How to fix Amazon’s “Send to Kindle” feature

stkTopBanner[1]When I manage to fix a technical issue that doesn’t seem to be well documented online, I like to share what worked for me. In that spirit:

This morning, as I often do, I emailed an ebook file to my @free.kindle.com address to load it onto my Kindle. For the first time in years, it didn’t work. I got no error message from Amazon, and never got the standard email acknowledging receipt of my file either. The file just never appeared on my Kindle. I tried sending it via their Send to Kindle PC application too, and got the same results – my file disappeared into the ether with no confirmation or error message.

After pulling my hair out for a while, I noticed that my Amazon Cloud Drive (everyone gets 5gb of storage for free) was full. I piled it full of some last resort backup files six months ago and promptly forgot it existed. When I deleted a few files out of that Drive today, suddenly all my Send to Kindle features started working again. I don’t know if this is a policy change or related to the recent changes to the structure of Amazon Cloud Drive, but I do know my Drive has been full for months. I don’t know why it suddenly started rejecting my files, but there we are.

Side note: It’s very poor design for Amazon to not provide any error message in this situation. They could very easily email me about the full Drive, or pop up a message in the PC application. Both options looked like they sent the file successfully. Amazon support was also completely clueless about this when I contacted them.

The TL/DR version: If your @free.kindle.com email address or Send to Kindle program has suddenly stopped working and provides no error messages, check if your Amazon Cloud Drive is full.

Defining what I do: What makes a technology emerging or disruptive?

Up the Hatch!

“I’m the Emerging Technologies Librarian at UNC.”

“So what does that mean?”

Every time I meet someone new at work, that’s how the conversation goes.

My response usually consists of arm flailing and a disjointed summary of my duties. I’m working on that. But I think people mostly don’t know what my job defines as an “emerging technology”.

To be honest, as the years go by I’m less a fan of that term. “Emerging” is too broad. Any new technology emerges, just by virtue of being new. Solar power is an emerging technology, and even something as simple as seatbelts once was too. I can’t keep an eye on everything. Instead, I find myself looking at a new technology and asking: Is it disruptive to libraries? “Disruptive” does a better job of defining what I deal with on a day to day basis. The technologies I look at tend to be new and emerging, but as they emerge they also disrupt that context and the way we do things.

I tend to define things by removing what they’re aren’t, plus there’s a lot more tech that doesn’t disrupt libraries than that which does. Xbox Kinect is interesting and definitely emerging, but I don’t see a lot of immediate disruption coming from it in my academic library corner of the world. I also don’t see a lot of relevance for 3D printers in the core parts of my particular work environment, but they’re definitely emerging as technology. As sci-fi author Neal Stephenson recently noted in Arc 1.3, “…[3D printing] isn’t a disruptive idea on its own. It becomes disruptive when people find their own uses for it.”  It’s when an actual or likely use impacts libraries that I pay more attention.

So now I have to define what makes a technology disruptive for my purposes. My definition is a bit hard to nail down, but I think I’ve settled on something close to “a technology that could change the way academic libraries deliver services and information.”

Based on that, eBooks are an obvious disruptive technology in libraries. And in a general sense the web continues to disrupt everything in our core mission.

Now I’ve established criteria for which disruptive technologies I deal with in my job. But how do I spot disruptive technologies for evaluation in the first place? Disruptive technology arrives in two different flavors. The first kind does something new and interesting well, but misses a basic feature of an existing technology. The second kind creates an entirely new niche for itself, carving out existence without an obvious analogue anywhere else.

TYPE ONE

Google Voice is a prime example of the first kind of disruptive tech. It adds a number of very useful features to our venerable old phone numbers, but also doesn’t support MMS messaging or certain types of SMS shortcodes at all. I don’t use either of those features on my phone often, but it’s enough that I’d miss them if I moved over to Google Voice.

Later, the disruptive tech might fill in those gaps and be more fully emerged as a replacement. But I have real trouble coming up with examples of tech that successfully made this transition. Google Voice is still plugging right along, but shows no signs of fixing my dealbreakers. Other examples have been less fortunate; their feature gaps were important enough that they eventually faded away. Netbooks took off on their amazing portability and battery life, but their tiny keyboards and often limited processing power meant they peaked early and are now fading. Google Wave tried to reinvent email with a treasure trove of added features, but had an impenetrable UI and lacked a clear use case. It lasted 15 months. Uber’s car service is heavily disrupting the taxi industry, but is so far outside the box that it’s meeting significant legal pushback and sabotage there. Look at 3D printers again: they provide all kinds of disruptive challenges to traditional manufacturing. But the technology is also extremely fiddly and requires a lot of customization, expertise and constant adjustment to use. It’s future will depend on whether the printers can overcome those gaps and more fully emerge into everyday use.

