One of the unfortunate truisms of modern consumer electronics is that they rarely, if ever, have a shelf life of more than a few years. Whether this comes about just because of the rough and tumble way that most people treat their expensive toys, or whether it represents a scheme of planned obsolescence on the part of manufacturers, most people hold domain over a veritable graveyard of broken gadgets.
We’re only a few years into this whole Kindle experiment at this point, so for the most part, we haven’t really figured out what the shelf life of your average Kindle or Kindle 2 is yet. There are some disconcerting signs, like people reporting fading e-Ink after months of using the Kindle in direct exposure to the sun, and the probability that the Kindle’s non-replaceable lithium-ion battery will eventually cease to hold a charge, but for the most part we’re still in the early part of the products’ life cycle.
So when an e-buddy of mine reported that his Kindle was busted, I was curious to see what Amazon’s customer service response would be.
Upon taking his Kindle 2 out of his bag one day, he found that only about a quarter of the screen was operational, and what it did display was totally garbled. He called Amazon’s dedicated Kindle hotline (1-866-321-8851 for those of you in the U.S.) and was immediately put on the line with a representative. He explained the situation and within five minutes, Amazon was overnighting a brand spanking new Kindle his way, along with a prepaid UPS label and shipping instructions to send back the broken one. No muss, no fuss.
In my experience, a lot of companies will ask that you send them the defective product first so that they can either fix the one you send or, at the very least, verify that your claim of a broken product is legitimate. Evidently, Amazon has taken the decidedly more consumer-friendly approach of assuming that their customers are being honest. Or in the words of my Kindlebro, “I like it when companies trust their customers. I didn’t have to prove that I wasn’t using it as a doorstop or something. I said that it broke during normal use just chilling in my bag and in its case, they believed me and took care of it faster and with a better outcome than I hoped.”
Upon receiving a replacement Kindle, all you have to do is go to your Amazon account page, hit “Manage Your Kindle” under the Digital Content header, and deregister the old Kindle. Then register the new one, change your current subscriptions to your new Kindle, and the rest of your content should download via 3G automatically. It could scarcely be a simpler process.
Of course, my friend’s Kindle was still under the included one-year manufacturer’s warranty. I’ll be curious to see moving forward what kind of policy Amazon adopts when these kind of things happen out of warranty. Here’s hoping they can keep up this level of service.
If you have any Kindle customer service stories of your own, either good or bad, feel free to let us know in the comments!
One of the most underrated features of Amazon’s Kindle is the ability to highlight passages of text to save for later. If you’ve never done it before, just use the five-way joystick up or down when on a given page of a book and click it in at the beginning of your passage, scroll to the end of the text you want, and click it again. You can even type out your own notes and commentary by just tapping on the keyboard after highlighting the text and hitting “Save note.”
Where in the olden days you’d have to underline passages that caught your fancy (or highlight them, if you were particularly sophisticated and appropriately equipped), the Kindle catalogs your notes in a way that’s much easier to access after the fact than photocopying pages or (heaven forbid) copying out passages by hand. For full-time students or just studious readers, this can be in invaluable tool if you learn how to use it correctly.
You can access your notes and marks from the Kindle itself, but if you plug it in to your computer, they’re all available in a simple text file that you can then copy and paste into Microsoft Word and work with. With your Kindle plugged in, go to “My Computer” on your desktop and double-click on the Kindle in the list of devices. Go into the “Documents” folder and locate the file called “My Clippings.txt.” The notes are then sorted by the book they belong to and the date they were taken.
Honestly, though? If I were a student, I would probably find that barely sorted text file scarcely navigable, especially for the purpose of studying certain important passages. Luckily, there is another way! I originally derided the Kindle for PC application, because to me it seemed to defeat the whole point of buying the e-Reader to begin with. In the context of notes and marks, however, it’s a godsend.
If you’ve installed the Kindle for PC application, just double-click the book you want to look at, click the “Show Notes & Marks” button in the top right corner of the menu, and you’ll get a column on the right side of the screen showing all of your highlighted passages and notes in chronological order. When you click on an individual highlight or note, it pulls up that page in the text and highlights the words in their original context. Your notes appear as blue icons on the page that can be selected with a click. If I had a complaint, it’s that you can’t directly copy text out of the application, but I suppose that’s to be expected as an anti-piracy measure.
This is really one of those features that you never knew you needed until you use it. Once you start scribbling notes on your books, it’s hard to stop! If Amazon was smart, they’d expand on this feature in their pursuit of the student market. Perhaps, as seems to be the case with Kindle games, all it will take is a little competitive push from Apple. We’ll see.
