Yesterday I launched a project to provide free Kindles for U.S. troops serving in Afghanistan.  I chose Kandahar because of the letter K, but also because it’s the general region where Army Sgt. Andre B. Corbin will serve when he deploys later this month.  He will be toting a new 6-inch Global Wireless Kindle and accessories, all donated by M-Edge Accessories in a sponsorship for which I gained quick and enthusiastic support from Patrick Mish, CEO of M-Edge.  You can listen to the interviews I did with Sgt. Corbin and Patrick Mish in Episode 84 of The Kindle Chronicles.

It was during those interviews that the idea of Kindles for Kandahar arrived, and I’ll be working with Andre and Patrick to develop the project. Andre this morning left the following message on my Reading Edge Facebook page:

“As the Kindles become available, I will provide to you a name and address of one of the Kandahar soldiers who will find great pleasure in receiving a Kindle. I will donate the money required to cover the postage.”

I appreciate that donation, Andre!  I realized yesterday, when the first contribution arrived, that PayPal is charging a small transaction fee, so I will donate that money back to K4K, so that we can assure donors that every dollar contributed will go toward a Kindle for the troops.  I haven’t had a chance to talk with Patrick Mish yet about M-Edge’s involvement in this next phase, but I’m hoping he will consider contributing a protective cover and an E-luminator 2 light for each of the Kindles we ship to Kandahar.

Andre has another idea we’ll pursue, which is to figure out a way to donate Amazon gift certificates for purchasing content on the K4K units.  I loved his signoff on the Facebook entry today:

“Mighty oaks from little acorns grow.”

I hope you’ll consider becoming one of the first contributors to Kindles for Kandahar. To do so, simply click here or on the logo above or the PayPal button.  If you have your own PayPal account, you will be able to use it for the contribution.  If not, there will be credit card buttons available. I don’t have nonprofit status set up for this yet, so for the moment your contribution will not be tax-deductible.

This project is a terrific use case for eReader technology.  I realized that when Andre described how small the bag is that he will carry for his personal effects when he deploys.  Instead of taking one or two print books, he will be able to bring more than a thousand titles on his 10-ounce Kindle.  His reading list for the year he will be stationed at a remote base in Tarin Kowt includes recreational fare, as well as elucidating tomes such as In Afghanistan: Two Hundred Years of British, Russian and American Occupation (Kindle, hardcover) by David Loyn and Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Kindle, paperback) by Steve Coll.

Another book I’d recommend is Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? (Kindle, hardcover) by Seth Godin.  It’s about making yourself indispensable by overcoming lizard-brain resistance to your true mission.  I happened to have read it in preparation for an interview with Seth just before talking with Andre, and it helped me overcome reasons to procrastinate the launch of Kindles for Kandahar.  Andre and his fellow soldiers are taking the art of being indispensable to the 11th power.

With help from wizard Kindle formatter Joshua Tallent, I now have a new title available at Amazon’s Kindle Store.  It’s A Poet’s Progress at Bennington – Vol. 1. It comprises the work I did during my first semester in the Bennington College Writing Seminars MFA program, a mix of commentary on poets and my own original poems. My teacher that semester was David Lehman, editor for the highly successful Best American Poetry Series.  David was a terrific teacher and a great wit.  The way it worked was that I would send him a packet once a month during the semester, responding to his suggested readings and assignments, so this first volume contains four packets.  Then we all gathered on the classic New England campus of Bennington in southern Vermont for a 10-day orgy of workshops, special lectures, and nonstop conversations and arguments among fellow students.

I wasn’t the oldest student in my class, which graduated in January of 2003.  The low-residency MFA writing programs are terrific for people who have pursued other careers, like mine as a journalist and corporate executive, and finally decide to try their hand at serious writing.  I loved every minute of the program, even the ones which involved painful realizations about the inadequacy of my own work.  I always felt I was moving toward something those two years of the Bennington MFA. When I came across the saved files of my packets for David Lehman, I decided to edit them lightly and publish them using Amazon’s Digital Text Publishing platform.  I set the price at the lowest one possible, a dollar, and that usually means Amazon will discount it to 80 cents.

I left Bennington eager to take my place in the literary world, and I worked hard to complete a booklength poem titled Downsizing the Heart, excerpts of which appear in this new Kindle volume.  But along the way, new passions arose, triggered by a conference I attended in Banff named Blogs ‘n’ Dogs, where I first saw someone making a podcast. That was in December, 2005, and I’ve been podcasting and experimenting with audio and video on the net ever since.