In the academic library world, this first type of disruptive technology describes ebooks perfectly. They add new functionality to the traditional task of consuming text, but thanks to DRM and licensing we can’t share them as easily and have questions about long-term viability of the titles in our collection. Ebook readers fit too, for similar reasons. I’m obviously keeping a close eye on them and am involved with a number of ebook-related projects and programs on campus. The recent trend of massively online courses like Udacity and Coursera qualifies as this type of disruption as well, though for higher ed in general. Instant messaging continues to disrupt the way we provide service at the reference desk.  So those are three areas I’m focusing on lately.

TYPE TWO

Not all emerging technologies fit that first model. Instead of changing something we already have, the disruption a technology creates may carve out a whole new space for itself. The iPad is the obvious example here; Apple pretty much created the modern tablet market. But despite being a new market, tablets still disrupt laptops, ebook readers and smartphones. Cell phones in a general sense fit this second model of disruption too, incidentally. I have a harder time coming up with more examples here, especially ones relevant to academic libraries. Most of our disruptions come from modifications to existing technologies or systems, and very few spring forth into an entirely new niche. Still, iPads and other tablets have huge implications for desktop computing facilities in my library and on my campus. Even if the disruption isn’t obvious, it’s still important to recognize the difference in how it comes about. Libraries need to keep an eye on changes to both current niches and the emergence of entirely new ones.

PHASES OF DISRUPTION

No matter which type of disruption a technology fits, all of them go through early, middle and late phases of disruption. Early on, they’re pretty experimental with notable feature gaps. Google Wallet and their system of NFC payments fits the early bill right now. I think Google Voice seems to be stuck in this early phase too, and shows no indication of advancing beyond it. Before the release of the Kindle I’d also have put ebooks at this point. They were a niche interest at best.

By the middle phase, a technology has a foothold in the general public – not just among early adopters. In April we learned that 21% of American adults read an ebook last year, and 45% now own a smartphone. They’re not anywhere near universal adoption yet, but it’s significant and trending upward.

Eventually some of these technologies close in on finishing their disruption. By that point they’re into the late phase. I classify MP3s as a late phase disruption, for example. In many demographics they’ve completely replaced CDs, the technology they disrupted. Of course CDs, vinyl, and other music distribution methods do still exist. Not everyone has the technical literacy to make the change in their personal music collection, though an increasing majority do.

After the final stage of disruption, that ’emerged’ term pops up again. Emerging technologies go through phases of disruption, but ultimately must become fully emerged or at some point fade away. Blogs disrupted traditional web publishing (if there can be said to be such a thing), but are now a fact of online life. They’re emerged. Digital cameras and (non-smartphone) cell phones are emerged too.

FULL CIRCLE

We’ve come back around to dealing with emerging technologies. But on a day to day basis, I’m more concerned with following their progress through phases of disruption. If we can figure out which technologies with potential implications for libraries will make it through the phases, we can get ahead of the game. Or at least keep pace and stop anything from blowing up in our faces.

And that’s why I flail my arms when someone asks me what my job title means: I haven’t found a way to distill all this into a soundbyte yet. But as a collective institution, libraries are ripe for disruption. In my job I try to keep a practical focus on the horizon and do my part to keep us a bit ahead of the curve.

R.I.P Fictionwise

On Friday morning I received a sad email: Fictionwise is shutting down.

Back in the early 2000s (does that decade have a pronounceable name yet?) I took my trusty Rocket eBook Reader everywhere. There weren’t a lot of options to legitimately buy ebooks back then, but Fictionwise was among the first. They specialized in sci-fi, and I bought tons of short stories from them by moderately well known authors. Usually they cost less than $1, and were often DRM-free. Yes, Fictionwise was ahead of it’s time in some interesting ways. I looked forward to buying a digital version of the sci-fi magazine Analog every month, and grabbed an occasional novel too.

As I shifted more of my reading to ebooks, Fictionwise didn’t really meet my needs anymore. Their selection was never the greatest, though I knew that if they had what I wanted it was almost always at the cheapest price around. And in a move unheard of at other ebook retailers, they offered regular coupons. I bought something there as recently as October 2011, by which point the site was a shell of it’s former self.

Barnes & Noble bought Fictionwise in early 2009, and left the site largely untouched ever since. I’m not sure what they did with the store, but I’d guess it was a staff acquisition. Whatever happened, Fictionwise’s customer support dropped off a cliff. They took more than two weeks to get back to me when that 2011 ebook purchase had major issues in the text. Time pretty much stopped for their site – it still has the exact same design I remember from 2003.

