shots of the site:

A microsite for the Ama­zon Kin­dle that shows all your notes and highlights

Detail of a book’s notes and high­lights in the Ama­zon Kin­dle microsite

Ama­zon notes that if the site is miss­ing notes or high­lights that you know you have made then do the fol­low­ing on your Kindle:

These are the high­lights or notes that you added to this book. If you added high­lights or notes and you don’t see them here, then do the following:

If you have a Kin­dle (1^st Gen­er­a­tion) then from your Home screen choose MENU and select “Check for New Items”.

If you have a Kin­dle (2^nd Gen­er­a­tion) then from your Home screen choose MENU and select “Sync & Check for Items”.

Humor works. Humor + Neg­a­tiv­ity works even bet­ter. Here’s how I found out.

While this post will cer­tainly not become viral, I have been study­ing viral mar­ket­ing and wanted to share about a small exper­i­ment I did. I read a book called World Wide Rave: Cre­at­ing Trig­gers that Get Mil­lions of Peo­ple to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Sto­ries (Kin­dle Edi­tion) in which the author states

It turns out peo­ple react to neg­a­tives. Sev­eral years ago, I worked on a site where we included a link “For Exec­u­tives Only,” which gen­er­ated more traf­fic than other links. Words like worst, don’t, and only are inter­est­ing, and peo­ple want to know what’s there.

This got my cre­ative juices flow­ing and I decided to exper­i­ment. Con­tin­u­ing to read in the World Wide Rave we see an exam­ple of a blog­ger, Mark Hin­kle, who did a satir­i­cal arti­cle on Ubuntu. Just so hap­pens I have a blog on Ubuntu. I copied the idea by mak­ing a neg­a­tive arti­cle of “Top 10 Rea­sons I’ll Never Use Ubuntu.” This list was not seri­ous at all, actu­ally it was a list of 10 things I love about Ubuntu. And it was hastily writ­ten, jot­ted down in about 10 minutes.

It worked! The blog nor­mally receives 200 vis­i­tors per day. After 20 hours of my post being live it had 2764 vis­i­tors. It had been picked up by a cou­ple of Linux blogs, it got dugg, it was Stum­bled, it was twit­tered, it made it into Ubuntu forums, and it sparked some rather inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions in comments.

Only one other time have I had that kind of suc­cess on my Ubuntu blog, and it was an arti­cle that I spent hours on.

I have been read­ing on my 6″ Ama­zon Kin­dle 2 for quite some time now and really enjoy it. But, as with all inno­va­tions that try to re-invent a tried-and-true prod­uct, it has its trade-offs. It does not com­pletely replace the expe­ri­ence of read­ing a real paper book. I thought it was about time we had some side-by-side shots — the same book in print and on the Kin­dle 2, so you can see the exact dif­fer­ences. The book is Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder (link to the Kin­dle edi­tion.)

Gallery

It is imme­di­ately appar­ent that a real book has more con­trast than the Kin­dle. And images are harder to view on the Kin­dle;  the 5^th image above, of the ship dia­gram, is almost unread­able on the Kindle.

Ways that the Kin­dle bet­ters the ordi­nary book

• Built in dictionary
• Search within books
• Search within notes and bookmarks
• Dynamic resiz­ing of the text size
• A whole library of books in one device

Ways that the ordi­nary book bet­ters the Kindle

• Con­trast
• Res­o­lu­tion (espe­cially images)
• Smell
• Typog­ra­phy
• Sense of which chap­ter your cur­rently in. On the Kin­dle there is no way to know which chap­ter your read­ing other than pag­ing for­ward to the next chap­ter or back­ward to the begin­ning of the cur­rent chap­ter. Books can place this info at the top of every page.
• Sense of loca­tion within the book. The progress bar below the text on the Kin­dle works ok, but it’s not nearly as good as page num­bers and the feel of the thick­ness of the pages before and after the open page.

Hav­ing recently pur­chased an Ama­zon Kin­dle 2 I am in the mar­ket for a jacket. I have spent alot of time research­ing and review­ing var­i­ous options and want to share my expe­ri­ence and knowl­edge so you can make a bet­ter buy­ing deci­sion. Today I am con­cen­trat­ing on the M-edge GO! Jacket for the Kin­dle 2.

Sum­mary of product

The M-edge GO! Jacket has a gen­uine leather exte­rior with a grey microfiber inte­rior. It is one of the most min­i­mal­is­tic jack­ets for the Kin­dle 2 — when closed it’s only 0.66 inches thick. It securely latches onto the Kin­dle and has a very soft inte­rior to pro­tect the screen from scratches.

It has no extra­ne­ous fea­tures (dis­trac­tions) such as pock­ets or straps. This is great for the Kin­dle user look­ing for a sim­ple & ele­gant pro­tec­tive cover. The front and back are made of high-quality, durable mate­ri­als. The cov­ers are very stiff, offer­ing great pro­tec­tion for the Kin­dle 2 screen. The microfiber inte­rior is incred­i­bly soft so there are no wor­ries about it scratch­ing the Kindle.

Per­haps the best fea­ture of this jacket is the way it attaches to the Kin­dle. It is the first third-party jacket I have seen that uti­lizes the Kindle’s built-in hinge mech­a­nism (see pic­tures below.) This makes for a very strong and secure attach­ment. Fur­ther­more, because of the outer-edge straps, it is more secure than Amazon’s offi­cial cover because your Kin­dle will not loosely flap around.

Details

The M-edge GO! Jacket is made of padded 100% gen­uine leather on the out­side with a very soft  microfiber ultra­suede inte­rior. It’s dimen­sions when closed are 8.25in. x 5.25in. x 0.66in. And it only weighs 7.2 oz so you will not notice much added weight.

Likes

• Access to all ports while closed
• Very low profile
• Qual­ity mate­ri­als and durable, trust­wor­thy construction
• Great pro­tec­tion for the Kin­dle screen

Dis­likes

• Ini­tially I wished for a strap to keep it closed (I am a fan of the Mole­sk­ine). How­ever, after using it for a few weeks I love it as is (so this isn’t really a dis­like after all.)

Opin­ion

This is one of the most min­i­mal­is­tic jack­ets for the Kin­dle 2. It has a sub­tle style and durable con­struc­tion you can trust in. It pro­tects the Kin­dle well and is easy to hold while read­ing. I highly rec­om­mend the M-edge GO! Jacket for the Kin­dle 2.