SolderSmoke Book on Kindle

Now on Kindle:

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SolderSmoke is the story of a secret, after-hours life in electronics. Bill Meara started out as a normal kid, from a normal American town. But around the age of 12 he got interested in electronics, and he has never been the same. To make matters worse, when he got older he became a diplomat. His work has taken him to Panama, Honduras, El Salvador, the Spanish Basque Country, the Dominican Republic, the Azores islands of Portugal, London, and, most recently, Rome. In almost all of these places his addiction to electronics caused him to seek out like-minded radio fiends, to stay up late into the night working on strange projects, and to build embarrassingly large antennas above innocent foreign neighborhoods. SolderSmoke takes you into the basement workshops and electronics parts stores of these exotic foreign places, and lets you experience the life of an expatriate geek. If you are looking for restaurant or hotel recommendations, look elsewhere. But if you need to know where to get an RF choke re-wound in Santo Domingo, SolderSmoke is the book for you. SolderSmoke is no ordinary memoir. It is a technical memoir. Each chapter contains descriptions of Bill=92s struggles to understand (really understand) radio-electronic theory. Why does P=3DIE? Do holes really flow through transistors? What is a radio wave? How does a frequency mixer produce sum and difference frequencies? If these are the kinds of questions that keep you up at night, this book is for you. Finally, SolderSmoke is about brotherhood. International, cross-border brotherhood. Through the SolderSmoke podcast we have discovered that all around the world, in countries as different as Sudan and Switzerland, there are geeks just like us, guys with essentially the same story, guys who got interested in radio and electronics as teenagers, and who have stuck with it ever since. Our technical addiction gives us something in common, something that transcends national differences. And our electronics gives us the means to communicate. United by a common interest in radio, and drawn closer together by means of the internet, we form an =93International Brotherhood of Electronic Wizards.=94

Reply to
bill.meara
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It's should say FOR SALE. I still have to pay Amazon money for it, which makes it a for sale ad, just like any other.

I've enjoyed your podcasts, and I might even want to read your book, but IHMO adversting something on this group is a violation of the charter. If you want to sell your book, you should post it on the forsale groups as forsale, not as available on a noncommerical group.

Since I don't have an Amzon account, and I'm not about to spend $12 on it, is not available for MY kindle.

Available would be more appropriate for a PDF file you could download for free.

Geoff.

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Geoffrey S. Mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to misquote it.
Reply to
Geoffrey S. Mendelson

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I bought it about a year ago, it's a good read. Go buy the book! Mikek

Reply to
amdx

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I guess to me it's pretty evident that anyone specifically telling you something is available for the Kindle is looking to sell it, not give it away (...in which case they could likely just use a PDF).

You can read Kindle books on most smartphones, Android tablets, and Windows PCs/tablets as well. The DRM is definitely annoying, although for a "fun read" sort of book like this (as opposed to, e.g., a reference text) I could see putting up with it.

---Joel

Reply to
Joel Koltner

It's not evident at all to me. After all, it was SPAMed to a bunch of newsgroups that don't allow sale postings.

As for Amazon, aren't there free books for the Kindle there?

Maybe he just wanted to use Amazon as the distributer, or had a friend in the Kindle publishing business?

Geoff.

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Geoffrey S. Mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to misquote it.
Reply to
Geoffrey S. Mendelson

Fair point, strictly speaking I would have to concur with you there, even if I do consider it a pretty minor transgression.

Yes, it's just that usually no one bothers to advertise them much due to the lack of potential financial gain and all. :-) (And I also think the 100% free ones have to be physically downloaded via USB or WiFi to your PC -- you can't get them over Amazon's "whispernet," which is just the Sprint cell phone network where Amazon cut a deal with Sprint to deliver books in (near-) real time, the price of this delivery being bundled into the price of the book.)

I figured that, like many hams, he was thinking he'd charge an inexpensive price and use the proceeds to buy more radios and antennas and produce more episodes of SolderSmoke. :-)

---Joel

Reply to
Joel Koltner

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