While my good memories outweigh the bad, it’s time for Fictionwise to go. B&N is shutting them down, and allowing users to transfer most of their Fictionwise purchases to a Nook library. Only one of my dozens of titles have made the transition so far, but I’m assured more will follow. And I’ve got backups of them all, so I’m not worried. Still, there’s a lengthy list of Fictionwise titles which won’t be transferred to a Nook library. If you owned one of those, they’ll just be gone.

This is the first semi-major ebook store shutdown that I’ve personally experienced as a customer. Despite the backup and transfer options available, I still find it disturbing that my library can up and disappear.

I do salute B&N for handling the shutdown relatively well, and wish them the best.

Format rot in ebook preservation

Electronic text is hard to preserve. This might seem counter-intuitive – isn’t it trivially easy to make backup copies? Yes, but accessing those copies is another matter.

I’ve been cleaning out the darker recesses of my office lately, digging through things accumulated by previous occupants back to the mid 80s. I knew I was playing host to a large quantity of floppy discs (both 3.5″ and 5.25″), but this is the first time I looked at what’s actually on them.

I found seven ebooks (the labels call some “Hypercard novels”) in that pile of 3.5″ floppies. Most were published by a company called Eastgate. Eastgate still sells copies of these titles ebooks to this day, but I’m not clear how they’re supposed to be read.

I’ve run into 4 barriers in trying to read these ebooks:

  1. They’re on floppy disks. Floppy drives are a dying breed. Luckily these are 3.5″ disks, because if they’d been 5.25″ I wouldn’t have access to the right-sized drive. Still, in another five years any floppy drive at all will be considered specialized legacy equipment.
  2. The disks are mac-only. No PC that I’ve found has been able to read them.
  3. Even on modern macs, they can’t be read. I haven’t had time to fully figure out why, but some preliminary research pointed out that they might be a special kind of floppy disk that only older mac drives can read. Modern ones won’t work.
  4. Even if I had the right kind of drive – what software will they need to be read? I have no idea, but I’d bet money that it’s nothing still in common use today.

Like I said Eastgate still exists, and sells copies of these ebooks. They were evidently were migrated to CD-ROM at some point. But even with those more modern copies, the Eastgate website says some of their titles require Hypercard to be read. Hypercard was mac-only software, and stopped working with current versions of OSX in 2005. And even if I was somehow able to get Hypercard to run, I’d still be forced to re-buy the content on CD-ROM.

I have no idea if these ebooks are any good, or hold any value at all beyond being curiosities of early ebook publishing. I’m not going to put any more effort into getting them running unless I’m given a compelling reason. But this is a real issue, and one that will only become more important in time. I think of the huge quantities of CD & DVD resources we still have at work, and I shudder a bit. Apple removed the CD-ROM drive from the latest imac, and other manufacturers can’t be far behind.

If anything, this experience has drilled into my head that I need to keep an eye out for mission critical resources on old formats. I’ll migrate them forward when I can, but that won’t always be possible. I’m bullish on ebooks in general, but when it comes to preservation paper still wins.

Side note: Here’s a list of the titles I have on floppy. Maybe these are crucially important to someone else. If you’ve got the means, I’ve got the media:

  • Ambulance: An Electronic Novel, by Monica Moran
  • King of Space – by Sarah Smith
  • The Perfect Couple – by Clark Humphrey
  • Quibbling – by Carolyn Guyer
  • Afternoon, a Story – by Joyce Michael
  • Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse – by John McDald
  • Its name was Penelope – by Judy Malloy (this disk appears to be signed)

Review: Kindle Paperwhite

Based on shipping time alone, the Kindle Paperwhite seems to be a huge success.  There’s currently a 5-7 week lead time on ordering one, which makes it already iffy even for a Christmas gift.  But if you’re shopping for an ebook reader this season, the Paperwhite is the one to get.This is my third Kindle, after leaving #2 on a plane (which I still kick myself for), and the paperwhite has a series of refinements that have been a long time coming.

The most visible addition is the lit screen.  Previous Kindles offered add-on cases which included a light, but this is right in the device itself.  It’s bright enough to read in the dark, but also dim enough to let my wife sleep next to me while I read.  There’s a slight shadowing effect at the bottom of the screen, but it only bugged me for a minute or two before I learned to ignore it.

Less visible but equally welcome is the capacitive touchscreen.  Previous models used IR to detect taps, which was sometimes inaccurate or frustrating to use.  The difference is subtle, but the results are much more responsive.  And while I don’t pretend to know the technical reasons behind this, the Paperwhite’s screen also seems to repel smudges and dust better than the previous model’s did.

