We have just given Amazon permission to create kindle-books from Hold ‘em Poker for Advanced Players and The Theory of Poker. We’ll see how these do and then decide if we should do any more.

Finally some decent quality books on poker will be available for the Kindle. These two books by David Sklansky are must reads for any student of poker.

What are the requirements for inclusion on my list? Books must be in paperback and ubiquitous enough to be found in a local library. A big bonus if they are available for the Kindle (I may only use Kindle-available books for purely selfish reasons). Oh and they must be good books, hopefully with a bit of an edge.

I’m also considering doing some kind of virtual version of the book club. Perhaps I would do it in SecondLife, or via a group in Facebook or on my message board. Sounds like fun and not that much more work since we would read the same book in the different locations.

A month or two later, frustrated with my inability to lose weight on my own, I looked up Seth’s scientific paper online about what makes food fattening and tried his method. It worked! I started losing weight again.

After a few weeks of sipping sugar water and drinking olive oil, I spent a week in New York for the Del Close Marathon. I was explaining it to a friend and he responded, “Oh you mean the Shangri-la Diet.”

The next day I bought the book and found Seth’s website.

As the months went by and I lost more and more weight, my former prejudice against fats in the diet had been seriously challenged. I was losing weight not by restricting fats (like I had in my 20s), but by adding fats to my diet.

Then I read an interview of Gary Taubes on Seth’s blog. I started reading more about low carb diets.

Finally when I got my Kindle, I read Good Calories, Bad Calories by Taubes. After reading it, I switched to a low carb diet of mostly meat, cheese, eggs and green leafy vegetables, something I had already started to do gradually.

In a discussion on low carb diets on Seth’s website, I saw a reference to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michale Pollan. I downloaded it to my Kindle. I haven’t finished it, but I’m sure it’s going to have a profound affect on how I eat in the future, along with Taubes book. (Pollan chides Taubes in his introduction without mentioning him by name over his 2002 article, “What If It’s All a Big Fat Lie?,” because of what is said about bread. However, their books could easily go hand and hand. For instance, high fructose corn syrup is one of the villains in both books.)

From there, I found eatwild.com, a website with a listing of grass fed beef farms across the United States. Next Saturday, I hope to visit a farm near Springfield. And in June, I’ll be heading to the local farmer’s market in Peoria.

I certainly would not have thought that a book on economics would have so radically changed my eating habits and be responsible for me losing over 50 lbs in little over a year, but in a way, it has. One thing leads to another to another to another.

However, since I’m taking some classes at the local community college, I do have access to their journal resources. I decided to check out what’s available at the library. When I got there, I started by searching for some of the articles I had found before, ones which only had the abstract available publicly. When I brought of the article on the screen, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could read the whole thing online. Apparently if I access the article directly from these computers, I don’t need a subscription.

Next I noticed that the article was a bit long and I only had a few minutes before I needed to leave. I considered printing the article and then I remembered that if you send HTML documents to your Kindle email address, the document will be sent to your Kindle for only $0.10, a lot less than printing it out on paper.

I was very excited as the first few papers showed up on my Kindle only a few minutes after I had emailed them to be processed. I’m guessing that I’ll be doing this quite frequently in the future. If I have a document that I need to bring with me, I’ll send it to my Kindle instead of printing it.

Many of my favorite poker books are from Two Plus Two Publishing and none of them are available yet. Judging from this thread on their forums, they have no plans to release Kindle versions of their books. That’s a shame.

So what is available for the Kindle now? Well there are several books by Phil Helmuth. They all look like crap honestly. I don’t particularly like him anyway, but more importantly, I did once buy his book, “Play Poker Like the Pros” and returned it within a few hours. I just couldn’t read it and from what I did read, it was very light on useful advice.

There is one book that has his name on it that I started to read last winter, Phil Hellmuth Presents Read ‘Em and Reap. Thankfully, this was not written by Helmuth. It was better written and seemed much more useful. I’m considering buying it for my Kindle, since I don’t own a copy. Perhaps, I’ll download a sample and take a another look.

Phil Gordon’s book simply called Poker has good reviews, but it also looks very short on the kind of in depth strategy and tactics suggestions I enjoy.

Matt Lessinger’s The Book of Bluffs also looks promising but the reviews are decidedly mixed. I’ll have to find out more before I buy it.

There are a couple of non-fiction books about poker that I’ve read and enjoyed that are available. Poker Nation is a great read and Positively Fifth Street is also interesting. Lastly, One of a Kind, the story of Stu Ungar rise and fall in the poker world looks like it could be good. I’m downloading the sample of it and of Moneymaker. I’ll let you know if they are good.

I can’t be the only poker geek out there that would love to have copies of all my favorite poker books. The current lack of titles (only 36 show up when you search the Kindle store for ‘poker’) is probably an opportunity for some secondary poker authors to get noticed. If you are one of them, plead with your publisher to release your book in that format. I hope that Two Plus Two will come around soon as well, but I fear that they just don’t get it yet. If they wait too long, they might find another publisher will come along and challenge their lead in the poker books market.

UPDATE 3/22: Both the Moneymaker book and the book on Stu Ungar looked interesting. I downloaded the Ungar book and will have a review later.

I couldn’t wait to open it up.

It’s packaging looks a bit like a book.

Just turn it on, it’s ready to go.

The manual is loaded right onto the device and ready to read. It also had a number of samples already downloaded and ready to read which I had chosen from Amazon.com

The screen is hard to describe. It looks great. The pixels are tiny, it compares well to a printed page of text. And the screen saver images that appear when you shut it off are pretty neat too.

My first impressions are very positive. Two negative things:

1. The faux leather case is embarrassingly bad. It works fine when it’s closed and in transit, but it fits the device more like a flip flop fits a foot then a glove fits a hand.
2. The side buttons are easy to hit on accident.

Both of these problems have been well documented. I’m guessing that future models will address this.

However, so far the rest is great. I love the feel of it. The screen is excellent for reading. and I love not messing with a book binding to read. It rests in my lap and I just press a button to switch pages. Perfect.

I would write about it more, but I’m eager to finish reading the sample pages from Good Calories, Bad Calories.