Free cycle touring kindle books

Cycle-touring, Expeditions, Adventures, Major cycle routes NOT LeJoG (see other special board)
OldBloke
Posts: 137
Joined: 15 Jul 2014, 3:34am

Re: Free cycle touring kindle books

Post by OldBloke »

Enjoying the free books. Thanks.

If I'm wrong blame Tapatalk.
TomBruce
Posts: 29
Joined: 9 Jul 2013, 12:26pm
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Re: Free cycle touring kindle books

Post by TomBruce »

Smith873 wrote:Tom,

Thank you for clarifying that you are offering only the promos versions for free and not the full editions.


They aren't the full versions (have to make a living!) but the free versions are still a good length. The round the world one is a cycle ride across Europe from UK to Istanbul. In the first post it does say Part 1 of both books are available but sorry if you thought it was misleading, wasn't supposed to be.
cotswolds
Posts: 287
Joined: 16 Jan 2010, 10:47am

Re: Free cycle touring kindle books

Post by cotswolds »

Completely agree with all the comments about how much nicer an e-in screen is for reading. Completely readable in bright sunshine, and much pleasanter with its backlight for reading in dim light - very different to phones and tablets. Also a battery charge can last weeks.

One thing I'm surprised nobody's mentioned is that Kindle isn't the only game in town, and in choosing Kindle you risk locking yourself into the Amazon world. This is particularly true if you regard your books as a part of a library which you may want to revisit in the future. If and when your Kindle dies, if you want to have continued access to the books you've bought, the only easy options are another Kindle or Kindle software on a tablet. This may or may not bother you, but you should be aware of it. And the e-ink screens don't last for ever - we've had 3 e-readers in our house, and with 2 of them (1 kindle, 1 nook) the screens died after 18 months, which apparently is not unusual. The kindle was just junk, the nook had been bought from John Lewis with their 2 year warranty; the model was discontinued, so we got a full refund without quibbles.

The other e-readers I know of are Kobo and Nook. I know little about the Kobo, other than it sees to be linked to WHSmith. The Nook is linked to the American bookstore Barnes & Noble. In principle the same arguments about being locked into a book store apply, it's a question of choosing who you are looked in to. I believe the Nook supports more formats than the Kindle so may be a better choice if you want to import material from different sources.

If you have a techy streak, and don't mind putting a bit of effort in, there is a further potential option. I have a Nook Simple Touch which is essentially a stripped down Android tablet. With relatively little effort and pretty much no risk, it's possible to unlock it so that it can run other Android apps. I've done this to mine, and have found the result fantastic for cycle touring.

The Nook e-book software is unaffected by the process, so it works as an e-reader as it always did. I have the Kindle Android app which works equally well and gives me access to the books we bought when we had a Kindle. When buying new books I look in both the Amazon and Barnes & Noble shops - one can often be cheaper than the other by £5 or more.

On top of that I have various apps that are nice to have:

when WiFi is available, Guardian and BBC news apps grab a download of UK/world news; in the same vein, a weather app;

an app called Pocket keeps an offline archive of web pages - for our last tour, any web page I thought would be useful I put into Pocket from my laptop (1 click in a browser), a single refresh on the Nook to get them all downloaded then they were stored offline on the Nook and available throughout the tour; only works well for pages that are articles rather than 'busy' web pages, but it worked perfectly for wikipedia pages for all the towns we were visiting;

and last but not least, OSMAND with offline Open Street Map maps - data for a whole country can easily be stored before departure on the SD card; it's usable for general navigation but it's a bit of an art reading colour maps on a mono display; where it really excels is with zooming in for street maps of towns; and the search works well, so you can show all the campsites or cash machines, or branches of Lidl or whatever; (no GPS, so you still have to be able to map read).

Everything beyond the basic e-reader is a bit clunky to use - the Nook only has a slow processor and the refresh characteristics of an e-ink screen are strange; but it works and for me the benefits of readability in bright sunlight and long battery life outweigh the disadvantages.

I think the Nook Simple touch is discontinued - not sure if you can do the same with newer Nooks, though I believe you can. I know you can't do this with the Kindle - they can be rooted, but are Linux rather than Android, so it doesn't get you very far.
cotswolds
Posts: 287
Joined: 16 Jan 2010, 10:47am

Re: Free cycle touring kindle books

Post by cotswolds »

Forgot to say thanks for the links - I look forward to reading them.
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