Instapaper extracts web articles for your Kindle

This is a really effective free utility that picks up the text-body of an article while ignoring the side links and ads all around it and then gets it ready for reading later and for delivery to your Kindle if you want (there's a 'pro' version that lets you do tilt scrolling if using this for an iPod).

 It does best when you use the webpage's option to 'print' an article (easier to determine the text you need) or to choose a 'single page' version if that's offered by the website.

So far, I've received really nicely formatted versions of the articles without any of the stuff to the sides.  But there are times when a page can confuse it, I read.  TIME gave it a Top Ten iPhone App for 2008.  Here are some press reviews.

If you sign up at Instapaper, it'll display a form to add the URL of a page but, much better, gives you the option of just using a "Read Later" bookmarklet that you can move to your browser's Bookmarks toolbar.  When you click the icon, it will automatically pick up the URL of the web-page you're on and then set the article up for reading later and delivery for your Kindle when you're ready for that.

You're given your own Instapaper page, which will hold the article(s) and make a 'digest' of articles in one file, with a choice of least 1 or 5 or whatever number of articles to include in the one digest-file-send (the digest will tend to cost no more than 15c with Amazon's new email-to-Kindle fee) or you can choose to send just what is there, manually, to the Kindle.  You just have to make sure that your Amazon ManagerYourKindle page includes the approval to accept Kindle mail from the special Instapaper From:email address given on their page.

To 'manage' your setup, you click on the "Account" option at the top of the page and choose to send, daily or weekly, a digest of articles that have been saved for reading later, or just manually send one instead.

They don't want you to send Feeds though. For that, they (and I) recommend Kindlefeeder.

It's worth the time to read Creator Marco Arment's Instapaper FAQ and check out his blog for plans and features.

Also see CutePDF for an interesting alternative utility.

Kindle 2's voice reads a personalized script

UPDATE 5/1/09 - Engadget's interview with Tom Glynn - "the Voice of the Kindle 2."

  (Also see later UPDATE on Tom Glynn's latest interview and voice technology.)

Below text originally added 4/27/2009 06:18:00 PM
  On a fun Amazon Kindle-forum thread titled "Tomisms" for odd events in the Kindle voice's (mis)reading of various words (some of these are hilarious), Bufo Calvin, author of Free Books for Your Kindle as well as the heartfelt The Disabled Deserve to Read: The Controversy Over the Amazon Kindle's Voice, offered forum members the personal script he wrote for his Kindle 2's voice to introduce himself.

 I modified, with his permission, that amusing intro for my own Kindle's Tom to use, and you can hear that here if interested in hearing what the K2 voice does with a personal text file.

The Kindle 2's text-to-speech technology is courtesy of Nuance.com and if you heard the mp3 above, you'll recognize Nuance's "Tom" in Nuance's official demo.  Bufo Calvin was the first forum poster to notice the similarities of the Kindle voice to Nuance's.  I don't personally know Bufo, but he's a very alert guy :-).

On an Engadget blog entry about my original posting at Kindleboards which Harvey Chute blogged, there used to be a 2nd page of comments that included some interesting details from a Mike Spa, who commented that he used to work with Tom.

"I use to work with this mystery Tom -- the voice talent.  He's a great guy to work with.  You have *no* idea how awful bad voice talents can be to work with until you have to record 2,000 voice prompts for a automated speech recognition system.  I used to design the user interfaces for those systems.  I have since moved on once I realized how much everyone hates them so."

Mike pointed us to Tom Glynn's page, where there are linked feature articles about Glynn and his work -- in The Boston Globe, The New York Times, Washington Post, etc.

Now, that's a kind of voiceover work that I'd never thought of.

For the interested, here are all of Nuance's demo voices for several languages.

UPDATE 4/28/09 - Lynn Mostafa posts on this thread that

"Astonished when Tom read *ASAP* out *as soon as possible* and pronounced *1-(831)-xxx-xxxx* as *area code 831* etc.  The tiny dude inside my Kindle is pretty smart.  Guess that's because he reads so much."

