UW CSE Kindle Pilot

A Kindle application for Windows has been released (beta).   The download is available on the Amazon Kindle store.

All current pilot project participants should now have accounts for both this blog and the pilot project wiki.  Please feel free to use both.

All the kindle.com addresses we have to date are now in the kindle-pilot mailing list.   To enable receipt of course materials through this list, be sure to go to:

http://www.amazon.com/manageyourkindle 

and add the list as an authorized sender.  See the Mailing Lists heading on the wiki for more information.

Let us know if you notice any omissions.

The Kindle DX has native support for PDF, however the Kindle annotation features are not supported. One way to use PDF content with annotations is to use the free Kindle 2 conversion service to turn the PDFs into AZW, then load up the AZW documents over USB. Unfortunately this approach suffers from problems of poor fidelity in the conversion.

Much of our target PDF content has math symbols and equations, contains charts and tables, and is in 2-column “conference paper” format. The problems we have observed with the PDF to AZW conversion fall into three classes:

• The math is hopelessly messed up
• The 2-column format converts to single column (which is fine), but in the process we occasionally see chunks of text out of order.
• Figures that are not based on photographs are frequently unusable. A typical problem is that all the lines and boxes in a figure disappear leaving only the text labels.

One manual resolution for the out of order text issue is to use a PDF to Word converter such as Nuance PDF Converter, then using Word, reformat to single column, and send the single column DOC file to the AZW converter.

We are working with our friends at Amazon to see if these things can be improved.

This is the initial post on the UW CSE Kindle Pilot Blog.  The other web resources for the project are:

• The Pilot Project Announcement
• The Wiki for the Pilot Project

You are encouraged to use the RSS feeds available on the blog to receive the latest updates about the pilot.