The Kindle MP3 player plays music and podcasts in non-DRM .mp3 format. While it might be nice if you can purchase such content and have it sent wirelessly to your Kindle, audio file sizes and transfer speeds make this unlikely. However, it is easier and cheaper than you may think to purchase reading-friendly background music, transfer it to your Kindle, and start listening.
If you like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, start by going to the Amazon page for The 99 Most Essential Mozart Masterpieces, a collection that features hours of wonderful Mozart compositions performed by the world's greatest orchestras and soloists. While it is possible to purchase the individual tracks for 89 cents each, you can spend a total of $7.99 and get all 99 tracks, ranging in length from under two minutes to longer than 15 minutes, just by clicking on the orange "Buy MP3 album with 1-click" button near the upper-right corner of your computer screen. Amazon will begin downloading the album almost immediately, perhaps after asking you to enable the Amazon downloader tool to work on your computer if you have not done so already. Keep track of the destination at which your computer saves the album download, which will usually be in a folder or directory called "Music", associated with your default audio program, such as iTunes or Windows Media Player.
Once the album downloads to your computer, plug your Kindle into your computer via the USB cable. From within your computer's "Finder" or "My Computer" feature, locate the music files that were just downloaded, select the tracks that you want to copy to your Kindle, and pick them up with the Copy command. (Important Note: Remember that audio files require more storage capacity than text, and don't overdo it. I recommend that you choose a dozen or two of the tracks you think you will enjoy the most and copy them rather than trying to store all 99 tracks on your Kindle!)
Next, go to the Kindle folder from your computer's "Finder" or "My Computer" structure, open it, and then open the subfolder called "Music." Use your system's Paste command to paste the music tracks into your Kindle's "Music" folder, eject the Kindle from your computer, and you are ready to enjoy some nice background music as you read. Just press Home to go to the Kindle 2 Home screen, press Menu, then use the 5-way or scrollwheel to select "Experimental" and "Play MP3" from the next two menus that appear on your Kindle display.
Listening to Free Audible.com Content on Your Kindle
In addition to the music and podcasts to which you can listen on your Kindle after you store them in your Kindle's "Music" or "Audible" folder via USB connection with your Kindle, you can also purchase and download or transfer Audible.com content and listen to it on your Kindle. If you are already an Audible.com member, you are probably aware that Audible.com files come with better navigational enhancements than the background music files that you may keep in your "Music" folder for Kindle listening, and you probably also know that Audible.com regularly offers free audiobooks to its members. Also, as of December 2010, when you enter Audible.com for the first time as a Kindle user at http://www.audible.com/kindle you will be invited to get a free Audible.com book as a Gold plan customer with a free month of Audible.com service.
Once you spring for Audible.com membership -- which begins at $12.46 per month, for an annualized Audible Listener Gold account -- you may be amazed at the hundreds of free audiobooks that are available to you. To browse the possibilities, just go to Audible.com, click on the Advanced Search link in the upper left corner, and select "Free" from the pull-down menu in the Price field.
If you have a latest-generation Kindle with a wi-fi connection, you can now download Audible.com content wirelessly to your Kindle using that connection. You must purchase and download the audiobook first using your computer, but once you've done that, you will be able to find the Audible.com file on your Kindle's listing of Archived Items. Just move the 5-way to the Audible.com title and select it by pressing down to begin the wireless download.
Otherwise, for earlier-generation Kindles, your Kindle, you'll need to use your computer to purchase and download content from Audible.com. Amazon purchased Audible.com around the time of the Kindle launch, so it is fair to expect that Audible.com connectivity for Kindle users may continue be enhanced in the future, but the difficulty that must be overcome both for Audible.com and Amazon MP3 content involves file size and the resulting effect on transfer speed, and it takes a wi-fi connection to address that problem.
For now, purchase your content and use the free Audible Manager software on the site to download it to your computer, then transfer the content to your Kindle's native "Audible" folder using your USB connection. If you are using a Mac, you may not be able to download Audible.com content unless you are using Windows-emulation software. When prompted by Audible Manager to select your listening device's "Audio Format Sound Quality," you can choose 2, 3 or 4 for Kindle compatibility. The best quality, and the largest file size, comes with selection 4 -- whether you choose this option may depend on your download speed and on the file space you have available on your Kindle and, if you are using a Kindle 1, any SD memory cards.
Navigate to http://www.audible.com/kindle and sign up if you have not done so already. Download the Audible Manager software to your computer and re-start your web browser. Connect your Kindle to your computer via USB and "activate" the Kindle as your listening device within Audible Manager. Once you have purchased listening content, you will be able to copy it to your Kindle and listen to it there.
Once you have transferred Audible content to your Kindle you should be able to access it directly from your Home screen with your 5-way, just as you would a Kindle book or other content. Look for a tiny speaker icon next to the Audible.com content.
After you've opened an Audible.com file, just use the onscreen navigation menu to move among your options including Beginning, Previous Section, Next Section, Back 30 seconds, Forward 30 seconds, and a Play/Pause toggle.
