Finally had a chance to sit down and comment on this past week's thread on Kindles.
Love my Kindle because I have problems with my neck, and carrying large, heavy books around makes it hurt. I have the old keyboard style. Haven't upgraded to Fire and don't have a tablet, so I can't vouch for how they work. on 5/20 Lyn wrote: "...How difficult is it to take the paper copy of the pricking or diagram and put it on the kindle/device? Or vice versa, kindle/device to paper pricking." The first part is easy, and Diane and Anna already answered it. However, on the plain old Kindles you're limited to black and white, so take it into consideration when you scan. As for the vice-versa part, it depends on the file itself. Most of the books you buy from Amazon, etc, are DRM protected. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management and is supposed to protect the book from being illegally copied, etc. That means you can't print out pages, which would be prohibitive if a lace book had prickings/patterns. Some of the print-on-demand sites that offer e-books, like LULU.com, have stopped using DRM. Unfortunately they don't have lace books with patterns. I've had problems with .pdf files on my Kindle. They only show you the whole page, and the text doesn't wrap. So if I zoom in, I end up having to read the first part of the line, then click to move the screen to the second part of the line, then back to read the beginning of the next line. Maddening!!!!! The fix for this problem came with a great freeware program called Calibre...Suzy Johnson mentioned it in one of her posts. It can convert non-DRM files from one format to another....quite a few, in fact. I had downloaded some old lace books in .pdf format from the cs.arizona fabric archives, and couldn't read them on the Kindle. With Calibre I converted them from .pdf to .mobi, and was able to read them. Calibre also converts Word documents and Excel spreadsheets to .mobi format...I now have the inventory of my lace library at hand when I go to lace events. There's a lot more the program can do. Google them for more info. Lyn wrote: "And, how difficult would it be to turn a popular but out of print lacebook into a kindle/device edition? Could you get a pricking from such a version?" I think that would depend on how old the book was and whether the publisher had it in an electronic form like a Word document format...piece-o-cake to convert to an e-book version. Older books may have to be set up from square one. Whether you'd be allowed to print, again, would depend on whether they added DRM protection to the file. I hope that today's authors of lace books would look into self-publishing...particularly publishing on demand. That way they can control the publication of their books. I want to scream when I see the prices on some of these out-of-print books. I would rather pay the author. (OK...off soapbox...) Peg in a windy Cleveland Heights, OH...chillin' with Beloved. - To unsubscribe send email to majord...@arachne.com containing the line: unsubscribe lace y...@address.here. For help, write to arachne.modera...@gmail.com. Photo site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lacemaker/sets/
