Amazon Kindle
An interesting possibility
I’ve been a big fan of reading Kindle ebooks for a while now, but so far I have done all my reading on my iPhone. I bought a couple of the earlier Kindle eReaders but never liked them: the page turning, the form factor, something about them just wasn’t as good as reading on my phone so I didn’t use them much.
Last week though, Amazon were doing a deal where the latest Kindle was 5,000 yen off, so I picked one up for under 4,000 yen.
And loved it. It’s light, the screen looks great, and the pages turn in a pleasing manner. It’s a bit too easy to touch it by accident, but not a deal-breaker.
So far, so good. It’s a nice device, and the prices are coming down so fast that these things are practically disposable now.
And that’s what hit me. On Thursday as I was showing some teachers around the Academy, it struck me that Kindle could be the answer to our high-level book problem.
You can sync multiple devices to the same account (my account is linked to a dozen: computers, smartphones, tablets, and all those old Kindles).
So instead of buying hundreds of paper books that are going to lie around taking up shelf space and rarely being read, I could buy books on my Kindle account, buy a couple of Kindles for the Academy, sync them to my account, and lend them to our students. Heck, at 3,000 yen each we could just give them to the students 🙂
I already have close to 1,000 books on there (although 90% of them are fantasy, science fiction, personal finance, productivity, or teaching) and it would be easy to pick more up as needed.
The school would appear funky, students would probably appreciate the novelty, and we wouldn’t need anywhere near as much space for marginal books.
What do you think? Genius or what?
Get a Job Teaching English in Japan
My second ebook, Get a Job Teaching English in Japan, is free on Amazon Kindle for the next couple of days. It’s aimed at people new to Japan, but I would be really grateful if you would grab a copy and leave an honest review on Amazon. The book is available in all the Kindle stores and you should be able to find it with a simple search.
If you have any comments about the content, please let me know! One of the nice things about Kindle is that you can fix mistakes after ‘printing’.
Thanks for all your support.
business Kindle materials online resources personal publishing
by sendaiben
4 comments
Self-publishing on Kindle
Last weekend I did something I have been meaning to do for a long time: I sat down and wrote a short book, edited and formatted it, and published it on Kindle through Amazon.
It really was that easy.
The process is extremely clear and Amazon has several tutorials to walk you through how to sign up, format your work, and upload it to the site. Once you have finished they check it (takes 12-48 hours) and then it goes live and people rush to buy it… or not, in my case 🙂
The book(let) is called Air Miles and Hotel Points in Japan, and it’s available free in any Amazon Kindle store worldwide for the next 24 hours or so. Please check it out if you are interested, and if you are feeling particularly generous you could leave an honest review.
The thing is, if you have been sitting on an idea for a novel or a non-fiction book, why not go ahead and put it out there? I’ll be happy to help if you have any questions.