My writing week 3 (46)

Hi all,

I spent a lot of time fiddling with a new Kindle last week. It arrived on Tuesday, three working days after I had ordered it. It took a couple of hours to charge, connected to the USB port of my computer (the power adapter was yet to arrive). I couldn’t figure out how to transfer another copy of Graham Storr’s ebook Timesplash from my Amazon account, Kindle for PC or from Lyric Press, so I purchased another copy for $4.40 from Amazon. It took a long time to download, probably because the battery hadn’t completely charged.

I enlarged the font size up, finding it a lot easier to read then the tiny print in the paperback I had been reading. I tried out the text to speech function. The voice reading the text was more natural than I expected. But I immediately heard one of the problems with text to speech software when it mispronounced a word. The sentence went something like this: Graham read the ebook. Instead of pronouncing read as red, it pronounced it as reed.

The following day I downloaded Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat Cradle to check how fast the downloads actually took, and it only took a minute. The power adapter arrived. At the end of the week, I ordered a leather case to protect the Kindle’s screen, something I should have done when I initially ordered it. I would have saved $20 postage.

I felt some smugness after reading an article in The Age by Charles Wright comparing ipad to Kindle. It said the Kindle screen was much easier to read. Battery life was much greater for the Kindle, and it was lighter and therefore more comfortable to prop up when lying in bed. And the range of ibookstore titles doesn’t compare favourably with Amazon. Add that to the plan costs for an ipad and it costing $450 more, and a Kindle clearly comes out as a superior e-reader.

I finished an article about what happened when we moved my father into a nursing home. My father had very bad dementia at the time. I emailed it to Divine online magazine of Thursday. I don’t know when it will be up.

I did a bit of critiquing and wrote a tiny bit of writing of a novella. I will finish the first draft of it this week. I certainly read a lot more last week as a result of the Kindle being much easier to read than a print novel.

Graham.