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Ok! Its been a long time since the previous post. Never got to doing it. Anyways I’m back and hope it stays in this mode or else ” I’ll be back” again!

There’s something about ebookreaders that enriches our experience as a book lover, but with affordable tablets coming in to the picture, what would you wanna go for? Amazon has come out with its new Kindle Fire which I sure hope will give the Apple a run for its money, a) cos the Fire is way cheaper than the apple b) & with someone else running ‘the Jobs’ I guess the legacy at Apple is just not the same. Well only time will tell.

Well anyways, I have a kindle 3 upgraded to the latest firmware v3.3  with not many perks, everything on the experimental still maintained in the experimental. One way its a good sign is cos it keeps your reading experience pure and pristine if you’d like, cos there are no other distractions (like on the tablets), if you want to keep it that way. The pdf readability isn’t that great, hope amazon works on this one. Well I wonder if there’s gonna be any more work on the Kindle 3 updates anymore as they’ve decided to change the formats. Now until I get my hands on a ‘Touch’ or the ‘Fire’ can’t comment on that.

But hey guess what? you wanna enrich your experience on the kindle 3 here are some great tips:

a) One of the drawbacks of the pdf formats is the inability to reflow (tweak the text in such a manner to make the print more legible on the device), and at times tables and images lose their alignment or just aren’t there anymore. One workaround is the k2pdf tool, a cool tool that lets you cut off the white spaced margins around the main body of the text & lets you reflow the text and doesn’t alter the alignment of the tables or images. A  lot more features ….. why don’t you explore them yourself. There are a whole lotta aspects about the k2pdf tool that I haven’t taken a peek at but if I do will try and blog.

b)Duokan: Another awesome tool. My discovery of this tool was accidental and very welcome as I have a lot of pdf files. This is another OS that you can install (alongside the original Kindle OS) by updating from the kindle. The instructions to which are provided in the link (btw this is the only place that i found some instructions that I understand). Verdict: Simply Superb! Why? Read on!

You could uninstall Duokan anytime without affecting the original OS. So you could update both Duokan as well as the Kindle OS. So when you turn your kindle on or restart it you have the option of choosing between the OSes. Once in Duokan you could also switch back to Kindle.

Another cool feature that I like about Duokan is you have an Index(TOC esp for the pdfs) and you can add bookmarks…but cannot annotate yet. Hope that comes in the next fix. You could also check out mobileread forums for more info. More on FAQs.

With Duokan now epubs is another format that you can read off. Wonderful ain’t it?

Well I love my kindle and I love the fixes that helps me tweak my reading experience.

I’ve discovered this site www.overdrive.com where you could borrow ebooks from. I like the idea and hope that you could get more of the new books sooner, and perhaps the list of books available would be more exhaustive and current. Now I stay in India; forget about ebooks, the state of the public libraries here in India is not worth a mention. So just recentlygot the library card of my sis-in-law and now have access to ebooks. Yay me!

Hope to put in more updates later! Happy Reading!