General Purpose Tools

Cool Tools Digital Book

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E-book version on Kindle

The clever folks at Amazon figured out how to make a handy Kindle digital book from the huge, oversized, giant Cool Tools tome I published in paper a few years ago. The 470-page paper book was a hit and is just about out of print (only a few copies left), but now a digital version is available.

This Kindle version of Cool Tools is good news for the many fans who live outside of North America, where the paper version was prohibitively expensive. It will also be swell for those pioneering souls who have given up paper books and thrive by digital-only. This version is also a lot cheaper.

The Kindle Cool Tools will cost $4.99. If you are a member of Amazon’s Unlimited program, it is free. If you have already purchased the Cool Tools book from Amazon, you can get this digital version for $1.99.

You can imagine the difficulty of squeezing an 11 x 14 inch (28 x 36cm) page into a tiny Kindle screen. While no text or images are lost, the associative juxtapositions and context of each item is lost, making it less rewarding to browse, IMHO. It is hard to discover tools randomly; you have to march through one after another. That’s the cost of making the book intangible and portable and cheap. You can rapidly search it, which is not easy to do in the paper version.

This is still an experiment; it is one of the most complicated and bigger books Kindle has done so there may still be bugs. But overall I believe this digital version will be a useful tool itself. Not ideal for all uses, but extremely nifty for certain uses.

As a reminder, it is very easy to read a Kindle book on your phone with the Kindle app, so even if you don’t have a Kindle, you can access the Cool Tools book digital version on your phone. If you have previously purchased the paper book from Amazon (they will remember), you can get it for $2.

-- KK 04/8/18

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