I still write poems occasionally, and I dutifully pack my big leather notebook of works in progress whenever I travel, in case the muse lures me from GarageBand and iMovie to pen and paper.  Having my work from eight years ago available on my Kindle may spark renewed interest in poetry.  And I bought a paper book of poems several days ago, W.S. Merwin’s latest, The Shadow of Sirius, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry this year, his second.  I’ve been fascinated by the insights and observations that my new Kindlesphere friend Andrys Basten has emailed me in the past two days, as she has taken the time for a very close reading of A Poet’s Progress – Vol. 1. It’s wonderful to have readers, and to hear from them.  We all know the Kindle and eBooks in general are making a new world of reading possible.  What’s not clear is how this emerging platform will revolutionize creative writing.  I’m enjoying my own small experiment as a way to find out.

Here is my description of Vol. 1 as it appears on Amazon:

This volume’s commentary comprises considerations of The Best American Poetry 2000, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” by T.S. Eliot, nine short stories by Henry James, The Mooring of Starting Out by John Ashbery, The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth, Douglas Hofstadter’s translation of Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin, The Sea and the Mirror by W. H. Auden, The Changing Light at Sandover by James Merrill, Sphere by A.R. Ammons, Garbage by A.R. Ammons, and The One Day by Donald Hall. Edgerly’s original poetry takes as its subject literary satire, travel in New Zealand, a villanelle on marriage, poetry. Also included are excerpts of a book-length poetry manuscript loosely drawn from the author’s experience as an executive at a gas company.

All that for a buck, and of course there’s the free sample available if you’d like a taste of the work first…

SmartMoney

Over a few weeks, I rediscovered my ability to simply read the book or article I had punched up in the first place. (Just like—gasp!—old-fashioned printed matter.) It’s particularly enjoyable when reading a newspaper or magazine—enough so that I’ve been routinely purchasing some of these publications when I could have grabbed my laptop and read them for free on the web. In effect, I’m paying for the lack of distraction.

Exactly! In my own experience with the Kindle, which dates back to the early days of the orginal Kindle in late 2007, this same pleasure in what Weber calls “unitasking” explains why I prefer reading on the Kindle to reading on paper. Oddly, the new technology of the Kindle offers fewer distractions for my mind than a traditional book, in which I’m always able to see a page other than the one I’m reading, and it’s easy to flip ahead, to see how far I am from the end of a chapter.  Some new Kindle readers report feeling hemmed in by this limited view of the text, but once they submit to it, I would argue, the limited view is exactly what gives us the sense that reading, which we’ve always loved, has become even more of a delight.

I am grateful to Jeff Bezos and company for resisting the temptation to add distractions to this Zen-like attention which the Kindle encourages. As the e Ink technology advances, there will be temptations for video and who knows what else.  But each advance will have to be tested against Weber’s insight into the genius of the Kindle.

I want to thank Alex Ferreyra, editorial producer of ContentNext Media, for emailing Weber’s article to me.  In the near future, I hope to arrange a telephone interview with the author for an upcoming episode of my weekly Kindle Chronicles podcast.

I added the free app Pointer to my iPhone, which enables me to control a PowerPoint presentation using the iPhone and my MacBook Air. I haven’t figured out how to draw boxes on the computer screen with any accuracy, but there’s obviously some Wow Tricks to learn with this little beauty.

Amazon’s Digital Text Platform (DTP) is blowing my mind with possibilities for Kindle publishing.  I first tried it by uploading A Poet’s Progress at Bennington, made up of my first assignment in the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program. It’s now available for 80 cents, which honestly? I’d say it’s is overpriced.  If you can wait a couple of weeks, I plan to take that one down and replace it with a new version that will contain all four of the “packets” I prepared in January through April of 2001, for my first teacher, the poet David Lehman.  This will be a 23,000-word tome of comments on the reading that David assigned me, as well as original poetry.

What delighted me this morning was the realization that I could insert photographs into the Word document, which enabled me to amplify the text with scenes from New Zealand, where I was traveling my first semester of the Bennington low-residency program, and of the Djerassi Resident Writers Progam in Woodside, California, where I spent several weeks finishing a book-length poetry manuscript. The photos will look okay in black and white on the Kindle, and they’ll look even better in full color on the Kindle iPhone app.

Because I purchased the $9.99 Kindle edition of Joshua Tallent’s excellent  Kindle Formatting, I could probably have made my way through this Word document on my own, setting styles for different levels of headlines and section headings so the booklet will look good on a Kindle.  But I emailed Joshua and learned that he can take on the project for his reasonable fee of $60 an hour, and he estimated it will take two hours or less to whip my manuscript into shape.  When it’s ready, we’ll submit it to the DTP and within 48 hours, it will be available on Amazon for purchase for 80 cents. To learn more about Joshua’s Kindle formatting services, click here.  You can also hear him as my interview guest in Episode 22 of The Kindle Chronicles podcast.