You'll have several listening options, including the Kindle's onboard stereo speakers. For a better experience, use the audio jack to the left of the USB slot at the bottom of the Kindle to connect it to a speaker or headset and the sound quality isn't bad. That jack will also work if you have an automobile with an MP3 jack. Further to the right of the Kindle's bottom edge, you will find "down" and "up" volume-control buttons. (Tip: If you don't do a lot of Kindle listening and your first Audible file doesn't seem to be starting for you, make sure that the volume is turned up.)
Between the Chapters, and Just Between Us: How to Contact Kindle Nation
Please feel free contact me any time at [email protected]. I read all email and comments and try to respond promptly to polite messages whenever appropriate, often from my other email address, [email protected]. I also have a Facebook page and a Twitter page, but if you want to contact me I check email more often.
Kindle Nation Mailbag. Sometimes, if I think the topic of an email message or comment will be of interest to a wider group of the citizens of Kindle Nation, I'll include the message and my response in a From the Kindle Nation Mailbag post, but I only use first names there. If you don't want your message included, be sure to let me know!
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Ch 10: Ten Reasons the New Kindle 3 or Kindle Wi-Fi Is a Must if You Love to Read ... And a Few Minor Drawbacks
Back on July 28, after testingthe new $189
Kindle 3Gandthe $139 Kindle Wi-Fi for half an hour, I gave the newest Amazon device a pretty strong "Wow". I’ve been using Kindles now for three years and have been through every model and every Kindle App but one, but it was clear to me almost immediately that Amazon had done some wonderful things with the new release, all while maintaining its new $189 price point. More about that price point later, of course, but the initial thing to say about the $189 price point is that, while it may not be quite the equivalent of an impulse buy for electronics, it is 53 percent lower than the price that thousands of us paid for a much more basic Kindle 1 back in 2007 and 2008.
Now that I have been using a Kindle 3 nearly non-stop for the past five days, thanks to my receipt of a "review" Kindle from Amazon last Wednesday, I am prepared to be much more articulate about it.
ThisKindle 3G is a Triple Wow. Five Stars. Two Thumbs Up. And, because Amazon stays true to its core vision of catalog, convenience and connectivity for the Kindle, it is by far the best ebook reader ever made. For now, and probably for the rest of 2010, at the least.
Naturally, as with any other kind of technology, there will be serious people who want no part of it.
Some will hate it because it is "only" an ebook reader. It does astonishingly well with audio in several useful and attractive ways, but it does not support video or animation or sophisticated gaming and its lack of color will rule it out for some textbooks, art books, comic books, manga and other illustrated or design-intensive books.
Some will hate it because it doesn’t have a touch screen. I use an iPad or iPod Touch frequently enough so that my muscle memory sometimes gets ahead of me and I find myself tapping my Kindle screen. And I doubt I will ever get used to any of the Kindle keyboards, so there are times when I would love to be able to add annotations to my Kindle content with a stylus. And speaking of input, I just don’t understand why the keyboard can’t have a number row -- there’s room for it! But these are minor complaints. When it comes to actual reading of a novel or any text-intensive book, article, newspaper, magazine, or blog, the Kindle 3 provides an exquisite experience.
Some will miss the configuration of buttons and bars on earlier Kindles, as the new Kindle 3 places the Menu, Home, and Back buttons adjacent to the keyboards and transforms the 5-way into something more trackpad-like, but for most of us all of this will be old hat within a week.
Some will want to avoid doing anything to hasten the inevitable transition in publishing technologies, but their fingers in the dike of change will be seriously overmatched as the number of devices being used as ebook readers soars past 10 million in 2010, 20 million in 2011 and 60 million by 2015.
Some will want to stay with print books and their favorite brick-and-mortar bookstores, but unfortunately over the course of the next five years the availability of these pleasures will decline dramatically, and by the end of the decade there will be far fewer print books manufactured and even fewer places to buy them.
Some will be impatient, as I am, for Amazon to put on some speed with respect to the kind of true internationalization for the entire Kindle platform that would be signified with more alphabets (whether or not they are supported for the Kindle 3 has been handled somewhat mysteriously), more in-country stores, translation dictionaries, and a much wider selection in languages other than English, but the Kindle 3 may indeed be the hardware device that opens the doors to all of this, and there have been plentiful rumors lately of Kindle launches in China and elsewhere.
Some will continue their call for Amazon to open up the Kindle to one or more of the variations on the highly Balkanized ePub format, or to library ebooks, or other “open” formats, but adherents of such moves have demonstrated little support among Kindle owners and do not seem to understand Amazon’s need to conduct itself as a business.
Some will be content to stick with devices they own already, including the Kindle 1 and Kindle 2 as well as other ebook readers, but even before the first Kindle 3 order has been filled, ourmost recent Kindle Nation survey suggests strongly that nearly one-fourth of existing Kindle owners plan to upgrade to a Kindle 3 or Kindle 3 Wi-Fi Only before the end of 2010.
