08:01 – I finally “borrowed” my first book under Amazon Prime yesterday. I’d given up on trying with Barbara’s and my monochrome Kindles because every time I tried it would lock up the Kindle, requiring a complete reset. Something in the firmware of those older Kindles doesn’t get along with our D-Link wireless router. I figured out the problem one time. It has something to do with the B/G/N mode setting on the router, but it’s not worth the hassle so we just keep our mono Kindles in airplane mode. Fortunately, the WAP works fine with Barbara’s Kindle Fire HDX, so that’s what I used to borrow the book.
Once I’d downloaded the book to Barbara’s Kindle Fire, I used the Amazon website to download the book to my hard drive, dropped it into Calibre to strip the DRM, and transferred it to my mono Kindle. We do all our reading on our mono Kindles, so formerly I’d download every title twice, once into a directory of books for my Kindle and then a second time into a directory for Barbara’s Kindle. That was getting old, so now I routinely download the book once, drop in into Calibre to strip the DRM, and then we can transfer it to either Kindle without worrying about which copy works on which Kindle.
The book I borrowed is Alpha Farm by Annie Berdel, which several websites had recommended. If I were going to waste time writing a review, the heading would be “Stop her before she writes again”. Like most prepper books I’ve seen, fiction and non-fiction, this one is complete garbage. Even elementary school spelling, grammar, and punctuation escapes this woman. The book is full of misused and misspelled words, run-on and fragment sentences, and odd constructs that leave the reader with no clue what the author intended to convey. She apparently doesn’t even realize that she’s supposed to use periods to end sentences. The narrative switches back and forth from first- to third-person, and even characters switch back and forth between names. The author has apparently never met a woo-woo conspiracy theory she doesn’t like: HAARP, chemtrails, government causing severe weather and earthquakes, vaccines causing autism, and on and on. Fortunately, I’m a very fast reader. I got through this piece of crap in half an hour or so, but that certainly was a wasted half hour.