Well, it’s been just over two weeks since I received my Kindle 2. I’m happy to say that I’ve been able to read with my new Kindle for those two weeks on just one battery charge. I’m also happy to say that the Kindle gave me plenty of notice before completely running down. I was able to finish up a chapter before plugging up the power adapter for the second time. I was getting sleepy too, so both I and the kindle needed some respite.
It happened again. I was reading at lunch and realized I had not charged my kindle in quite a while. It died. ARRRGH. So I am at work, no where near the standard charger. The plug on this is not run of the mill, but I have a drawer full of old cell phone chargers.
Before beginning to use the charger I will describe later I decided to attempt to do a trickle charge with my USB cable. We’ll if your Kindle is so dead that it won’t alert your machine it is connected then your machine like mine will likely not charge the USB port to even trickle charge the unit. So I began a search for alternatives. It began with confirming that a Kindle will indeed trickle charge at all.
On page 16 of the PDF users guide it says”USB port — plug in the included USB cable to transfer content between your computer and your Kindle. Your Kindle will also accept a small trickle charge over USB that may extend your battery life if your computer’s USB port or powered USB hub provides power.” The words that matter are “small” “trickle” and most importantly “may”. In my case it was too far gone to “may”…
Read more
So I was recently using a book that did not have a table of contents nor chapter links, so I was being beaten down by the need to press next page over 40 times. I was wishing there was a feature that would allow you to jump ahead with more than just a single page. I just learned that you can jump 5% of the book forward or backward by pressing and holding the alt key and the next or previous page keys.
That is a great feature that I can’t believe I missed, is it documented? Perhaps, but I found it while trolling the amazon discussion pages. The Amazon discussion pages are horrible, I would prefer google or yahoo to them any-day, you can’t follow what’s up most of the time. Anyway just a tip you might not have discovered.
Alt + prev or Next page skips 5% of the books length.
So it has been 10 days and i have recharged my Kindle several times. I had the unthinkable happen last night, while in a bible study my Kindle power ran completely out and I was … ARRRRGGGGHHHH … unable to follow along. So it was Wednesday and I had charged it Monday morning and I had left the wireless on… so… it was probably about the amount of time Amazon has insinuated I would need to recharge the device.
As Amazon put’s it “Long battery life. Leave wireless on and recharge approximately every other day. Turn wireless off and read for a week or more before recharging. Fully recharges in 2 hours.” It does recharge pronto, but I had hoped to last longer. Yeah that sounds reasonable doesn’t it… longer… but in any event how long are you seeing it last?
I let it charge completely and turned it on this morning at 9am, wireless is on so I’ll update with how long mine lasts this time until it gives me the “Yeah, I’m shutting down again message.”
Update: Read about my experiences with the battery life of my Kindle 2.
Just discovered that manybooks.net now has kindle formated books available. If you have wondered, “what can I get to try my kindle out with that won’t cost me anything,” search no longer. Many (Ha, that’s part of their name) of the books I read when I was younger and would consider great books for your own library are available at the site. I downloaded Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe and, although it has about 7 pages of pretext explaining that the text came from the Gutenbug project and how you can contribute if you want to, there is a coverpage picture and the text is all there. So in my mind, score one for FREE!
There is a large number of books at manybooks.net that I wouldn’t bother with, but I plan on grabbing many of the classics that I haven’t read or haven’t read since I was much younger. “Frankenstien” by Mary Shelly or Bram Stokers “Dracula” were a few that I have never read the book but have obviously seen ton of retread movies related to them. One I do want to get is Treasure Island and Gulliver’s Travels, which I haven’t read since I was 10, but there are really too many to list here. A large number of Shakespere’s works, Poe, well far more than I had expected. So Kudos to ManyBooks.net for hopping on the bandwagon early and getting their collection converted so quickly. Go check it out, I can’t image you won’t find at least one book you’ll download.
Free Books at Amazon
As a commenter mentioned, there are lots of free books available at Amazon.com. The link I provided lists all available Kindle books sorted by price. All of the free books should appear first, even if you click on a category on the left of the page. I’ve used this technique many times to find new books for zero cash.
Not Free, but Used
While we’re focusing on tightening the purse strings, you should know that there are lots of used Kindles and accessories available on the web. So, if you’re looking to upgrade or pick up some accessories, a used Kindle should be a strong consideration.