Amazon Customer Fixes Kindle-2 Dim-Font Plight

Ted Inoue's trial replacement fonts (a sort of beta-test, created and run by an Amazon customer) have brought ecstatic responses by other customers who had considered returning their Kindle 2s due to a strongly-perceived problem (backed up by photographs) on some units with too-faint fonts on a somewhat darker background than used with the Kindle 1.
  The strong lure of the Kindle-2 has been shown by the customers petitioning for darker fonts rather than returning their units.

See Inoue's animated image showing the effect of some of the replacement fonts relative to Kindle-2's basic font.  Click on the image at that page to start the animation showing rotation of pages displayed with various fonts from his trial font-set.

UPDATED PARAGRAPH - 5/2/09 - This was pointed to in an earlier blog entry but belongs here too: See See TechCrunch's article that makes Inoue's replacement-font results clear, using his webpage example.  But Inoue later found that it's not due to font-smoothing but to the amount of black that gets rendered on the surface that we see.

 Most of those wanting the font-changes seem to be customers who found their Kindle 1 displays beautiful but have been finding their Kindle-2 units difficult to read and a strain on their eyes.  (Most customers, of course receive units with good displays -- I am one of them but, I've seen photos of clearly substandard ones).

 Inoue and many other customers have seen quite a variation in the various K2 screens (with regard to lightness of gray and darkness of fonts), indicating some quality control problems with e-Ink's 16-shade screen affecting some customers.

 Amazon is aware of the problem and does replace the units until the customer gets one with a display that works for the customer and which doesn't fade in direct sunlight upon page-turns).  I imagine they get replacements from E-Ink in Cambridge.

 Amazon's replacement policy has been very good, though some of their customer service reps don't get that policy message until a customer asks for a supervisor.

 Also, too many customers have received units with fonts that failed in direct sunlight.  I've read that some Sony units have this problem too but that Sony doesn't replace the units, saying to at least one customer that the e-Ink display does not work in direct sunlight.

 Amazon does replace any unsatisfactory units and will, until the customer has a unit that works correctly; they do this because an E-Ink technology feature is that it works just as well in direct sunlight.  And they appear to have better customer service policies than Sony.
 Lightness of fonts may not be directly related to that sunlight exposure failure, but they often co-exist.

 As far as we know, this affects "only" several hundred people visiting the Amazon forums to ask questions, who have signed a petition requesting Amazon institute a simple fix, such as a font with more 'black' ink showing in the characters.  Customer Inoue has been able to do this, and he's provided customers with a variety of font-sets to choose from and they're extremely pleased about the results.

Caveat:   Problem?  Anyone testing these font-replacements must UNinstall them before any periodic Amazon Kindle firmware updates that come, so far, once a month.  But they can re-install them after the Amazon updates.

The history of this has been described in the original entries for 1) Screen Contrast problems for some users who had loved their Kindle 1 displays, which was further reported on by Wired.com) and 2) Ted Inoue's new findings, a few days ago.

  In mid-April, Inoue wrote to Amazon Customer Service Representatives at their official public Amazon forum topic, letting them know of his successful trial results and offering them font-sets to try from his tests making fairly easy font-replacements for the Kindle 2.
  Customer Service representatives on their own forum thread have never responded to Ted.
  It's as if users and this problem for many of them just don't matter to Amazon, which means it apparently doesn't matter to Jeff Bezos (or they would reply in a constructive way).

  The forum thread by users requesting darker fonts on the Kindle 2 now numbers about 800 posts.
  Since the topic-thread participants are very happy with Inoue's replacement fonts, they are now asking that Amazon do something like this, especially since Inoue has shown it can be done quite easily, possibly with options to choose the default set or a darker one.

Amazon's fee$ to convert emailed docs direct to Kindle

On May 4, Amazon starts charging for converting e-mailed documents for the Kindle when they are emailed direct to your Kindle. These will be at 15c per megabyte rather than the previously advertised 10c per document, rounded up to the next megabyte -- and will include support for DOCX files though, like PDFs, the more complex ones might not format correctly.