Speaking of Amazon, I’m very happy to see that they have lowered the price of this blog from $1.99 a month to 99 cents a month. This means that I will keep subscribed when my 14-day trial ends!  I feel silly spending even a dollar a month to subscribe to my own blog, but I’m here to tell you that I definitely will be receiving that much pleasure each time a post magically and wirelessly travels from WordPress on my MacBook Air to the paper-like eInk screen of my Kindle 2.  This pleasure reminds me of the delight I’ve always felt using blogging software.  There is the text entry box, where the writing gets done, and then there’s the attractive finished product, which I can see using “Preview” in WordPress.  I find that I proofread better when I’m looking at the Preview, so I switch back and forth toward the end of the writing.  And by the time a post hits my Kindle, my words have been transformed yet again, to something more substantive and, somehow, real.

Darlene and I took a walk to Kinko’s this afternoon, so I could do some condo association prep for a hearing we’ll have Wednesday, when a homeowner will appeal a fine related to our building’s Pet Policy.  After the Kinko’s session, we settled in at Peet’s Coffee on 16th Street for an hour or so, reading our Kindles.

With a busy week ahead, it was wonderful to wander through Sunday without a plan and end up so grateful for what turned up.

NOTE: In tracking down links to the Inquirer piece here on my laptop, I took the time to play the video which accompanies Fitzgerald’s written article. I couldn’t do that with the Kindle, which displays an occasional muddy black-and-white photo but no video or color. Written quotes are one thing, but to see and hear the people Fitzgerald interviewed more than doubled the information about the topic. Still, it’s a lot more Sunday-morning-ish to arrange myself in a stuffed chair in the living room with the Kindle than it is to sit here at my desk in work mode. When Apple makes a Kindle-killer, it will probably have color and video and unimaginably cool design. For now, I love my Kindle the more I use it.

The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie – I came across a reference to this book last night when I was finishing The Lazy Person’s Guide to Investing by Paul B. Farrell, a terrific overview of how passive investors can use index funds to outperform professional stock pickers and active investors. Farrell’s book cost $8.96 to download to my Kindle, and the Carnegie autobiography cost 99 cents. I could have saved the 99 cents by downloading it from Project Gutenberg to my computer, transcoding it and transferring it to the Kindle. But at 2 a.m. in my leather chair, I was willing to spend the money for a one-click purchase that arrived on the Kindle in a few seconds. Andrew Carnegie would not have approved! The linebreaks on the Kindle version are funky, but it’s still easy to read and full of gems, like this passage, which I can find easily because I highlighted it on the Kindle:

I think my optimistic nature, my ability to shed trouble and to laugh through life, making “all my ducks swans,” as friends say I do, must have been inherited from this delightful old masquerading grandfather whose name I am proud to bear. A sunny disposition is worth more than fortune. Young people should know that it can be cultivated; that the mind like the body can be moved from the shade into sunshine. Let us move it then. Laugh trouble away if possible, and one usually can if he be anything of a philosopher, provided that self-reproach comes not from his own wrongdoing. That always remains. There is no washing out of these “damned spots.” The judge within sit sin the supreme court and can never be cheated. Hence the grand rule of life which Burns gives: “Thine own reproach alone do fear.”

The New York Times - I clicked through all the stories and found the main Obama news, including pieces by Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich that seemed brilliant to me, because they mainly supported my candidate. That was fun, but I wondered if I’d missed anything, so I pressed the “Search” key on the Kindle keyboard and typed in “Obama.” The result brought me to a series of Letters to the Public Editor decrying The Times’s alleged bias toward Obama, and an article in the arts section touching on how his campaign is attempting to reframe the issue of race. For 75 cents, the Sunday Times on Kindle seems like a bargain to me, and I enjoy not having to shuffle through all the paper of the tree-killing edition.

The Kindle User’s Guide – This came loaded on the reader, and I’m reading it a second time, slowly, to see if there are any tricks I’ve missed. (No link to this available at Amazon.)

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison – I always like to have one novel aboard, and this is a dandy. I was drawn to it in the wake of Obama’s speech on race. Just now I came across this video comment by Morrison on why she is a big fan of the Kindle. I guess when you’re a Nobel laureate in literature you don’t have to worry that the book-hugging Kindle-mongers might consider you a traitor to the written word. Here’s a taste of Morrison, describing her character Macon Dead:

Solid, rumbling, likely to erupt without prior notice, Macon kept each member of his family awkward with fear. His hatred of his wife glittered and sparked in every word he spoke to her. The disappointment he felt in his daughters sifted down on them like ash, dulling their buttery complexions and choking the lilt out of what should have been girlish voices.

Time Management for Creative People by Mark McGuinness – I can’t remember where I came across this useful short piece, which I downloaded for free in .pdf format, then emailed to my Kindle for 10 cents. (There is a way to do this for free, but I don’t mind paying Amazon 10 cents for the nearly immediate gratification of seeing the item show up on my Kindle home page.) The article is chock full of useful links to other writers, including my own organization fave, David Allen. The best tip I incorporated from McGuinness is to procrastinate by one day the processing of email, gathering most of today’s flow into a folder to act on tomorrow. This strikes me as a small but brilliant adjustment of work flow, because the Yesterday Folder has a finite number of messages to act on, so I have the satisfaction of completing it each day instead of living with the never-done feeling that comes from trying to keep up with today’s torrent of e-mail.

