Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

Interesting, yes, but I'm not feeling overwhelmed quite yet.

Email your Word documents and pictures (.JPG, .GIF, .BMP, .PNG) to Kindle for easy on-the-go viewing.

No PDFs, though?

OK, no PDFs. I would have been pretty interested if it had had PDF capability, but I have no interest without that, sadly.

Wikipedia is the "best encylcopedia in the world"

Yeah i stopped reading after this blatant sentence of death

I thought that was the name of Julian Cope's Krautrock book and webpage.

Oh, I guess that typo is only on our side.

is there anyway of changing that screen colour? black text on grey - ew

I helped design the hardware! I don't think I can answer any questions yet, but it's an exciting day for us out here in Cupertino.

Apple plots! Trickery! Or not.

hard to disagree

Watch the vids

OMG it has a bookmark function???????????????????

engadget claims PDF support, so now I'm confused. Essentially if I could fill this with math papers it would be awesome, but not otherwise.

anywhere-in-the-world access to wikipedia, in something the size of a paperback, sounds pretty awesome. i read a bunch of ebooks on a monochrome unbacklit palm, back in the day, and it was surprisingly pleasant (esp in comparison to later colour/backlit vsns, or reading off a computer screen). i think this is pretty awesome. still - the industrial design on it looks pretty awful.

Holy shit did this thing get designed by Tomy in 1988?

2.5 out of 5 is the average rating from 140 customers...
doesnt look promising.
the price is too high,it has a light problem and it's ugly: "electronic paper that Japanese were working on was only a thin sheet of artificial electronic paper A4 format which you can roll into a pocket"

no pdfs no credibility </lazy zing>

plus you have to pay to read stuff you already... own?? I have problems enough paying for that stuff in the first place

sony e-reader looks hella better and that was lame in the first place

boo amazon

I mean, amazon is one of the better web1.0 (yeah, whatevers) companies when it comes to, you know, like, having a fkn clue, but this flys directly in the face of any clue they have

2.5 out of 5 is the average rating from 140 customers...
doesnt look promising.
the price is too high,it has a light problem and it's ugly: "electronic paper that Japanese were working on was only a thin sheet of artificial electronic paper A4 format which you can roll into a pocket"

-- Zeno, Monday, November 19, 2007 10:09 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

didn't it come out like... today? dont know if i'd take those reviews too seriously

huh. i'll check it out in 3 yrs when it's cheap and usable.

report back!

ok!

yeah, 'bump' pls

"dont know if i'd take those reviews too seriously"
the reviews are written by testers of the product.
(unless they are liars)

unheard of!

I know that link to the Newsweek cover already mentioned it, but wtf... this failed miserably a decade ago.

This looks... less than usable. Sigh.

Shockingly ugly - and way too expensive to boot. The only way something like this could possibly take off is if it was free, maybe with some kind of reasonable subscription package - say, "twenty dollars a month for five books & we will throw in this ugly clunky device for FREE."

Yeah, I could definitely see this coming in handy--there are many occasions when I'll be working on something and I need a certain book; it would be awesome to be able to get it right away. But I'm not gonna pay four hundred dollars for it. I mean, it's a book! I'll just go out and buy it if I really need it.

But I'm not gonna pay four hundred dollars for it. I mean, it's a book! I'll just go out and buy it if I really need it.

-- G00blar, Monday, November 19, 2007 11:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

I don't think their initial target market is ILX. I'm sure if I'll ever take a business trip again I'll see some guys with these on the plane.

http://www.smallsurfaces.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/segway.jpg

I saw somebody recently using one of those professionally recently, in an airport or a big store, I think.

nice to see the whole internet thinks this kindle thing sucks :D

Yeah - everyone who hasn't actually used one.

^^^ he made it, kids

(which I mentioned at the top of the thread)

what, you want a medal?

Sheesh. Jerk.

sorry :( i guess you don't need any more hassle :(

wow what a dick!

that's what all my ladies say

I'd love to talk about cool lesser-known features and correct some assumptions and misconceptions about the device, but we've been specifically instructed not to do so. So for now, I'll just let it go... Sorry about the jerk comment...

The quotes in The Guardian article are kind of funny...

Amazon's chief executive Jeff Bezos... "Books have stubbornly resisted digitisation. I think there's a very good reason for that, and that is the book is so highly evolved and so suited to its task that it's very hard to displace."

