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.

I was happy to find that Zlibrary is still going, though I had to install Tor to access it. Probably the closest I've ever got to using "dark web"!

annas-archive.org is still going - tor unnecessary

got fed up of the lack of covers on penguin classics - sometimes they don't include them, if they do they are the wrong shape for my 3:4 ereader. so wrote something that'll let me generate them using a 600x600 image and mocking the rest. and it lets me do crap like this

http://www.koogy.clara.co.uk/feersum.jpg

(there are other generators out there if you search, that's where i got the font details from, but they maintain the aspect ratio and that's exactly what i needed to change)

zlib doesn't need Tor anymore, apart from a few books that have had requests to be removed, which are now only on tor

xp image opens in flagging, doesn't show for me on the web for some reason. anyway, nice :)

(it's linked from my personal webspace rather than, say, imgur. i do worry about that image being downloaded everytime someone views this page, but hey, it's what web servers are for)

that’s awesome, koogs

Has anyone tried the Boox Palma some people are now raving about? The phone format is both tempting and worrying

https://shop.boox.com/products/palma

um, in two minds about that. it looks ok of itself, but it's an even worse aspect ratio (imo) than the kobo (which is a touch shorter than a book). it's also twice what i'd want to pay (probably because of a pointless camera and microphone)

824 x 1648 (300ppi, 1:2) palma
vs
1072 x 1448 (300ppi, 6:8) clara

Why not just make an actual e-ink phone if you're going to do that?

i'd love to see the super refresh (you can watch videos on it!) but yeah not sure what market / purpose they're going for, it's obviously way overspecced (and small) for an ereader.

they quote a bigger diagonal screen size than the clara but that aspect ratio skews things

I could see the appeal of an e-ink phone (especially if it means that the battery life is significantly longer, not sure about that though).

I feel like somebody who wants something more portable to do their reading is just going to use their actual phone rather than carry around two similarly sized devices even if the phone screen isn't quite as good for reading as e-ink is.

xxp to myself

Might be worth watching this video on an e-ink monitor before committing to the phone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZXrJRpA0Jw

As a fortysomething with increasingly iffy vision, I don't find e-ink noticeably better than reading on my phone - my Kindle still looks a bit sparkly and overly-contrasty, even though it's noticeably better than a phone on a sunny day. But my impression is that the resolution/DPI of the text itself is still pretty poor even on the most recent e-ink readers.

Chief benefits of the Kindle for me are:
-- Reading big Victorian novels is a bit easier on my back than carrying a big Victorian novel
-- Every non-reading experience on the Kindle is bad, which keeps me focused on reading
-- Useful on holidays and stops me packing 8 books in a suitcase

But I don't find the letter-and-sentence-reading experience itself any better

plus:
-- you can fall asleep whilst reading without creasing pages / facial papercuts
-- backlight means you don't need the main bedroom light on / can read between bands
-- ebooks are cheaper / free

minus:
-- ocr errors
-- amazon drm / hegemony

plus:
-- choice of fonts (serif for victorian novels, sans for sci fi) / text size

-- Every non-reading experience on the Kindle is bad, which keeps me focused on reading

Btw, this would basically be the main positive of an e-ink phone. Much like the reason why I am sometimes tempted to just buy a flip phone it would prevent me from wasting time doing dumb shit.

https://play.google.com/store/books

Real Life Stories:

Matthew Perry
Prince Harry
Alan Partridge...

what is a good ereader if I want something that works with Adobe DRM (for library borrowing etc.) and I have no interest in buying books from Amazon, or it doing anything other than showing me words in the right order.

although audiobook functionality might be good

totally lost as most ereaders have gone out of business, and I dont even know if the Nook is still going and sold in UK.

cheap please as this is just for a few cases where it easier to borrow digitally, or I want a searchable reference.

kobo works with adobe and public libraries in the uk (and us, canada, and others) - https://help.kobo.com/hc/en-us/articles/360017814074-Add-eBooks-with-Adobe-Digital-Editions

the cheapest is the clara b&w, £120.

https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/p/apps 8)

i'd've said kobo was the only game in town but there's boox and pocketbook also, but all quite expensive. maybe an app is the way to go.

(i've been reading on my phone recently and the form factor is a bit odd and the screen often turns off between page changes if you read slowly. the kindle app didn't want to know on my (aged) hudl2 tablet though, wouldn't get beyond the cover (comixology app is the same))

You could probably pick up an older or second hand Kindle fairly cheaply. The newer ones have some nice bells & whistles like backlights and waterproofing and larger screen size etc but nothing that's really essential to the reading experience.

And if you go the app route, I use Moon Reader on my (Android) phone which is pretty great

Kobo Mini (2010ish?) is a great form factor... wonder if there's still a decent used supply on eBay. Can't believe they still haven't made one as small.

I'm still pretty happy with my kobo clara that I bought about 6 years ago now. I use it for library books all the time and it works reasonably well for that.

thanks all, Kobo looks good. I notice that audiobooks have to be KOBO format.... not mp3 or anything... why do they always have to put in some proprietary BS in every product now...

not a big dealbreaker, but I'd be interested in how pdf/comic formats look in the colour versions. the fact that there are no example screens or anything pretty much tells me though...

would still love if they made a kobo mini with a backlight but i doubt that'll ever happen

The second kobo I bought eight or so years ago has gone kaputt. The first one went last year. Is it unreasonable of me to expect them to last longer?

8 years is a good stretch for something choosing around 100 quid and used every day, i reckon. have you replaced it yet, and with what?

wishlisting random things i want to reread and checking it frequently has paid off again - https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Steve_Erickson_Days_Between_Stations?id=c7kklq51MDwC - but notice the date there, "price drop in 27 sep", not the end of the month, just a random Friday. and all the rest of his books so expensive usually in a way i don't understand either - 15 quid for something less than 300 pages (terrible new covers too)

choosing / costing

oh and btw ledge, the kobo just runs from an sd card and you can physically remove it from the broken one to recover your files should you not have them backed up somewhere+. don't know how this will work for drmed files though, they will probably need redownloading.

+assuming the fault isn't a corrupt filesystem on the kobo, in which case you can just replace the sd card with a new one

My Kindle stopped charging. Got a new one, the cheapest ad-free (ish) Kindle I could get. Was looking forward to how much better Kindles must have gotten in the eight years since I bought my last Kindle.

And uh ... nope, not at all. Pages actually turn slower than my 2016 Paperwhite. Kinda incredible, Amazon could probably provide a better experience for like fifty cents per Kindle, given how much cheaper low-power mobile processors are now.

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)