The Atlantic – I’m making my way through the March 1, 2008 issue, which I downloaded for $1.49 . It’s got a terrific piece on the great firewall of C
hina by James Fallows, a provocative essay by Michael Hirschorn stating that “one of the most exhausting things about new-media Moonies is their cultish conviction: either you ‘get it’ or you don’t.” (That’s MR new-media Moonie to you, pal!)

A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle – I admit it: I’m enjoying Oprah’s world web event, a 10-part conversation with Tolle about the book, which I’m also enjoying. They make a quirky couple. He’s a restrained German with the charisma of a paper clip, and she’s–well, she’s Oprah. This book is the top seller on Amazon, and Tolle’s earlier book, The Power of Now, is number 4. I’m miffed that you can buy the paperback of these two books for the same price as the Kindle version, $7.70. But I’d still rather read Tolle on the Kindle. I use the highlighting tool for easy reference to passages I like in A New Earth, including this one:

“If you think you are so enlightened,” Ram Dass said, “go and spend a week with your parents.” That is good advice. The relationship with your parents is not only the primordial relationship that sets the tone for all subsequent relationships, it is also a good test for your degree of Presence. The more shared past there is in a relationship, the more present you need to be; otherwise, you will be forced to relive the past again and again.

How to use the Amazon Kindle for Email & Other Cool Tricks by Stephen Windwalker – I don’t really want to use my Kindle for email, since the iPhone is much handier. But there are a few fun tricks I want to try, such as using one of my own photos for the screen saver which appears when the Kindle takes a nap. Kindle version cost: $1.99.

Article 33.3, Colorado Common Interest Ownership Act – this thriller lays out the rules for condominium associations such as the one where I serve as a board member. Good for reading as I doze off to sleep. I downloaded the .pdf document and paid 10 cents to mail it to my Kindle account for conversion and uploading to the Kindle.

First Amended and Restated Declaration of Condominium…. – See above. This is the so-called “dex” of our condominium association, like the Constitution that we live by. I am determined to read the whole thing, and I feel virtuous for carrying it around with me whenever I have the Kindle with me. I also have the Bylaws of the Association aboard.

“Second Earth” by Wade Roush, a Technology Review article on Second Life – my good friend Kes Woodward emailed me a link to this fascinating piece. I spent another dime emailing it to the Kindle, and I’ve been making my way through it slowly. I haven’t spent any time in Second Life for several months, so my interest in the topic is on the back burner. (The link requires free registration.)

That’s everything. I don’t have the latest copy of Le Monde on board at the moment, because I cleared out the past issues and the new one won’t arrive on the Kindle until early tomorrow morning. I enjoy practicing my French and seeing how the presidential campaign appears from Paris. The subscription costs $14.99 a month.

I’ve always enjoyed switching around in my reading, creating a sort of mind stew. Sometimes this results in wise coincidences, and my brain stays engaged if I switch content frequently. The Kindle, of course, is perfect for that. I return to the Home page, and the Kindle remembers where I was last in each of the items I was reading.

The electronic paper display is easier on my eyes than the backlit screen of my MacBook Air. Last night while observing Earth Hour, I had to hold it up to the candle to see the print, which made for a fun photo of the event – Kindle by Candlelight. Very romantic.

Believe made it to Number 7 in the Kindle bestseller rankings, selling for a limited time at 99 cents (that’s what I bought it for), and Oran says he received “some great feedback on the novel during the beta test.” This is quite a concept — beta testing a book with real readers, as opposed to circulating a manuscript to friends and fellow-students in your MFA program. Molly of Kindle Daily Post reported the exciting next chapter of the story. “To our absolute delight,” she wrote, “Oran reported that he was contacted just this morning by a publisher in New York showing interest in publishing a paper version of Believe.”

As for the novella itself, it was sweet and pretty well written, in my opinion. A patient named Joshua turns out to have dramatic healing powers and helps make New York City turn to kindness for a day. Oran includes enough real-sounding medical knowledge to help a willing reader go along for the miraculous ride.

I confess I am toying with putting up my poetry manuscript on the Digital Text Platform as a beta book for 99 cents. It’s one thing to put your stuff up on the web so people can read it on their computer screens. It’s quite another to know they can curl up in their favorite chair with your work, seeing your words on the clear, paperlike screen of the Kindle. Very tempting.

It’s one more example of how the Kindle has the feel of a writer/reader’s gadget. The team behind this product really seem to care about writing and authors and readers. It shows.