Philip Makinson, of Greenwich Consulting... "Do not get me wrong, it's a very nice bit of kit but what need is it fulfilling? Books are quite portable, cheap and universally available already."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/nov/20/amazon.news?gusrc=rss&feed=10

Why the fuck would anyone pay £195 for this? Reading it is never going to be as comfortable an experience as reading a book, so much isn't going to be easily or legally available and, y'know, it costs more than an iPod and not much less than an iPhone on contract. Not saying they do the same thing, but yeah, perspective.

i feel sorry for that schwantz guy now :(

only possible appeal of this (or any equivalent) is not having to lift boxes and boxes of books when moving.

but when i fall asleep reading and the book inevitably falls off/behind the bed, i would be pretty mad if that book cost $200

I'd love to get one but the $400 is pretty steep.

I thought last night about all the Library of America editions I could line a shelf with using the same $400.

Ha, otm

I haven't bought a new kobo yet, I've been using the app on my phone. (Annoyingly I had to shell out for a new phone last month after I dropped it one too many times.)

It's not the sd card, it's (at a bare minimum) the screen, which is just frozen. My purchases should all be recoverable.

I've been thinking of switching to a Kobo Libra w--I like the side handle/buttons--but don't know whether to pull the trigger. I don't really need color but am hesitant to buy a used b&w model because it's several years old so there's rumors of a new version soon.

https://gizmodo.com/this-50-case-turns-any-phone-into-a-kindle-2000515959

(wha?)

Always confused at anything where people think a non e-ink screen is an adequate replacement tbh

i use my tablet for pdf / djvu scans of things that won't format nicely to epubs (plays, things with lots of pictures, comimcs) but yeah, epub on an e-ink display ftw usually.

i keep meaning to play with it and see if the kobo respects things like background / font colour (for cheap dark mode). epub is basically just zipped html with some metadata for tocs.

Got the new paperwhite. So damn fast. I love it

As in the customary sluggishness is fixed? Interested.

Upgraded from a 10 yo model and the difference is pretty incredible

no physical page turning buttons :(

Why I’ll never give up my Oasis.

yeah my Oasis's battery life is getting worse and I have to restart it every few days to keep it from feeling super laggy but I don't know if I can get comfortable not having buttons

I know we're all trying to cut off Amazon but Laird Barron's newest collection Not a Speck of Light: Stories is $.99 on Kindle at the moment

orrrrrrr

https://www.patreon.com/LairdBarron

I wish he was less of a cunt.

i spent money (not much) and bought a Penguin Classics version of Doctor Thorne (for the notes) and it has more ocr errors in it than the cheapo PD version i also have. it also had the entire book as one chapter somehow so selecting any chapter in the toc took you back to the start. was curious.

anyway, i fixed that and, on a whim, set background-color = black and color = white and, voila, instant dark mode. (needs some work, only the main text is white-on-black but the top and bottom bars (title, progress) are black-on-white still. i think those are added by the device)

the other copy is one of those 'everything by anthony trollope' and is about 50,000 pages long and again the toc is trouble, has each chapter of each novel, pages of nothing but roman numerals.

(turns out that if you search for devmodeon in a kobo you get a new 'developer options' menu item and in there you can invert the screen)

i managed to download and decode a book from kobo.com entirely from the linux command line over the weekend, which means i have exactly 0 reason to boot into windows anymore (which is good because windows 11)

it did need me to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH and add a softlink from libzip.so.4 to libzip.so.5 but it worked fine after that.

was it free? or do you send your cc details? was it like curl requests or...?

i had to buy it, obv, but then you download the acsm file (your receipt basically) and run a command on it and that downloads the actual epub (usually I'd drag the acsm file into adobe digital edition and that would do it, then I'd fish the file out of My Digital Editions and into calibre. then reboot into Linux, import that to Linux calibre and sync my mojo against that)

(actually bought it on kobo website a couple of weeks ago)

OK your next job is a bash script to make the purchase.

no point, really, because that's just two clicks whilst I'm browsing.

the advantage of the new method is saving me having to boot into windows to download, especially has it'll try to get me to upgrade to win11 when i do, or tell me my hardware isn't compatible and fail.

kindle daily deals is showing me exactly one thing today, instead of the more usual half a dozen.

(A Mischief of Rats)

the deals page has been broken in canada for months.

9 today

but the same 3 titles in the second carousal as have been there since 2024 (Brothers Karamazov...)

tiny

https://www.yankodesign.com/2025/12/09/xteink-x4-is-a-wallet-sized-ereader-that-snaps-onto-your-phone/

perhaps too tiny. and i don't see why they are pushing this as an addition to your phone. but lack of backlight kills it for me (who does most of my reading in the dark)

in other news, i have been reading trollope using a kobo-enhanced kepub from the standard ebooks site and having page numbers correspond to actual page turns is so much nicer than the swimming through treacle feeling i normally get. the number at the bottom went from 800something to 1300something but it goes up much more rapidly. the only other change i notice is that the choice of font sizes starts much smaller than with non-kepub.

i still have a Kobo Mini around, love that size.. but yeah this is pushing it!

