Given that I'm such a book nerd I have to acknowledge that I love my Kindle. It will never of course for me replace the joy of holding a book or the act of turning the page, but it is a useful piece of kit to own. Especially with the dual life we've been leading. Now of course being based in one place - France - the Kindle's usefulness has changed. It's no longer the essential travelling companion. However, a new purpose now beckons.
One of our Anglo-French groups has a regular book club. We've been to two since we moved here and one earlier in the year, before we moved, to get an idea of what it was like and whether we could cope with a more 'intellectual' level of French conversation. All was fine, as was the range of books being read. A good mixture of authors from scandinavia, across europe and eastern and asian litterature, some contemporary others classic reads. All of course are translated from the original language into French.
My Kindle was bought and registered in the UK to a British email address, which we no longer use. I tried to download various books in French to UK amazon, but of course as you'd expect the range is limited, in part because of copyright as well as sales. So initially I could only download books from the reading list here in English, at least some of them, while the versions translated into French, were almost non-existent. Problem of course that we want to improve our French litterature reading skills, that particular aspect of the French language, being different from the everyday spoken and written, because of the tenses. I contacted Amazon UK explained that I wanted to be able to order and download books in French from Amazon FR rather than Amazon UK. How to do it? I was told to change my home address to my French address. Which I did. Fine. This was a couple of days ago. I wanted to down load The Summer Book by Tove Jansson for the book club meet, week after next. Wouldn't let me do it. French Amazon Kindle didn't recognise me at all. So I got in touch this morning via the Amazon FR website to Kindle support.
I can write and speak French pretty well, so had no problem explaining my problem, in an email this morning in French. Mike went into Chinon for what proved to be an abortive attempt to post some letters, both of us forgetting that being a public holiday here, nothing was going to be open. In the meantime, I got into the shower. Then I got out of the shower, still wearing showercap, and heard the phone go. Grabbed towel, stuffed feet in slippers, rushed to the phone. A very rapidly speaking Frenchman from Amazon Fr had received my email and was going to talk me through what to do. Dripping English woman in shower cap is startled, as wasn't expecting a phone call. She removes shower cap in the hope that it will help her to hear more easily! Actually I did pretty well. These days we no longer, both of us, run away into separate rooms when the phone goes. We can manage phonecalls with ease, but something like this, that involves technical tweaking, is still a bit of a challenge.
Got through the first phase of the process. Then he had a problem and I misunderstood what he was asking. So for a few minutes, we were definitely at cross-purposes to each other. Fortunately he was very patient.
The sticking point was, so simple as it turned out, that I couldn't use my French email address as that related to my home here in France. My account could only be transferred to Amazon FR using the original UK email address to which the Kindle was first registered when I bought it. Once I'd understood that bit, it was all straightforward. Our old email address is still active although we don't use it.
So as of half an hour ago, my Amazon Fr Kindle account was opened and I have made my first transaction which is a Collins e-French/English dictionary. Useful to have I hope.
Need another shower.
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