Make sure you have a full battery and that the wireless switch is turned on before you begin.

The first thing you need to do is navigate to the settings page. A link to it is on the menu off of the home page. The settings page looks something like this:

From the menu on the Settings page, select “Update Your Kindle”.

A dialog box will appear. Click the OK button.

I wasn’t able to get a screenshot of the update process. There wasn’t much to see, so you’re not missing a whole lot. At the end of the update the Kindle will reboot. After the reboot, go back to the settings page and you will see that you have the latest version of the Kindle firmware:

Also check out the new menu item under the Menu on the main page. It used to say “Check for New Items” but now it says “Sync & Check for Items”.

The sync feature allows you to synchronize multiple Kindles so that your current page and bookmarks are preserved between devices. I don’t believe it transfers books between devices, but I’ll know for sure when I have another Kindle to test with.

I haven’t really noticed anything else different about the update. It seemed like a pretty small one. From the screenshots you can see that from start to finish it only took about 6 minutes, and some of that time was spent making the screenshots.

Enjoy!

The free ebooks can be downloaded in one of four formats: html, pdf, mobi, and epub. I have a Kindle so the version that makes the most sense for me to get is mobi. I also download all of the other versions because I don’t know if I’ll have a Kindle forever, and if the technology changes I would still like to have the book available (assuming I like it, I haven’t read it yet).

Let’s take a little side trip and look at the world-wide web, http, and html. They’re universal. They’re open. Can you imagine what the Internet would be like today if web pages for Internet Explorer had to be written in one language and accessed via their own protocol and web pages for Firefox had to be written in a completely different and incompatible language and protocol? When multiple browsers and thousands of companies united behind a single standard (http + html) everyone benefited. Yes there were fights about the direction of html, but in the end everyone came together and everyone benefited.

Does anyone remember Gopher? I do. It was a competitor to the world-wide-web in the early days. In the fall of 1994 it was estimated in RFC 1689 that there were 4800 Gopher nodes. This compared to an estimated 600 World-wide Web servers. Today there are only about 125 Gopher nodes left, mostly run by enthusiasts. Why did it have to die? So that everyone could benefit. It was clear that http and html were the wave of the future and gopher had to die to make room. It wasn’t a bad technology. Parts of it were quite clever. But it had to go.

So here is my plea: I shouldn’t have to download four versions of a single book. Can Sony, Amazon, publishers, and other interested parties get together and unite behind a single open ebook standard please? It will benefit everyone, especially the ones making the ebook readers and publishing the ebooks.

Oh, and quit with the DRM already. By treating everyone like a criminal you are inconveniencing the 99% of us that are honest.

First, I still use the Kindle every day. This is significant because I have several gadgets that I’ve used for a couple weeks and then not used very much afterwards.

Next, the I still think the screen on the Kindle is awesome. It works very well for long reading sessions.

And what do I read on the Kindle? Well, there’s a bunch of books from the Baen Free Library, a bunch of Cory Doctorow books, and several books from ManyBooks.net which in turn came from Project Gutenburg. The one thing all of these sources have in common is that the books are free (mostly as in beer, but also the other kind of freedom for some of them). Yes I’m a cheapskate. However, I haven’t read them all, and until I do I don’t see any reason to go buying more. I also have several documents I’ve converted using the @free.kindle.com conversion service.

The features of the Kindle that I don’t use are: the mp3 player, the picture viewer, and pretty much anything else that is not directly related to reading books. The Kindle is a book reader and it doesn’t work very well beyond that. It’s an excellent book reader though, so I can forgive its imperfections in other areas.

It’s an excellent product. If you are the type of person who does not read for fun, the Kindle is not going to turn you into someone who does. But if you are, get one.