Nicholson Baker has written the most thorough, entertaining, and literate review of using a Kindle that I have read to date.

“Nobody’s been buying e-books,” Jeff Bezos told Charlie Rose in November, 2007, at the time of the Kindle 1 launch. The shift to digital page turning hadn’t happened. Why was that? “It’s because books are so good,” according to Bezos. And they’re good, he explained, because they disappear when you read them: “You go into this flow state.” Bezos wanted to design a machine that helped a reader achieve that same flow—and also (although he didn’t say this) sold for a premium, fended off Sony’s trespass into the book business, and tied buyers to Amazon forever.

Amazon today announced that the Kindle iPhone app supports purchasing of Kindle e-books. This should bring a compelling e-book offering to the more than 35 million iPhone and iPod touches already in the marketplace. In one simple update, the market for ebooks just got a whole lot bigger.

I’ve seen a lot of sites discussing the move but nobody had really posted photos of how simple it is so I thought I’d grab some screenshots to share with you all. Enjoy!

Fire up the Kindle application

Click Get Books button on the home screen

Decide how you want to look for books (search, browse or product recommendations)

In this example I navigated to one of the best seller lists

The page where you make your purchase and send to one of your devices

Disclaimer: I am an employee of Amazon.com although I do not work on the Kindle or on e-books. I’m just an avid reader and really love the device.

Here’s a trend I think Amazon should push – hotels offering Kindles loaded with classic books to their guests during their stay.

I stayed at a hotel last year that offered Sealy Posturepedic mattresses, you know the ones with “your sleep number.” While I didn’t rush out to purchase one after the experience, I thought it was a really great way to try one out. I mean, you can’t really go to a mattress shop and ask to try out a mattress for a night’s sleep, can you?

Similarly, if staying at the Algonquin Hotel gets people to try out Kindles for free and to see for themselves the wealth of literature available (much of it free via sites like Feedbooks then I’d consider that a great boon.

Disclosure: I love my Kindle and am currently reading “War and Peace” for free from Feedbooks.

[found via TeleRead]

This video shows the process of getting Feedbooks up and running on your Kindle. With Feedbooks, your Kindle can use its wireless connection to download any of thousands of public domain books, for FREE! I just downloaded “War and Peace” in about 10 seconds. Awesome.

Kindle Guide FB from zeta on Vimeo.

If you’ve been waiting for the price to lower on Kindle before you pick one up, wait no longer. Amazon has just dropped the price from $399 to $359 (and it still ships to you free via 2-day air). It may be a while before you see any further price drops…

I picked up a Kindle about a month and a half ago. While I have not yet written a comprehensive review, suffice it to say that I love mine so far. I’ve read a couple of books, peruse the New York Times daily, and have downloaded a couple of samples from new authors I may try out. It’s all integrated quite nicely and reading is very pleasant.

As I sat organizing hundreds of books at home yesterday, I actually decided to get rid of the vast majority of them since I could always get them for the Kindle; inexpensive much of the time and free for others. Any book that’s part of the public domain, and most of the older classics are lumped in that category, I can get for free via Project Gutenberg.

Any of you folks planning on purchasing a Kindle? What’s it going to take for you to switch?

Sara Lloyd has published a wonderful and informative manifesto about the place of publishers in a rapidly changing reading landscape. It’s an absolute “must-read” for anyone involved in the production of written content (bloggers, authors, publishers, and marketers alike). There’s enough information here to feed a lot of different blog posts so don’t be surprised if you see me turning back to this one with some frequency.

Publishers – and, importantly, authors – will need increasingly to accept huge cultural and social and economic and educational changes and to respond to these in a positive and creative way. We will need to think much less about products and much more about content; we will need to think of ‘the book’ as a core or base structure but perhaps one with more porous edges than it has had before. We will need to work out how to position the book at the centre of a network rather than how to distribute it to the end of a chain. We will need to recognise that readers are also writers and opinion formers and that those operate online within and across networks.

If you have a few minutes today, give it a read and then post a comment telling me what interested you or what you’d like for me to follow up on in more detail. I’ll be happy to dig down into anything here.

Easy Links to all 6 parts of the manifesto:

1. Part 1
2. Part 2
3. Part 3
4. Part 4
5. Part 5
6. Part 6

I just got my Kindle last week and I think I need a bit more time with it to really gather my thoughts and make any real review of the device. I will, however, cop to the fact that one of my first thoughts when I saw the “Whispernet” connectivity and a browser was, “I really wish this thing had RSS.” Thankfully, it does. Kind of…

For all you Kindle-folk out there, and I suspect we’re a growing legion, here are the things you need to do to use Google Reader as your RSS Reader on the Kindle. I was excited to discover I could do this. While there’s nothing overtly tricky, this may be able to save you few exploratory and incorrect clicks.

1. Get an account on Google Reader if you don’t have one yet and add your rss feeds.
2. From the “Home Page” on your Kindle, click on “Menu > Experimental”
3. On the “Experimental” page, select “Basic Web.”
4. From the browser page, click “Menu” and select “Advanced Mode”
5. From the browser page, click “Menu” and select “Settings.” On the “Settings” page, click to “Enable” JavaScript.
6. Type the Mobile Reader URL (http://www.google.com/reader/m/) into the “Enter URL” bar at the top of the browser.
7. You’ll have to log-in to Google Reader on your Kindle now, which is kind of a pain the first time. You’ll probably want to ensure that the box is ticked to remember your settings so that you don’t have to do this frequently.

Voila! You can now use Google Reader for free from anywhere you get the “Amazon Whispernet.” Woohoo! Admittedly, navigation is a bit clunky and the speeds are not dynamite on the stripped mobile version of the reader, but I found that the act of reading the entries was quite pleasurable.

I have to use the Kindle roll and click navigation to get around on the reader site while using Kindle. Has anyone out there been able to get any of the keyboard shortcuts to work?

Not that it’s a huge surprise, but I’m a big fan of free literature. I like it even more when it’s digital and there’s no need to toss a book out on its head once I’m done reading it. Charles Bock is a first time author receiving high praise for his new novel “Beautiful Children.” I downloaded a copy of the book and read the opening scenes. It looks like it will be a rip-roaring good read. I don’t generally endorse writers I haven’t read personally but come on, it’s free!

>> Get a free digital copy of “Beautiful Children” until 2/29 here

>> Check out the “Beautiful Children” website for more information and promotional material

A great hour-long interview with Jeff Bezos, mostly centered on the new Amazon Kindle e-book reader but with other interesting tidbits on innovation in general.

• 101 of 112 current New York Times Bestsellers
• Represents all major publishers
• Most new releases are $9.99 (although I want to read “War and Peace” and that one is only $2.80)
• “Think of a book, have it a minute later”
• Large onboard dictionary and access to Wikipedia
• Highlight text. Underline text