The Kindle home screen & menus received their first overhaul ever, and it’s a welcome arrival.  Cover images now feature prominently instead of just text, and overall it’s a easier to navigate around.  That said, I’m annoyed that roughly 1/3 of the home screen is taken up by a display of popular books available for purchase.  And this is on the model that supposedly has no ads.

Now the smaller improvements:

One of my pet peeves about the Kindle line up until now is that I never felt connected to my location in a book.  While it was easy to see my progress through the book as a percentage, it was harder to know how long it’ll be until I finish a chapter and reach a good stopping point.  The Paperwhite fixes that with math!  It watches my reading pace, then predicts how many minutes it’ll be until I finish a chapter.  And so far it’s been pretty accurate.

I still wish the Paperwhite had physical page-turn buttons in the same way the Nook has preserved that option.  But when placed in the optional Kindle case, the Paperwhite’s bezel is very slightly wider than the case on older models.  It’s a small difference, but it makes it much more comfortable to rest my thumb there while reading.

The Paperwhite’s case has a smartcover-style wake feature.  Open it up, and the device unlocks.  Close it, and it re-locks.  This is again a small bonus, but an appreciated one.

Lastly, the negatives:

The Paperwhite has no audio output.  It can’t read the book to you like other models can, and you can’t listen to mp3s on it either.  I don’t think I ever used either of those features, so I don’t mind the loss. But if either are critical to your use, keep it in mind.

The new capacitive screen is great, but it doesn’t work with gloves.  I read at the bus stop every morning, and in the winter this makes it trickier to turn pages.  The older IR touchscreens could be poked with anything, gloved or not.

In conclusion, I feel like the lit screen will be the last major innovation in e-ink readers for a while.  I could be wrong about that, but the Kindle paperwhite feels like a device with the feature list I’ve always wanted.

New DMCA exemptions for 2012

Every 3 years since 1998, the Librarian of Congress has been allowed to issue new exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  The DMCA is the act which (among other things) makes it illegal to circumvent copy protection schemes and DRM.

The 2012 crop of exemptions (here’s the official document) goes into effect today.  The document itself is pretty lengthy, but Ars Technica has a great distillation of the important points.  In bullet point form, here’s the new things that the DMCA no longer outlaws:

  • Jailbreaking your iPhone (or any other smartphone) is now legal.  There’s a notable distinction here though: the exception applies to only phones.  Tablets are specifically excluded.  In the words of the rule, “…this aspect of the proposed class was broad and ill-defined, as a wide range of devices might be considered “tablets”…” Essentially, if it’s hard to define a tablet then how can it be made an exemption?  An interesting point, though I don’t agree with the results.
  • Unlocking your smartphone (making it compatible with a competitor’s cell network) without a carrier’s permission was previously exempted but will no longer be allowed if you buy your phone after January 2013.  Why?  Court rulings since the 2009 exemptions place more emphasis on the fact that we don’t own software – we just license it.  The new exemptions also note that “…there are ample alternatives to circumvention”.  The difference between jailbreaking and unlocking seems like splitting hairs to me, but it is what it is.
  • We’re allowed to rip DVDs (but if I read it right, not blu-rays) and use excerpts in noncommercial, documentary, or educational films.  That’s great, but I’m sad that the proposed exemption to allow “space shifting” of DVDs was denied.  That would have let individual movie owners transfer movies to their PC, home server, or mobile device.  Alas.
  • Visually impaired users who purchase an ebook can remove DRM to allow the text to be electronically read aloud.  The 2009 exemptions already allowed this one, but only in the case that content providers had specifically disabled read aloud functions.   Now that requirement is gone, so this one’s a slight win.  But it comes with a big caveat – the exemption does not include distribution of DRM-removal software to those blind users.  So as the Ars Technica article points out: the visually impaired are welcome to remove DRM, but only if they can write software to do it themselves.

That last contradiction reinforces my belief that the DMCA is a fundamentally broken piece of legislation.  It’s nice that it allows for periodic exemptions, but that process is too narrowly scoped.  Looking at Ars’ excellent analysis again:

“The space-shifting ruling is a good illustration of the fundamental brokenness of the DMCA. In order to convince the Librarian to allow DVD ripping in order to watch it on an iPad, a court would first need to rule that doing so falls under copyright’s fair use defense. To get such a ruling, someone would have to rip a DVD (or sell a DVD-ripping tool), get sued in court, and then convince a judge that DVD ripping is fair use. But in such a case, the courts would probably never reach the fair use question, because—absent an exemption from the Librarian of Congress—circumvention is illegal whether or not the underlying use of the work would be a fair use. So no fair use ruling without an exemption, and no exemption without a fair use ruling. A classic catch-22.”

