I got my Amazon Kindle eReader when I landed home from my recent trip out to Oklahoma City, where I had the privilege and honor to speak at the Oklahoma Bar Association. I enjoyed the trip and meeting awesome people including Jim Calloway, but I was itching to open the box when I got home.
My Kindle review wouldn’t add much except to say it’s as cool as they say it is. But I did something that has already changed my practice.
First, take a step back. I’ve got a bunch of bankruptcy books on my shelf, and they take up a lot of room. Books that I refer to every single week, stuff that’s critical to my base of knowledge. But I’m not near those books that often.
So I embarked on a massive scanning operation, digitizing all of the massive tomes. I began with my NCLC bankruptcy manual and moved on from there. The books went into a big box and got transferred to my closet.
Now that I got my Kindle I wondered if I could copy those books to my new portable reading device.
Yes I could!
So my Kindle now contains my entire bookshelf of professional books as well as the binders of NCLC Reports that I lovingly read on arrival. No matter where I am, I have with me all of the books that were previously on a bookshelf.
Right on point! I have been advocating this for a while and blogged about it a while back (http://brw.typepad.com/wmtech/2009/09/putting-t…..). I see this as not only personal productivity – but a tool for business to go digital in on-boarding new staff!
Thanks for pointing out the post, Arkovi – excellent information for everyone to use in their quest to go digital.
I wonder if the same thing can be done and displayed on the iPhone Kindle app.
I do the same thing. I have a lot of law books from a certain publishing company that also provides the book on a CD in Word format. I have put all that on my Kindle. It's awesome! Now, if I could only get all of the statues on my Kindle….
How did you scan your NCLC books? Those books are perfect bound.
One thing you did not explain is the "table of contents" and/or indexing on the Kindle. In other words, how do you find exactly what you want or need on your Kindle?
Here is an interesting scanner that reduces the time and cost of scanning: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/12/diy-book…..
Here is an interesting scanner that reduces the time and cost of scanning: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/12/diy-book…..
The TOC does not scan are an indexing mechanism, but I OCR the PDF before sending it to Kindle. In doing so, I create a PDF that can be searched. Kindle has that feature, which is how I find things I need.
I love my Kindle and have also begun adding legal texts to my library. Though limited, the basic Internet browser can also be used to access cases in a pinch via Google Scholar.