OMG BOOKS! ... for people who read books

[kristin]

I just finished The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I was pleasantly surprised- I thought the hype would kill it for me. It didn't. I'm anxious to see the new film coming out.

[luna]

i wanted to read it but it isn't available for the kindle in canada right now

[Goose]

Um, yeah it is, its just ridiculously expensive.

Seriously, $13.13 for a fucking eBook?  The paperback is $7.99!!  I'd just torrent that shit if that's how the publisher is going to play ball.

[luna]

Goose if you would enlighten me as to how I can load a non amazon book onto my kindle I will <3 you forever

[kristin]

I got mine for free-I use the city library, still. It says on their website that they now lend to kindles, I gotta set that up!

[Goose]

If you can, download an eBook format that's not PDF.  Those usually convert better.  ePub format is preferred.

Download and install Calibre, its like Winamp/iTunes for eBooks.  Load your book into that, use the conversion function to convert it to a MOBI format (the default settings usually work really well if its not a PDF), and then copy that MOBI file to the "documents" folder on your Kindle.  Done.

Or, if you prefer, you can plug your Kindle in while Calibre is running, and it should auto-detect it, and you use it to load the converted book onto the Kindle for you.

This is all assuming there's no DRM on the file.  If there is, that's a whole other ball of wax.  I've had to whack the DRM off some ePubs for my parent's Kobos, and I crack all my Kindle books purely as a habit (there's no fucking way Amazon is going to steal back any books I've paid good money for, or tell me I can't lend my books out to friends).

[r00]

MOTHERFUCKING SONG OF ICE AND FIRE WHAT

On a Feast of Crows...this shit is good.

I'm wrapping up A Game of Thrones right now.  Good to hear it continues to satisfy.  I will probably take a break before starting the next one though.  The fourth and final book of the Inheritance Cycle (the Eragon books) series comes out soon as well as the 3rd book in the Mazerunner series.  I want to read those next as I feel the need for some lighter fantasy reading for a bit.

[luna]

thanks goose 

the first one i tried happened to be a pdf because it's all i could find and it worked just fine.

[Goose]

I'm super anal about formatting and shit, and usually I find that PDFs end up not converting with nice chapter marks for quick browsing, or a proper table of contents, and so on.  I've figured out a method to ensure it works right, but its complicated to try and explain to someone who isn't a code monkey.

I'm glad its worked out for you, enjoy!

[luna]

Well I haven't actually read any of it yet...i just gauged my success on the fact that it's on my kindle and I was able to flip through the first few pages

[rynne]

I'm two chapters into China Miéville's Kraken. It's the first of his books that I've read, and I think I'm in love already. By the end of chapter one, a tank with a preserved giant squid has been stolen from the London Natural History Museum, leading to this brilliant paragraph:

"It can't have, it can't have," a biophysicist called Josie said, and yes, no, it couldn't have, not disappeared, so many metres of abyss meat could not have gone. There were no suspicious cranes. There were no giant tank- nor squid-shaped holes cartoon-style in the wall. It could not have gone, but there it was, not.

[r00]

sounds interesting.  I need to check out his stuff.

[rynne]

Now that I'm further in, Kraken gets even better. It's like some awesome mash-up of Neil Gaiman, H.P. Lovecraft and Mike Mignola.

[rynne]

Er, as opposed to an awesome mash-up of Neil Gaiman, H.P. Lovecraft and Arthur Conan Doyle. Or an awesome mash-up of Batman, H.P. Lovecraft, and Mike Mignola.

[chimera]

Haven't I been telling you guys?  China is brilliant!  N, you must read Embassyville next, and then you can work backwards through his other stuff.  My favorite contemporary writer now, along with Caitlin R. Kiernan.