Interesting things I’ve read this week – 10/19/12

Random House Says Libraries Own Their Ebooks

(Library Journal) I’m entirely surprised to read this headline and story, but Random House now flat out says that libraries own ebooks that they’ve bought from them.  That may seem like an obvious statement, but up till now libraries have only been able to license, not own, ebooks from the big 6 fiction publishers.  Of course, libraries don’t buy ebooks directly from publishers like Random House.  We’re still at the mercy of licenses we sign with vendors like Overdrive – and those licenses very clearly deny ownership.  Now it’ll be an issue of getting vendor licenses to line up with what Random House says here.  Plus trying to get the other big publishers to commit to the same thing, of course.  Those are still big hurdles, but at least it’s progress.

How We Lost the Future (Final Bullet)

In some ways I see this as a counterpoint to Louis CK’s “Everything is amazing and nobody is happy” bit.  Have we lost the capability to even think about and imagine what the future might be?  “To say ‘we live in the future’ is an expression of a predestination fantasy. This way of thinking is cheating us out of the exciting reality of growing and achieving a future.”

How Not to Talk to Your Kids (New York Magazine)

This is a bit old (2007), but as an expecting parent I find myself paying a lot more attention to issues surrounding child-rearing.  I’m trying to avoid drowning myself in advice & ‘systems’ of child-rearing, but this piece dealing with how styles of praise have huge effects makes a lot of sense to me.

Can Boxee reinvent cable with the help of a TV antenna? (The Verge)

At home we use an antenna to watch live TV, and a Hulu subscription to watch things later.  For the most part I’m really happy with the setup, but I do still miss having the ability to pause live TV.  Current solutions for that issue are largely homegrown and a pain to set up & maintain.  The new Boxee TV has a good chance to change that, though the thought of another $15/month subscription does give me pause.

The Humble eBook Bundle


HumbleBundle.com has a long history of offering wonderful independent PC games at a ‘pay what you want’ price.  They recently extended their brand into music, and this week took a step into eBooks.  For any price you want to pay, even just $.01, you get a bundle of DRM-free ebooks from a number of well known sci-fi & fantasy authors.  If you pay more than the average at any given time (currently $12.46) they also throw in books from Neil Gaiman and John Scalzi.

And it’s not crap either – all the titles look interesting to me.  I’ve read Pump Six before, and can verify that it’s amazing.

It’s nice to see more A-list authors willing to explore alternate sales models.  The Humble eBook Bundle has taken in just under $500,000 as I write this.

And here’s my obligatory side note: none of this helps libraries.  While I’ve been unable to find whatever license governs use of these eBook titles, I’d be very surprised if it allows libraries to lend them.

PaLA Northwest Chapter presentation.

Tomorrow morning I’ll be presenting a workshop for the fine folks at the Northwest Chapter of the Pennsylvania Library Association. Aside from being a good excuse to get back and visit my old stomping grounds, I’m quite excited about my presentation and the afternoon hands-on session.

Here’s the handout of links I mentioned in the talk, and the slides themselves:

(As usual, my slides may not be entirely useful without my narration. But here they are anyway!)

The forgotten Kindle

I don’t think there’s any consumer product line I’m more conflicted about than the Kindle. As a consumer, my Kindle Touch makes me very happy. At the same time, the Kindle Fire I’ve used made me very sad. (And as a librarian, well that’s another story entirely.)

But one thing’s for sure, the whole family of devices continues to be a big hit. Today’s announcement of the expansion of the Fire line to three different devices will no doubt have a major effect on the tablet market. And I’m certainly lusting after the new ‘paperwhite’ Kindle.

But what about the Kindle DX? The current version of this largest Kindle (with an 9.7″ e-ink screen) was released over two years ago, and hasn’t seen a major software upgrade since that time. Despite being seemingly tailor-made for reading PDF journal articles comfortably on an e-ink screen, the DX is missing the advanced PDF highlighting and navigation functions that were added to all the smaller Kindles long ago. The price hasn’t changed since July 2010 either – it’s still $379. (For the record, $379 could buy you five regular Kindles with money left over for books now.)

At this point I have to wonder what plans Amazon has for the DX. Sometimes I picture a warehouse somewhere packed full of the devices after an accidental massive over-order long ago. But even if that were true, why hasn’t the price dropped at all?

Amazon sometimes has mysterious motives, but with the DX it seems to be playing an unusually long and confusing game.