[.ca] Amazon Kindle: The Definitive User's Guide (Includes all ...

Almost terrible:
If you want to know the history of the Kindle and all about its innards, get this ebook. There are a handful of good shortcuts that I am assuming are probably found for free on the web (I haven't perused the other reviews.) Editing is just awful. Entire book is almost terrible.

He Needs to Hire an Editor:
I read the reviews here and then bought it anyway. At least my expectations were adjusted before I started reading it. I found about 2/3 of the chapters to be pretty interesting. The other third (word formatting, self publishing, etc.) seemed outside the scope of this document. My two biggest complaints, though, were the formatting (or lack of formatting) of the tables and the atrocious spelling. The typos and grammatical errors were the worst I've seen in any publication (even worse than my town's local paper). The misspelled words jumped off the page! They were so bad that I wonder whether the author even proofread his own document or if he just wrote it in one pass and clicked "send." He could have paid a high school kid fifty bucks to read through the draft and mark up the errors. Very shameful for any document, let alone one that I had to pay for. The formatting of the tables made them nearly useless. If he saved his Word doc as HTML then the tables still should have been preserved. If that didn't work, then he could have taken a screen shot of the tables and pasted them in as images. There has to be a better solution than one column of jumbled terms and values. Outside that, I actually enjoyed the background of the Kindle device. I was looking forward to the keyboard shortcuts, but I'm either too thick to figure some of them out or they've been discontinued (or maybe they were just incorrect). For example: alt-Aa?!?! Does that mean I hold down alt, shift, a for the first capital "a" and then press a second lowercase "a"? Do I hold down the "a" to make it two As? I tried many different combinations and never had any success. As others have said, you get what you pay for. It was worth a buck, but no more than that. He mentioned that we should check for upcoming releases. Maybe he'll spell-check it and post another version. UPDATE: Reading through the Kindle User's Guide (which, I'll admit, I should have read first), I discovered that the keyboard shortcut for sleep mode is alt-aA (the font size button). Again, it's a point of confusion that an editor and/or a little clarification by the author could have prevented.

Too many typos:
This book had so many typos in it that I finally had to stop reading it. I wish someone could have proof read it for the author. As for the info, some of it is good, but there is also a lot of commentary by the author that is subjective and distracting from the focus of the book.

Helpful:
This was only .10 cents, so who cares? I found a few handy shortcuts I did not know about without having to search the Kindle message boards, so that alone made it worth it. Would I go so far as to call it a book? No. A lenghty magazine article with helpful information, yes. Also, I did not need nor want detailed information on the evolution of e-readers. I just wanted what the title stated.

A touch of literacy would be a welcome addition:
At this price, complaining about this book is like giving a gift-wrapped Mr. Ed an oral exam, but still ... The author needs to learn a few tricks of the writer's trade, like: - Never proof-read your own work - Spell checkers are not to be trusted - Punctuation - Grammar - Sentence structure The book is rife with errors and misconstructions. I haven't gotten far into it enough to be able to comment on whether it fulfills the "Definitive Guide" promise on the cover, partly because I keep having to go back and re-read those "Did I just misread, or did he really commit ANOTHER howler" sentences. Slow going.