It’s true! If you’ve got some tech/geek skills, a little patience, $150, and a Bed Bath & Beyond nearby, you too can become the proud owner of a color touch screen Wi-Fi enabled Amazon Kindle!

Sort of.

Last week, several awesome people posted instructions on how to hack the new Pandigital Novel 7″ eReader, a somewhat janky, low-budget ebook reader that just came out. Emboldened by boredom and my own stupidity (the two things that usually embolden me, to be honest), I decided to try it out for myself.

Several hours later–I’m going to say six, because I was interrupted by dinner, TV, and sleep–I now have a portable Wi-Fi tablet running Kindle for Android.

So yes, it does indeed work, and no, you don’t have to be brilliant to pull it off. But I have lots of mixed feelings about it.

First, here is a summary of what I did.

Step 1: Register a new email address at bedbathandbeyond.com so that you can receive a 20% off coupon. You’ll need to print this coupon and bring it to the store with you.

Step 2: While you’re on the site, go to the product page and download the Pandigital $20 Mail In Rebate form (PDF) for later.

Step 3: Now get dressed and go to a physical Bed Bath & Beyond. (Yes, I know you were in your underwear at home.) Don’t bother looking for the device; it’s almost certainly in the back, because Pandigital had to pull all the inventory and issue a firmware upgrade a couple of weeks ago right after they first went on sale. (I told you the device was janky.) Just go to customer service and ask for it there.

The device retails at BB&B for $170, but with your 20% off coupon you can get it with tax for under $150. After the mail-in-rebate, it’s theoretically possible to get the price down to $130–hence the headline of this post. But some companies are notorious for abusing mail-in-rebate rules to deny valid rebates, and I don’t have any experience with Pandigital to know whether to expect them to come through. Buyer beware and all that.

Step 4: Bring home your new halfwitted Pandigital Novel, plug it in so it can charge, and turn it on. Now marvel at the slow, unresponsive interface! Seriously, I suspect nobody at Pandigital actually tried using this device before shipping it. It’s more or less unusable in its factory-fresh state, which is sad.

(On the other hand, if you’d rather use the Barnes & Noble ebook store for all your reading, you can stop right here and just use it as is. You’re probably better off buying a Nook, though.)

Step 5: Make sure there’s enough juice in the battery, then go to this page and follow this guy’s instructions. He’ll walk you through a multi-step process that will:

• install a special driver on your Windows PC so it can talk to the Pandigital Novel via USB cable
• install a software hack that will turn the volume up/down buttons on the Pandigital into “Menu” and “Back” buttons
• install a user-friendly replacement home screen that you will use instead of the heavily restricted default one

I think I followed the instructions precisely, but I have to say things didn’t unfold exactly as written. I never saw any “Success” or “Reboot the Novel” messages on the PC or the device, and I was worried that things weren’t working. It all turned out okay in the end, however.

Also: the instructions explain that you can now install other Android apps–for example, Kindle for Android. If you know your way around a command line interface (really you just need to know the commands DIR and CD) it’s easy. If not, you can open the web browser on the device and install Amazon for Kindle directly via this link, which goes to a public Dropbox account hosting the apk installer.

When you finally get everything working, you’ll be able to fire up the Kindle for Android app, download your purchases, and start reading.

Now a whole slew of warnings. Why so many? Because after playing around with this thing for the past several hours I’ve got a lot of misgivings about it.

• Hardware issues (yes, there are a lot)
  • I think it’s a nice size, but it’s heavy.
  • The touchscreen layer buckles in the center slightly on my model (you can’t see it, but you can feel it when pressing).
  • It’s a resistive touchscreen, not capacitive, so that means no multitouch and you have to press fairly hard (compared to an iPhone or iPad) to register a touch.
  • It’s sloooowwww; it seems like Pandigital took a page from Nokia’s playbook and deliberately underpowered the poor thing, probably to save money and battery life.
  • Even the included plastic stand is badly designed, so that the power cable falls out and you have to use both hands to insert the device when you want to use it.
• Software and firmware issues
  • It freezes up frequently. Sometimes it starts working again after several minutes, and sometimes you have to reboot.
  • There seems to be a bug with the Wi-Fi connection so that when you return from sleep mode, it refuses to scan for wireless networks. Fiddling with it via various setting screens and/or removing the SD card sometimes works, but not always. Reboot!
  • As a result of cutting corners on the processor, there’s not a single aspect of the device that you can call “snappy” or “responsive”–you will need to get used to pressing, waiting, and sometimes pressing again.
  • The on-screen keyboard is slow and frequently reads your press for the wrong key, resulting in an estimated one hundred million typos per typing session.
  • There are some issues with the auto-rotation–different issues depending on which launcher you install and/or which app you’re using at the time.