There will still be free format-conversion of emailed documents for the Kindle but only if you direct the email to [you]@free.kindle.com rather than [you]@kindle.com.  Kindle users will need to move the documents from their computers to their Kindles, with the USB cable provided (it's part of the power cord) and while that will be inconvenient for many, the conversions will still be done free of cost.

The ease of just having the converted emailed-document sitting on the Kindle without having to place it there with Windows Explorer or Mac Finder will now cost you 15c per megabyte.  It will also mean that the Kindle owner must have a computer and know how to use basic file-handling to move documents from one folder to another if they want the free conversions to their computers.  Many have bought Kindles for parents without computers.  That group of customers will need to pay for any e-mailed converted documents to the Kindle.  Amazon's statement on this:

"As always, you can also use our free document conversion service for any document you want to transfer over USB, and you will not be charged.

  Still, most Amazon-format books are under a megabyte.  That will mean a 15c charge (rounded up) for a rather hefty-sized document.  We're talking text-focused books.

  The difference will be in how many illustrations are involved.  PDF documents can be in text form or consist of image-scans or direct graphic copies -- the latter is not recommended for any of the small e-readers anyway.  Documents with large photographs will be large in size (always) and therefore much more costly and these always load slowly on an e-reader, so these have not been recommended in the past.

Small photographs won't be so much of a problem but can make a book average 2 megabytes rather than 1 megabyte -- or a cost of 30c to convert it and send it direct to your Kindle.

(One of my electronics manuals was 28 megs -- but that was too large for Amazon to handle anyway so I did it myself with MobiPocket Creator, which Amazon owns, I believe, and then I used the USB cable to put the converted PDF from my computer into the Kindle's document folder.  That's a Windows program.  Mac users would tend to use Stanza or Calibre as discussed in other blog entries below, earlier.

 But unless Amazon becomes capable of having the Kindle read PDFs natively on the Kindle within a year, they will not survive in the e-reader world that is coming up.  Sony already reads it natively although the results are almost unreadable due to the small font they use for documents meant for 8x10 paper or large screens but instead presented on a 6" screen.  Every e-reader being developed will be able to read PDFs and maybe ePub files directly.  Since Amazon just bought Stanza, they may plan to do this also.

A service like Kindlefeeder will be somewhat affected by this, since that service is already feeling the impact of too many who are downloading large feeds daily and the service is needing to charge $20/yr for scheduled deliveries to one's Kindle, to lighten the queued-documents problem on their servers.  The Amazon-related cost to the user of doing a large volume of feeds direct to the Kindle, daily, may result in a scaling back now of the large demand on Kindlefeeder's servers as some subscribers may choose a smaller number of periodicals for the downloads. The free Kindlefeeder feature involves doing a manual-send to your Kindle and some may even prefer that to the automated daily send.  Daniel feels that this will also shorten processing times overall.  The daily scheduled delivery is now going to be on the premium plan noted. Getting it, on demand, as wanted is free. The Amazon-emailing cost of a daily feed to the Kindle direct, at 15c a day, will average $4.50/mo.  There are a lot of newspaper/magazine feeds available to be batched in one file per day though.
UPDATE: 5/14/09:  Premium members will get free direct Kindle downloads.

Kindle 2 and iPod Shuffle Screen Test 2 - Star Trek

The Wrath of Khan - Those voices are at it again. Will we be the first to fall?

DVICE's Talking Gadget Theater II - With EMOtion this time (well ...)

KHAN: Kindle 2
KIRK:  iPod Shuffle

What does Amazon gain with Stanza?

Update to Amazon Buys Stanza.

What Amazon gains - by Chad Berndtson:
1. Exploding base of e-reader consumers - 1.3 million users worldwide
2. More than 40,000 books downloaded a day from Lexcycle
3. Successful team with expertise, supporting widely different formats
4. Possible willingness to use Stanza for the kind of 'free'-use items phase that brought Apple its success with the iPod.
5. Further consolidation of a market it already dominates
6. Pre-emptive move before Apple, eager to dominate the digital-everything market, could buy it.

