Thursday, December 23, 2010

Kindle Uses

I just got my kindle in the mail yesterday. I decided to buy one to get back into reading again, plus its something you can bring with you wherever, and if I put books on the Kindle I don't have to waste shelf-space on them.

I've already discovered a bunch more uses for it than I expected. I put my novel's first draft on my kindle and it has a note taking feature, so I have read through part of the first two chapters, putting little notes next to areas I want to edit. This will be a huge help in editing.

I had to rejigger the spacing in my novel in order to get it to look good. I had been using two paragraph breaks per paragraph because Word and Open Office weren't giving me good line spacing without two, but in the kindle the gaps between paragraphs were huge.

So I found a macro on the web that looks for two consecutive paragraph marks and replaces it with one. Then I changed the paragraph spacing in Word and it looks great on the kindle.

I am very happy that I'm not disgusted reading this first draft. When I started reading through Honor, Glory, Murder, I quickly realized it wasn't very well done. I think Caliber of Magic is much more readable, and I am psyched because of that.

I'm a bit disappointed at the collection of books on kindle. It looks like most are not on the kindle. I did get the Ultimate Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy for kindle. I had that in printed form before and it was a huge volume. That's the perfect book to just browse through and read a little bit of when I have some extra time.

I can also use the kindle to read manuals and anything else in pdf format. That could be useful for work even, if I need to read the manual away from my desk to help figure something out.