In general, I’d say this is sort of the electronic equivalent of an old car you keep around because you like to tinker with it; it will run sometimes, but other times you’ll have to open the hood and start messing with things.

As to whether I’ll keep it, I haven’t decided yet. I can’t say enough bad things about Pandigital after today, and I can confidently say that without discounts, the Pandigital Novel is insanely overpriced considering it’s almost unusable fresh out of the box.

Even so, I might keep it because I do like the size of it–not too big or too small–and I like that I can access not just my Kindle ebooks and personal ePub library, but also comics. That’s a great thing to have for less than a third of the price of the cheapest iPad.

But just to be clear, this is a poor man’s iPad in every aspect: speed, touchscreen technology, memory, battery life, connectivity, and materials.

If you can live with all that, and if you don’t mind troubleshooting a device on a regular basis, good luck. Maybe I’ll see you around on the slatedroid.com Pandigital forums.

Clearly I have no authoritative answer to that question, but as a nerd who is constantly sucking up information on the Kindle and its competition, I do have opinions! That’s sort of the whole point of blogging, after all.

Here then are the things I’ve been thinking about with respect to how low the price can go this year on the Kindle 2.

There’s at least one new Kindle model likely to be released by August or September.

That means there’s at least a slim chance that Amazon will introduce a cheaper model without Whispernet.

As far as consumer choice, currently you’ve got the $400+ giant DX or the sub-$200 Kindle 2, or free software to use on devices you already own. But Barnes & Noble now offers a $150 Wi-Fi only Nook, which I imagine would be just fine for a lot of people. Heck, if I could have saved $50 and opted for Wi-Fi only over Whispernet on my Kindle 2 last year, I would have done it. I just don’t shop online enough to justify Whispernet’s almost-anywhere capabilities.

It’s unlikely that the new model will be more expensive than the Kindle 2, given that it’s almost certainly not going to offer a color display or touch-screen technology.

Now Amazon and Jeff Bezos could be faking us all out in order to throw off the competition, and this hypothetical Kindle 3 (that’s what I’ll call it for now) might be some superslick multi-touch color ebook device, but I doubt it. There’s no point in trying to take on the iPad, which is a different product category entirely, and as long as Amazon keeps improving its line of Kindle software for other devices it can keep enough readers happy to stick with a more modest screen for now–at least until the technology improves and gets cheaper.

That leaves only a few areas where it can offer improvements: speed, screen resolution, number of shades of gray, weight and size, and wireless connectivity.

It is possible, then, that Amazon may offer a Wi-Fi version and a Whispernet version (which may or may not include Wi-Fi), and create two price points for the Kindle 3.

Let’s assume this forthcoming Kindle 3 is slimmer, lighter, and faster than the Kindle 2. That’s all good, but not enough to sway someone who’s eyeing the Wi-Fi-only Nook model perhaps.

If Amazon would also offer a Wi-Fi-only model at a lower price, this would put it in a more competitive place with Barnes & Noble–especially if Amazon can beat that $150 price point for a Wi-Fi-only Kindle. But who knows whether this will happen.

Of course, the other possibility is that Amazon will offer a Whispernet version at today’s price point and a Whispernet+Wi-Fi version for more money, but I don’t think that’s likely to happen. If Amazon did that, it would immediately lose its pricing edge over the Nook.

About a year ago, iSupply put the production cost of the Kindle at about $185. Amazon and its competition may not have much room to go lower.

Although it’s probably that cost per unit has dropped since then, it still doesn’t leave much room for Amazon to slash further before it hits the floor. That also hints that unless Barnes & Noble or a competitor wants to lose money, prices for other devices won’t drop much below $150 either.

Taking all that into consideration, if I were currently in the market for a Kindle, here’s what I would do: I would wait until the end of summer to see whether Amazon releases a cheap Wi-Fi-only version, and if it was priced within $10 of the Wi-Fi Nook, I’d buy it.

If September comes and nothing is announced, I’d probably buy the current $189 Kindle 2, and keep my fingers crossed that Amazon released a new version within the 30 day return period so I could swap out if I wanted to.

And otherwise, if I could make do with Kindle software on my netbook or smartphone, I would just wait until the Thanksgiving-Christmas shopping season and see whether Amazon offers any sort of holiday deal.