New Kindle-2 Screen Contrast Finding by Ted Inoue

This is an update to the original Kindle-2 screen-contrast story and updates, focusing on Ted Inoue's analysis.

While the original theories for varying screen-contrast of Kindle 2 screens involved thinner looking fonts and anti-aliasing that used the increased grayscales available to the Kindle 2, Inoue has done new tests from screen-grabs of the same page using both the Kindle 1 and Kindle 2, enlarged in Photoshop with examination of the pixel make-up of the characters.  They are the same.  Only 4-shades appear to be used for the basic font.

As Ted has explained, including on two forums following this, the variances in screen output of the same basic material comprising the font characters we see, indicates something seen in his earlier test of displays from his first Kindle 2 (Unit-A) vs his second Kindle 2 (Unit-B) - a difference in how both Kindle-2 units are rendering the same font.  What we see as less well-defined or less-sharp on Unit-A (which Ted notes as a unit that does not resolve well) shows less black brought to the 'surface' than we can see for the fonts from his second Kindle, Unit-B, when they're magnified.

  I have wondered if it was more a matter of seeing more black "brought to light" (that we can see) on the second unit so that his first unit's less-solid-blackened characters will appear less sharp then.  With Photoshop, we will tend to add contrast (more dark grays to black and more light grays to white) to enhance the perception of sharpness or definition of edges.

In the meantime, the screen-grabs from a Kindle 1 vs Kindle 2 mentioned above shows no difference in the basic font used for the devices.  Ted says that the differences that people can see easily in photographs result from how each unit renders the same basic combo of same pixels, and M. Matthews posted on March 28 that this might be related to the amount of voltage used to get the black portions to the surface and posted on April 28 that the variations we've seen indicate that the density of the black may be harder to control with the newer e-Ink screen with its 16-shades of gray vs 4 for the Kindle 1.  Whatever, it appears to be a quality control problem, especially with the seemingly unusual number of screens doing all right until brought into direct sunlight and fading under those conditions - a definite defect, since an advertised strength of the e-Ink screen (a feature I personally love) is how readable it is in direct sunlight.  There is an explanation, said to be given by an Amazon customer service representative, for the fading, having to do with faulty e-ink receptors.

Ted refers to some photo comparisons I made of my K1 and K2 and, in my own case, my Kindle 2 display is sharper and is black enough (though somewhat lighter in some lighting but good enough for me because it is definitely sharper than even my excellent Kindle 1).  I also took some photos last weekend of the Kindle2 vs the Sony PRS505 (using the older 8-shade e-Ink screen) and found the Kindle 2 looking very good in contrast (no pun intended).  They both have good displays.  But obviously, these screens can differ dramatically, though the large majority of owners appear to have units that meet the standards set for them.  The photos in my entry about problems for some users with bad screen contrast are repeated here for easier access.  These are some photo-comparison examples plus an added example and the most egregious one.
  In contrast, here are two examples of how the display should appear, taken with a cell phone last weekend while at Target:
Kindle-2 'Home' library listing and
Kindle-2 display of some text that I copied off a website to reference while shopping.

Amazon IS replacing units that are reported to have fonts that are too light to read, in connection with the warranty they do honor.  Customers have been very positive about how Amazon customer svc representatives have been handling this, with the exception of one official Communications executive who dismissed the concerns by telling Wired about a "few" customers wanting less gray shades!  From what I've read -- only as an offered option for pure-text reading where the font becomes gray instead of black.

As mentioned in the original screen contrast entry, customers who almost returned their Kindles have been ecstatic with the replacement fonts offered for trial by Inoue to Amazon Customer Service, at his site.

In the meantime, the long request-to-Amazon thread joined by new owners each day continues.  In between pleas for darker fonts displayed, they praise Inoue's new fonts (but which have to be uninstalled each time Amazon has a Kindle update).