A few months ago, I was worried about saving up enough money to go on another missionary trip to Sudan in May to the point where I was thinking about selling my Heroclix to help fund the trip.


But then several people donated money to my trip (without my asking them to do so), I got a nearly thousand bucks back on my tax refund, and my last royalty check was about $500 more than I expected (my first book--surprisingly--had a huge surge in sales. I've no idea why.)



Now I've actually got extra money--a rare occurance in my life. So I bought a Kindle from Amazon. Now I can take all my books and notes to Sudan in electronic form. I also bought a AA-battery recharger, since there's only electricity in the camp I'm staying at for an hour or two each night.


This helps enormously, since there's a 30-pound limit on baggage for the little plane that flies us from Uganda to Sudan. Bringing the various stuff I needed with which to teach was always a challenge.


We have a Kindle at the library at which I work, so I've already tried it out. It really is pretty neat--the screen does just look like a piece of paper with no glare at all. It's a fun and useful piece of technology.

was it the Kindle or the Kindle 2?

Congratulations! Can you get your books for one of those?

It's the Kindle 2. And, ironically, neither of my books are availabe for the Kindle.

Quit being such a failure and get your books on Kindle, young man! In fact, go to your room! You're going to bed without dessert!

Congrats - and make sure that the AA-battery recharger is voltage compatible with the place you are staying. Hopefully you don't need to buy a special adapter. It would be a major bummer to have your Kindle 2 with you and not be able to power it.

Of course, they probably have lots of hamster wheels attached to an electric generator at the camp - so maybe the question is moot!

Actually, the point of the AA-battery recharger is that it runs on AA batteries. I don't have to plug it in to power up the Kindle.

My wife recently bought one and it's pretty neat. I have yet to really use it though, but she loves it.

Then there is no point in buying one.


Oh, BTW, it would have been ironic if you wrote a book about the Kindle and it wasn't available for the Kindle.

how is the free cell phone based wiki browsing working out for you ?

It works great. I've used it at home, at church, at work, on the bus and while just walking down the sidewalk. In every case, everything I've bought has been downloaded into it within a minute or so.


I've already downloaded the various Bibles and commentaries I'll want for my mission trip. In addition to that, I've got everything from the best of Robert E Howard to Jules Verne to the near-complete works of Edgar Rice Burroughs for casual reading. (About 150 books and short story collections so far).

Are works in the public domain free to dowload on the Kindle ? I heard rumors that project guttenberg could load books to it with some slight file modification.

If they had free Guttenberg browsing and downloading, I'd be all over that.

A number of public domain items ("Treasure Island, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea," for example) are free directly from Amazon.

I know you can download books from Project Gutengburg, because a co-worker of mine has done it. I haven't gotten around to it yet, so I don't yet know the process for doing so.

Also try Archieve.org or Librovox

I heard talk that Britannica was working on something with Project Gutenberg to make their content viewable through our mobile device software. Not sure where that project is development-wise, but I know they wanted to get it up and running before the end of the year.