(Photo: timparkinson)

It’s been an interesting day so far for ebook devices. Barnes & Noble started it by pulling a fast one this morning, at least on Amazon, when it announced a new Wi-Fi-only version of the Nook for only $149. B&N also dropped the price on the 3G/Wi-Fi model to $199, making it $50 less than the Kindle.

At least, that was the case for a few hours.

Now Amazon has fired back, by dropping the price of the Kindle 2 to $189 with free 2-day shipping, effective immediately.

If you’re planning on mostly reading public domain ebooks or books from your existing digital library, the Wi-Fi-only Nook is still the way to go. However, Amazon continues to have an edge on the ebookstore front–at least against Apple, although I’m guessing Barnes & Noble is still playing catch up as well–and Consumer Reports gave the Kindle a thumbs up over the Nook when comparing usability.

Remember, however, that rumors surfaced last month that Amazon will release an updated Kindle later this summer, possibly one that’s thinner and has Wi-Fi, so this might also be a sign that the company is clearing out inventory in anticipation of a product refresh.

Just in case you didn’t know, Kindlerama is available on the Amazon Kindle Store under the blogs section. It’s the easiest way to access Kindlerama on your Kindle, and fresh content is pushed out as soon as I post it.

If you haven’t tried it out, remember that every newspaper, magazine and blog comes with a free 14-day trial period, so you can give it a trial run and save your 99 cents if you decide it’s easier to just read it online.

I haven’t promoted the subscription version much on the blog because I don’t want to be a salesman for my own stuff here. However, Amazon temporarily deactivated it for about 4 hours last week and in the process booted all of my Kindle subscribers, so I’m starting from square one. That means if you used to read this on the Kindle, it’s still available, despite whatever Amazon told you last week about it no longer being for sale. (I’ve been asking for some insight into what happened, but I’m not getting very far.)

Hey, if you do subscribe and decide you like it, feel free to leave a review. I could use some friendly praise on the page!

Thanks,
Chris

If you’re one of those readers who devours sci-fi or fantasy novels, you should know about WebScription Ebooks (www.webscription.net), a site run by sci-fi writer Eric Flint with the benevolent support of Baen Books.

In the About Us section of the Baen site, Flint describes the overall philosophy of WebScriptions: “The key is accessibility, followed by the principle that, whatever we do, it should be user-friendly for the customers.” Believe it or not, this is still a rare attitude for commercial publishers to take, because so many in publishing still consider the Internet to be something like this:

I’m going to eat your product!

What Baen’s pro-consumer attitude means for you, the reader who just wants to get some books and not spend a fortune, is you have some highly attractive purchasing options:

1. Buy a $15 “WebScription,” which includes four new books (plus a couple of backlist titles, usually). WebScriptions are a little unusual in how the books are distributed to you, so I’ll explain the concept in better detail below.

2. Buy a single book for about $6. This will be DRM-free, so you’ll be able to read it on any ebook-friendly device, Kindle or not.
3. Buy a collection of books, usually 5 or 6 per set. Although these bundle prices vary, the price per book usually comes out to around $4.
4. Buy an advance reader copy, or ARC, for $15. This is for the hardcore nerds who love an author so much that they want to read the latest manuscript before it’s even been proofed or printed in book form. That’s right, $15 gets you access to what’s basically the first finished draft of the author’s next work, warts and all.

As you can see, every single option listed above (except for the nerdgasm-inducing ARC, which has no peer in publishing) promises savings over the sorts of prices you usually find on the Amazon Kindle store. As an added bonus, you don’t have to worry with Amazon’s DRM should you move to another device in the future.

So how does this “WebScription” work anyway?

The WebScription service can seem a little confusing at first. At the simplest level, you’re buying early access to four new titles. What’s unusual is Baen distributes them to you in chunks during the three months before they hit bookstore shelves.

So for example, if today in June you buy the October 2010 WebScription bundle, access to those titles will kick in starting in August. You’ll get half of each book in August, then the third quarter in September, and the last quarter in October.

About two weeks after you get the last part of each book, you’ll start seeing them in your local bookstore. You’ll also get access to the final, complete ebook version then so you can add it to your private ebook library.

If you check out the WebScription page where each month’s collection is listed, you’ll see that a couple of nearby months (July and August) are partially through their release cycle, while later months (September, October, etc.) have yet to start. As you might guess, older months have been fully released and you can buy the entire books without dealing with the complicated release schedule.

Every bundle is a flat $15, and since there are 6-7 titles per bundle, you’re paying $2.50 or less per title. It’s a pretty good deal.