Physical books should come with digital downloads imo.

This is true but it's so unbelievably easy to pirate a book that it's inconsequential. I read most of my books 50/50 digi/phys

It's just so much easier to kindle in bed

I bought one of these and it’s made it much easier to read a paper book in bed or in other low-lit places - they’re terrific. Kindle use has gone down considerably. Almost every book light I’ve ever bought has been a piece of crap, but these are really, really good.

https://glocusent.com/products/glocusent-bookmark-style-best-book-reading-light

Great for bedtime reading with kids too

my kobo clara's little power button is now in two halves. it still works , but for how long? it's badly designed because it's long and thin but the underlying mechanical button is quite sharp and in the middle, so i guess it was only a matter of time.

(same thing happened with my phone. a £3 replacement fixed it but i'm not sure that's an option here)

((oh, people have used tiny 3d prints))

Physical books should come with digital downloads imo.

― Jordan s/t (Jordan), Sunday, 18 January 2026 01:29 (six months ago) bookmarkflaglink

Hard agree - it works with music. My most vehement minor hobbyhorse is that you should also have the option of buying a bundle that includes book, epub plus the audiobook? Especially with poetry these are complimentary rather than either/or.

How would that work? Music comes sealed. If it's an added perk just at Amazon or whatever.... that's kind of the last thing the book industry needs?

print something like a download code on the receipt?

would be easy for Amazon to implement that but for brick and mortar stores it would be a complete nightmare

you'd need something that only generated the ebook redemption code at point of sale, otherwise however you printed it in the book would result in it being torn out and stolen, shrinkwrapping every book would only result in piles of shrinkwrap on the floor of the bookstore as people browsed

Also record labels have mostly given up on providing download codes with vinyl LPs because they were so rarely redeemed.

if stores offered me the ebook version of a book I'm buying for an additional $1.99 or $2.99 I'd take them up on it, since whenever I buy a physical book I immediately go home and pirate the epub anyway it would save me a lot of effort. I assume they don't want to diminish the notional value of an ebook by offering it as a perk.

buying the ebook, and only the ebook, saves me a lot of money and space. i'm ok with it.

and i figure john waters is unlikely to visit anyway.

I definitely have a fantasy where I jettison 100% of my CDs, vinyl, and books after getting everything set up digitally, maybe I'll do it when I turn 55 or something

I definitely have a fantasy where I jettison 100% of my CDs, vinyl, and books after getting everything set up digitally, maybe I'll do it when I turn 55 or something

I keep swinging back and forth. For instance, I read a lot of manga digitally, since I go through it quickly and it's a pain to wait for the library holds to come in (assuming they have my desired title in the first place). Lately, though, I've been reading physical editions and feel myself more involved in the art when seeing it on the page, and less likely to rush through it. This has sparked an urge to buy my favorites in that form, but that's often at least 10 volumes per series. I'm already stacking books and vintage magazines next to shelves for lack of space, so I really don't need to add to it. Maybe I need to institute a one-in, one-out rule.

otherwise however you printed it in the book would result in it being torn out and stolen

I think you're overestimating the lengths someone would go to for a free ebook.

I'm picturing something like the codes that Bandcamp generates, a bookstore could have a spreadsheet or database of them to offer if the customer wants, can be emailed with receipt if bought online (each one is a one time use).

I think you're overestimating the lengths someone would go to for a free ebook.

I worked in a bookstore for seven years. People used to sneak behind our counters to steal discount coupons before we started putting them in the register. If customers know they can scratch off the inside flap of a book and snap a pic of the ebook redemption code, they would 100% do that all day long.

But what years were those? I feel like if you're setting foot in a bookstore in 2026, you probably want to buy a book.

nah, if people know you can get free ebooks by tearing a page out of a book at the local bookstore, they will absolutely do that... can only assume theft has increased since I worked retail because the economy is increasingly terrible

Lately, though, I've been reading physical editions and feel myself more involved in the art when seeing it on the page, and less likely to rush through it.

I have no problem with digital books and that is almost exclusively what I read but for whatever reason for comics I really need a physical copy to truly enjoy it, I tried reading a couple of things on an ipad and just found myself constantly zooming in and out on the artwork and individual panels which kind of ruins the experience. I guess manga, which has a smaller page size is probably less bad though.