Tech T.I.P. 11/3/2011

A Portable Research Library

By Denise Barrett Olson

I am a proud iPad owner and have been since day one. I wouldn’t trade my iPad for anything - except maybe the newest version. That being said, the one thing at the top of my Christmas wish list is a Kindle Touch.

Why? The Kindle Touch 3G is the ideal tool for field research.

It’s bigger than your smart phone so you can actually read things, yet small enough to fit into a purse or cargo pocket. The e-Ink display can be read even at high noon on a cloudless day in the middle of a remote cemetery and the battery life is amazing. You can have as many as 3,000 books stored on your reader meaning you can carry a huge reference library with you at all times without breaking your back. But that’s just the beginning.

Kindle recently announced its Personal Document Service. It allows you to email personal documents to your Kindle, store them in your online Kindle library and download them to your reader at any time. And, while you cannot edit your documents, you can annotate them with highlights and notes. The Touch 3G costs more ($150 compared to $100 for the wifi version), but you will be connected to your document archive at all times without paying a monthly service fee like the data plan on your phone. With this reader, your library of personal documents is accessible at almost any time and any place. (Unfortunately, there are still a few locations that have yet to enjoy the delights of wireless service.)

Part of the registration process for your device includes setting up a Kindle email address (yourname@kindle.com) and identifying which personal email addresses are authorized to send to it. Now, when you want to add a document to your personal library, all you do is email that document file to your Kindle’s address. Supported file types include Microsoft Word, HTML, rich text format (RTF) and PDF along with GIF, PNG and BMP image files. Although these document types don’t support annotation, just type “Convert” in the subject line of your email message and it will be converted to Kindle format - giving you not only annotation, but search and text-to-speech functionality as well as the ability to adjust font sizes.

My plan is to build my own library of reference documents to keep in my personal library. Thanks to the many organizations working to digitize public domain books, there’s a growing number of historical books and periodicals available from online libraries like Project Gutenberg, Internet Archives and Google Books. These range from regimental and family histories to memoirs and travel journals. The number of current genealogy books available for the Kindle continues to grow and ebook quality is also improving.

I’ll include my own research notes, logs, todo lists and family histories that I’ve scanned to PDF. I’m also experimenting to see which reports generated by my genealogy software will best convert to something I can put on a Kindle. If this works out as well as I anticipate, my load will be a lot lighter but I’ll have tons of information at my fingertips.

Dear Santa, do I really have to wait until Christmas to try this all out?