Value prices for big names in sci-fi and fantasy

Even if you don’t ever buy a WebScription, you should take a look around Baen’s Book Collections and Authors pages. The price-per-book in most cases works out to less than $5–slightly more expensive than a WebScription, but here you’ll find titles grouped by author or theme, many of them not available elsewhere.

For example, this collection of four of Greg Bear’s earlier works is $18, or $4.50 per title. Compare that to Amazon’s Kindle store, and you’ll see that one of the titles is going for $7.99, while the other three aren’t even for sale.

Hopefully it goes without saying, but I’m not a shill for Baen or anything. In fact, despite everything I wrote above I haven’t even purchased from them, because I’m not really that much of a sci-fi/fantasy geek. However, I do see some intriguing horror titles under the Night Shade Books section, so I might be handing over my credit card data soon.

However, if you’re a fan of either genre and you read a lot, you should visit the site and take a look at their offerings. You might find yourself saving a lot of money over Kindle Store purchases–and you might find titles that you can’t get elsewhere, too.

WebScription Ebooks Monthly Bundles [Baen Books]

(Photo: volt220)

But what you might not know is this: you don’t have to pay a dime to read it legitimately, and with the author’s blessing. Stephenie Meyer is releasing the novella for free at www.breetanner.com starting Monday, June 7th. It will remain there until July 5th.

Meyer writes on her blog:

Since this story had always been an extra for me, and was meant to be released with the [forthcoming Twilight Official Guide and not as a stand-alone book], I wanted to be able to offer it to my fans for free. You all have bought a ton of my books, and I wanted to give you this story as a gift.

Some of you may already know that for every hardcover edition sold, $1 will be donated to the American Red Cross. I’m not sure whether the Kindle edition also figures into the donation plan, but it doesn’t matter; if you want to save money on the novella and support the Red Cross, Meyer points out that she’ll have a donation option on the breetanner.com website when the book goes up next week.

So read it for free, donate what you want to Red Cross, and enjoy your latest Twilight book!

www.breetanner.com

This morning I logged onto Amazon’s Kindle store and checked out the bestseller list, and was happily surprised to see that Amazon has just implemented the change that it announced to Publishers Weekly less than two weeks ago. From now on, all books that cost money will have their own top 100 list, and all free books will have their own top 100 list.

If you were worried that Amazon would make the free books go sit in a windowless room off to the side, you’ll be pleased to know that the retailer is keeping that list in a prominent place. In fact, the two lists are presented in columns on the same page, which means you can now see 50 titles per screen.

For bargain hunters, this makes it even easier to find free offers. I think this may also help readers find those books that aren’t free but are steeply discounted. For instance, this morning I found that Stephen King’s new novella Blockade Billy is currently priced at $4.99, which is $3 less than what it’s been priced at lately.

Bestsellers in Kindle Store (new and improved!)

If you’re expecting, know someone who is, or think you might have a kid one day, you might find Tori Kropp’s The Joy of Pregnancy to be a reassuring and optimistic alternative to other pregnancy guides. Publishers Weekly says it’s “refreshing” and that it is “sure to leave readers feeling more prepared–and less frightened–about the journey of pregnancy.”

Presenting to Win by Jerry Weissman is yet another business strategy book from the Financial Times publishing arm. It’s subtitled “The Art of Telling Your Story,” and offers techniques to improve your presentation skills.

I have trouble getting past the amateurish cover art, but I was on a message board a few weeks back and nearly everyone there was raving about the Milrose Munce series and how funny/clever/entertaining it is. Milrose Munce and the Den of Professional Help is the first in the series, and for some reason they’re not available in print in the U.S. right now, which makes this free Kindle edition even more appealing.

And finally, Sidney Sheldon’s Rage of Angels is free for a limited time and might be good if you’re looking for brainless beach reading. I must have read all the Sidney Sheldon soap/thriller novels I could find back when I was a (weird) teenager; at the time I thought they were trashy fun. Just be advised that the book was published in 1980, so it might show its age in parts.

If you’re not a tech-oriented person, this won’t mean much to you. However, everyone else who works with computers or software knows that O’Reilly is the go to publisher for detailed manuals and guides. (When Amazon opens up the Kindle SDK for developers to start writing apps for the device, you can bet O’Reilly will have a book on it.) A chance to get one of their books for only $10 is pretty terrific.

There’s one other thing that makes O’Reilly books great, and that’s a complete lack of digital rights management (DRM). That means when you buy an O’Reilly ebook, you can read it on your Kindle or a Kindle-friendly device, on an Android smartphone, on your computer using PDF, and on an iPad. The company provides four different digital file formats so in your purchase, so you can read it on pretty much anything.

