Amazon, This Will Take Some Getting Used To

Amazon has a new "feature" which I find to be quite annoying. I decided it's time to read Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, and so visited Amazon. It's not available for Kindle, and is fairly expensive as a physical book, so a summary of the book caught my attention, and I thought it was pretty inexpensive:

As I went to click the purchase button, I noticed the "good" price was for a rental, so suddenly it was not a good price. Why make the rental price so much more prominent than the purchase price? It's especially more prominent in the search. Smells like bait-and-switch to me.

Amazon Cloud Reader: Almost Useless

This morning I wanted to look something up in an e-book that I had previously read and archived on my Kindle. Rather than download it to the Kindle, re-read small portions of it, and then put it back in the archive, I figured I could just use the Amazon Cloud Reader. I opened the book, and tried to search the book. No joy. ^F just does a find on the visible portion of the book, and there are no other search controls.

After a search (powerful idea, no?) of the Kindle help forums and learning there is no search, I sent Amazon customer service a query in case there really was, but no.

So how could a text-based application, like an e-reader, possibly be shipped without a search function? How could Amazon possibly make this omission? Really, how could they consider the Cloud Reader ready to ship without a convenient way of searching a book?

How can an organization that did such a great job on the Kindle do such a poor job on the web-based stand-in?

Unplug Your Charger

An article at RecycleBank suggests that we unplug our chargers when not in use.

Think of it this way:

• Your portable device uses energy. Since recharging batteries is not 100% efficient (among other things, heat is a byproduct), it takes a bit more power than an otherwise equivalent non-battery-powered device does.
• That charger may give off perceptible heat even when nothing is plugged into it. In the summer, this may represent a double-use of electricity, once to generate the heat, and once to remove it via air conditioning.

My NiMH chargers are on strips that are usually turned off. The little charger that Amazon sent with my Kindle (A00810-01) stays warm when plugged in even with no device plugged into it, so it clearly uses power when not in use. thus I keep that unplugged except when needed.

As an aside, I like the little Kindle charger as a generally-useful tool:

• Its output is 4.9V at 850mA. My USB Sanyo NiMH charger NC-MDU01 specs say it draws 500mA at 5V. I can charge NiMH with this plugged into the Kindle charger.
• It's 100-240V 50-60 Hz which makes it suitable for international travel.

On a related note, I have a Nomad7 solar charger that is sufficient for keeping my cell phone and my Kindle keyboard charged, sort of. The problem is that I'm in the habit of sending NYT articles to the Kindle, and am not too conscientious about keeping the Kindle's wireless turned off, which runs down the battery much more quickly. So I often end up using the plug-in charger for the Kindle.