The Complete 2012 User's Guide to the Amazing Amazon Kindle: Covers All Current Kindles Including the Kindle Fire, Kindle Touch, Kindle Keyboard, and Kindle (28 page)

If this fails, connect your Kindle to your computer with the USB cable and back up all personal documents, periodical issues older than seven days, MP3 files, and Audible files (Aa, AAX) to your computer.

Then reset the Kindle to factory defaults. Press Home, Menu, select "Settings," press Menu again, and select “Reset to Factory Defaults."

After the Kindle restarts, go to the last page of Home, select “Archived Items”, and restore all of the documents you'd like to read. Connect the Kindle to your computer with the USB cable and copy back your personal documents, MP3 files, and audiobooks (Aa, AAX).

This may often result from low memory on the Kindle. To check the amount of memory, press Home then Menu. The amount of free memory space is shown at the upper left. There should be at least 500 KB of free space.

To free up space, delete some items from your Kindle. Audiobooks take up the most space. Make sure you have backup copies of personal documents, periodicals older than seven days, MP3 files, and audiobooks (Aa, AAX) before deleting them from the Kindle.

E Ink Kindles:

If the charging light next to the power switch does not glow amber or green, try another power outlet.

If the charging light is amber and doesn't turn green after about six hours of charging, or doesn't come on at all,
reset the Kindle
.

E Ink Kindles:

Make sure wireless is on and the signal strength is strong by pressing Menu and checking the wireless status in the upper right corner. If the status shows "Edge," you are connected to a relatively slow wireless service, and many web pages will load slowly or not at all.

If you get a message that the Kindle is unable to load a web page, press Back and try again.

If ghost text or images remain on the screen after a page turn, press Alt G to redraw the screen.

Press Home, tap Menu, and then tap Settings. Now tap Reading Options and then turn Page Refresh On. This cause the Touch to redraw the screen from scratch on every page turn.

More information on troubleshooting is available on Amazon's Kindle Support Pages (
http://amzn.to/u9t6JJ
) .

Contacting Kindle Customer Support

On your computer, go to Amazon, Your Account (in the upper left corner), sign in to your account if necessary, and then select “Manage Your Kindle” under “Digital Content." Click “Support” at the upper right of the page, and then click “Contact Us” at the right side. Here's the link: Kindle Customer Support (
http://amzn.to/ul7KiA
).

E Ink, or electronic ink technology is used to create the electronic paper displays used in the E Ink Kindles. It differs from most computer and cellular phone displays in that it is not back lit. This is a major advantage in bright light, because the contrast and readability increase. The back-lit LCD screens used on computers, most cell phones, and other devices such as music players work best indoors in room light and become washed out and hard to see in bright outdoor light.

Another advantage of E Ink over LCD displays is that E Ink only uses power when repainting the screen (the black flash you see when turning pages on your Kindle). This allows the Kindle to have a battery life of weeks instead of the two to ten hours typical of laptop and tablet computers.

An electronic ink display contains millions of tiny capsules, each the width of a human hair, which contain positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a liquid medium. When a positive or negative electric charge is applied, black or white particles move to the top of the microcapsule where they become visible on the screen.

To create a display, the ink capsules are coated onto plastic film. A display driver controls a layer of electronic circuitry that creates pixels (picture elements). The display driver contains the logic required to form characters and images on the display.

For more information, see
http://www.EInk.com
.

To improve the speed and smoothness of web browsing on the Kindle Fire, Amazon developed the Silk browser, which is based on the open-source webKit browser engine. As with the E Ink Kindle screens, you don’t have to understand how the Silk browser works to use it. But if you’re curious about the advantages and potential of this technology, read on.

webKit powers many web browsers, including Apple Safari, Google Chrome, the default browsers in the iOS and Android mobile operating systems, as well as the experimental web browser on the current E Ink Kindles. Apple initially derived webKit from the open-source Konquerer browser library while developing Safari. webkit has since been extended by many other developers.

What sets the Silk browser apart is its transparent use of the Amazon web Services cloud. Typical web pages load dozens of files pulled from many different locations on the Internet. The complete page cannot be displayed until all those files have been downloaded to the device.