So, in enumerating the top ten reasons why the Kindle 3 is a “must-have” reading device for me, for you, and for millions of other people who love to read, let’s start there:
10. At $139 and $189, the Kindle 3 is the Best Value Proposition Ever for an eBook Reader
There aren’t as many readers as there are people who talk on the phone or drive cars, so there may never be as many Kindles as there are cell phones or automobiles, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be ubiquitous in the circles in which you travel. The combined force of the Kindle 3’s $139 and $189 price points and the superior reading experience that it provides means that most of the people you know will own a Kindle within two years, and most of the people you consider smart will own a Kindle this year. And the fact that Amazon is selling a unit that is identical in every respect except 3G wi-fi connectivity for just $139 means that most of those smart people will be buying multiple wi-fi -only Kindle 3s for their children, grandchildren and others on their gift lists this holiday season. The hardest work I’ll be doing in organizing my 2010 holiday list is trying to figure out who might already be getting a Kindle 3 from someone else, and which people spend so much time in wi-fi settings that they might not need the 3G model.
The other hard part -- and this may require the services of a certified swami -- will involve figuring out when I need to place my orders to ensure that Amazon will be able to deliver my gift Kindles in time for the holidays. Although Amazon cemented the Kindle’s current dominant position among ebook readers by never running out of Kindles during the 2009 holiday season, that stands in stark contrast to the company’s grinchy experience during the 2007 and 2008 holiday seasons, when there were no Kindles to ship in either year. Pre-order delivery dates for both Kindle 3 models have been getting pushed back throughout the entire month of August, and the most worrisome indication is that the length of the shipping delay noted on the Kindle buying pages has been lengthening.
This obviously indicates very high demand (unless, call me a cynic for raising the issue, it is all a marketing gimmick?), and it may also inspire resellers to place bulk orders in order to take advantage of impatience premiums, high demand, and arbitrage profits on third-party seller sites including eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon’s own Marketplace. If an authorized retailer like Target quickly runs out of Kindle 3 units when it receives its first supply in September, it will be a clear sign that we may see stock-out situations on and off through the end of 2010.
Of course, if prices of $189 and $139 alone were sufficient reason for people to buy a Kindle, the Kindle’s share of the market might be split more democratically with devices like the Nook and Sony’s various offerings. But that’s not what’s happening. Amazon has hit the sweet spot by offering all of the other benefits that fill out this top ten list at these prices, and as a result the Kindle’s current installed base of about 4.5 million Kindles will swell to well over 7 million by the end of this year. In addition to the million Kindle 3s that Amazon will sell to current Kindle owners and over a million Kindle 3s that will become their new owners’ first ebook readers, there will be at least half a million Kindle 3s sold this year to people who started out reading Kindle content on other devices like the iPad, iPod Touch, BlackBerry, Android, Mac or PC. Every other device with a freely downloadable Kindle App, and every ebook added to the relentlessly growing Kindle catalog, becomes a kind of Trojan Horse that will lead to more content sales and ultimately to more hardware and accessory sales for Amazon in the future.
These days, when anyone who enjoys reading tells me he doesn’t want a Kindle, my answer is simple: "That’s only because you haven’t tried one." But if Amazon can do a better job of keeping the Kindle 3 in stock, the company has a friction-free solution to that problem in its free "test drive" policy for Kindles and other products: you can buy any Kindle and use it for up
to 30 days, then return it for a full refund with no questions asked. My guess is that there will be very few Kindle 3 returns.
Now that Amazon has released a remarkably full-featured Kindle Wi-Fi model for just $139, the $50 price differential between that model and the $189 Kindle 3G places an elegant value-proposition accent on the Kindle's wireless connectivity. If you think that either of these Kindles is worth $139 as an ereader, that just leaves this question: would you pay $50 one time, with no monthly fees or AT+T contracts, for wireless connectivity that would allow you to check email, scores, stocks, weather and any text-intensive website from just about anywhere for the rest of your life? I’ve exaggerated the proposition here, because there’s a good chance you will outlive your Kindle, but you get the idea.
By the way, if you frequently send personal documents and free ebooks from other sources to your Kindle, the availability of wi-fi on both Kindle 3 models will save you money on those pesky wireless transfer charges. And if those personal documents come in the form of PDFs, the Kindle 3 PDF reading experience is the best yet for a Kindle, with support for password protection, highlighting and annotations, and multiple contrast settings.
9. An Enhanced “Webkit” Web Browser Makes the Kindle’s Free Wireless Internet Connectivity Better Than Ever
One of the things that impressed me about the Kindle from the first days of the Kindle 1 was the fact that it came with free "lifetime" wireless web connectivity with no contract, no monthly fees, and -- did we say it was free? -- no cost ever. Of course that was great for accessing the Kindle Store and downloading books in less than 60 seconds, but it also meant that no matter where I was -- with very few out-of-range exceptions -- I could check my email or the Red Sox score or any text-intensive web page. The drawback, of course, was that the browser was pretty clunky and web pages usually took forever to load.
Kindle Free For All: How to Get Millions of Free Kindle Books and Other Free Content With or Without an Amazon Kindle Page 6