I’m just sad I can’t buy more than one book at this price. That’s how geeked out I am over the sale.

O’Reilly online store

One reviewer on Amazon critizes it for simply saying “network more” in too many words, but the rest of the reviews are uniformly positive. More important for the job searcher, it won’t cost you anything to download and check it out.

(If you have a friend without a Kindle who should read it, remind him/her that the PC and Mac version of Amazon Kindle is free.)

Unlock the Hidden Job Market by Martha I. Finney and Duncan Mathison [Amazon Kindle Store]

User ratings are all over the five-star spectrum: a lot of readers wanted a “how-to” list and not a “why this happens” explanation. Still, it’s free so there’s no risk in trying it out–and the best part is it won’t add any clutter to your home!

Living Organized by Sandra Felton [Amazon Kindle Store]

Ten of the thirteen volumes are free right now. The ones that aren’t: vols 1, 7, and 8, which are each $8.99.

The hardback editions are $9.35 each, so it’s true you’re only saving 36 cents on those three titles. However, all thirteen of the hardback editions cost money, versus just three on the Kindle store. For the entire series, you’re looking at $27 for the full set. Not bad, considering the cheapest hardcover set of the full series is $64 on Amazon (not counting shipping as it’s from a third party seller).

If nothing else, you might want to grab one of the free editions and see if you think it’s worth your investment of time and money to get the full set. If so, you might want to act fast; I have no idea how long these books will remain free.

A Series of Unfortunate Events #2: The Reptile Room [Amazon Kindle store]

M-Edge, the company that probably makes more cases for the Kindle than the next five top case sellers on Amazon combined, is about to release a durable hard plastic case for the Kindle that will make it waterproof, sandproof, snowproof, and generally nigh-indestructible. (Note: you can probably still destroy your device if you try, so don’t try.) It’s also going to be $80 when it comes out, which is why you might want to try to win one for free instead.

The contest that M-Edge is running is simple, but there’s not much time left. It’s not just a random drawing, either–you have to send them your best vacation action shot of you using your Kindle somewhere exotic, the more exotic the better according to their instructions.

Here’s what you need to know:

1. It’s only open to legal residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia (sorry Puerto Rico!).
2. The deadline is 11:59 PM EST April 1, 2010. You’ve only got a few days left, so I hope you’ve already taken that vacation (or that you’re on it right now).
3. If you win, M-Edge reserves the right to use your photo in promotions for the contest or the case.
4. M-Edge will pick the winner and ship him or her a Guardian case.
5. The winner will be announced “on or about April 2, 2010,” so at least you won’t have long to wait to find out if you’ve won.

Check out all the details and fine print on the official contest entry page at M-Edge. It’s also where you can upload your best photo. Good luck!

It can be frustrating to look for good free books on the Amazon Kindle store, because there’s no way to filter out all the useless stuff. I’m talking about the public domain freebies, which you can get more easily and permanently via Feedbooks, as well as those “dollar dreadfuls”–those books that are in public domain but have been repackaged for profit, in varying degrees of quality, by some opportunist.

One way to bypass this morass is to look to the Listmania! lists that other Amazon Kindle customers assemble. One such person is Rachel M. Suffill, who maintains two useful lists for Kindle owners:

• Free Kindle Books
• One Cent Kindle Books (and any “free kindle books” over-flow)

The thing about personal lists is that they’re subject to the whims and interests of the person creating them, which means it’s a great way to discover new gems you’d never think to look for on your own, like this well-reviewed vampire detective novel Already Dead by Charlie Huston, or this Jewish children’s book based on the legend of the Golem called Timothy Tolliver and the Bully Basher.

If Suffill’s editorial take doesn’t suit your tastes, try searching the Listmania! section for the term kindle and words like free, bargain, and on sale.

What does that $14.95 monthly fee get you? One “credit” per month, which you redeem for an audiobook. Audible warns that “a very small number of titles are more than one credit,” so you may run into a situation where you’ll have to use up two months for one book.

Still, this is far, far better a deal than the one currently running on Audible’s website, where they just agree to knock the monthly fee in half for the first 3 months.

Here’s the offer with all the details. In addition to Kindles, the $100 credit can be applied to several Apple iPod models (including iPod Touch), Kindle cases, and–weirdly–Flip camcorders and GPS units.

“How to Save $100 on an AudibleReady Device” [Amazon]