Amazon Silk splits the browser’s load between the Fire tablet and the Amazon cloud. The software that powers the browser resides on the Fire and also in the cloud. Each time a web page is requested, Silk determines which browser components to run on the Fire and in the cloud, looking at network conditions, the complexity of the web page, and the location of content.

When you request a web page on the Fire, Silk simultaneously loads all of the required files into the Amazon cloud, then sends the complete web page to the Fire in a single stream. Because many web pages are already hosted on the massive servers that power the Amazon cloud, and the fact that these servers are connected directly to the Internet backbone and can fetch web pages up to 20 times faster than wireless connections, web pages are assembled in the cloud much faster than on any mobile device.

By transferring some of the workload to the cloud, the Amazon Fire does also less processing, which extends battery life.

Silk maintains a connection to the Silk server in the Amazon cloud, which in turn keeps connections open to the most-visited websites. This eliminates the time required to resolve a website name and establish the TCP connection.

The Amazon cloud also indexes millions of web page loads and uses this information to push web page components to the Fire even before they are requested.

Silk is very much a work in progress which constantly learns how to serve web pages more efficiently. As it loads millions of web pages each day, Silk learns about individual websites as well as where users tend to go next. This often allows Silk to push a web page to the Fire before the user clicks on the appropriate link.

The effect all this will have on your experience browsing the web on the Kindle Fire remains to be seen. One would expect that web browsing will speed up for all Fire users as Silk indexes an ever-increasing number of web pages and at the same time learns the browsing patterns of individual users.

Publishing your own work to the Kindle is surprisingly easy. The hard part, as any successful writer will tell you, is producing a high quality, interesting book that people will want to read.

Although the details of publishing to the Kindle are beyond the scope of this book, it is appropriate to list a few tips based on the author's experiences.

Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (
http://kdp.amazon.com
) accepts manuscripts in several file formats, but the best formats are HTML (web coding) and Microsoft Word. You have the most control over book formatting in HTML and the necessary commands are not hard to learn.

Producing a manuscript in MS Word format has several advantages. Working in a word processor is a more natural process for a writer. If you intend to publish your e-book at Smashwords to gain access to other markets aside from Amazon, it helps that Smashwords also accepts MS Word documents.

The key to producing a Word document that Amazon will accept and convert to Kindle format is to keep the formatting simple and within the Kindle Direct Publishing guidelines (
http://bit.ly/rDjLuY
).

For more information on Kindle Publishing in general, see Kindle Direct Publishing (
http://kdp.amazon.com
),

www.KindleBoards.com: Kindle Boards is one of the oldest and most active Kindle forums. Look here for discussions on all things Kindle, including accessories, books, author and book announcements, book clubs, tips, tricks, troubleshooting, and reviews.

KindleNationDaily.com
: Kindle Nation Daily is Stephen Windwalker's daily blog on "All Things Kindle," including both free and bargain book search tools. You can also subscribe to the blog on your Kindle.

BookLending.com
is a website that helps lenders and borrowers find each other. You can search for books to borrow and list your own Kindle books that you wish to lend. Note that lending must be enabled by the book's publisher for you to lend a book.

BookRooster.com
operates in the same spirit as BookLending.com, connecting readers and reviewers. In their own words, "BookRooster.com is a community of passionate readers who receive free copies of new Kindle books to read and review. Help fellow readers discover great books by becoming a BookRooster.com reader-reviewer."

Like many people who spend many hours working on a computer, Bruce Grubbs had no desire to read on an electronic device until he had a chance to check out a friend's Kindle. He was so impressed by the quality of the screen that he immediately ordered a Kindle for himself and has never looked back. As an experienced hiker and explorer of the American West and the author of more than thirty hiking guides, mountain biking guides, how-to books, and travel books, the possibilities for publishing to the Kindle were obvious. He now has four Kindle titles published independently and several more in the works.

Stephen Windwalker is founder and publisher of the popular Kindle Nation Daily (
http://kindlenationdaily.com
) website and the Kindle Nation Daily Facebook page (
https://www.facebook.com/KindleNation
), and he is the author of several books about the Kindle.