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.

"The Book Thief: The life-affirming international bestseller as seen on TikTok"

Kindle daily deal today. I've moaned about the crap that they add to titles before, crap which ends up in the title field on the ereader, but this one seems particularly odd. plus it's already been a film.

(the actual tiktok content is stuck behind cookie banners and privacy policy popups but i can see "2.4m views", i guess that's why)

Fuck, that’s grim

they've pretty much abandoned the daily deals, in canada at least. unmaintained page and few hidden gems to rummage for. audible daily deal has had garbage selections for months too, mostly romance novels and YA flops.

seems odd, there are still sidebar links for them, but they just lead to white pages.

can you sensibly use a different amazon? pay by gift card, download for "Kindle for PC" and then remove the drm for local use? kobo.com often echo the amazon deals, albeit as epubs, but again these are breakable and convertable. don't know about region restrictions.

i have looked at kobo canada and that's a ton of no-name sci fi deals. and not all that cheap.

I’ve stopped using my kindle almost completely. I’ve been reading ePubs on Marvin on my phone - usually B-OK bootlegs of books I’ve already bought paper copies of.

I get tinnitus and there was a period where I could only concentrate by using the “karaoke” function on Marvin that flashes words at you one at a time, Parallax View-style. It sounds horrible, but it’s actually quite enjoyable when you get used to it, and I find I can concentrate and read for longer, although it’s much better for simply-written genre books or magazine features than anything complicated.

The Marvin voice-to-text function is also really good. Listening to the app’s female robot voice do “Heartburn” was miles better than the Meryl Streep audiobook - better deadpan comic timing, more Jewish-sounding.

bad: turns out the sci-fi thing i took a punt on last month is part two of two

good: part one turned up as a daily deal today = cheap

bad: the reviews aren't great (of course only people who liked the first one even bought the second one so they skew positive)

and it's 500 pages

don't see it in the deals section but a pushkin-vertigo 4 pack of frederick dard novels is now on sale for under $3
https://www.amazon.com/Authentic-French-Noir-Box-Set-ebook/dp/B0951MZXR4
https://www.amazon.ca/Authentic-French-Noir-Box-Set-ebook/dp/B0951MZXR4

My kobo has replaced the current / total page count with current / total chapter count, which is next to useless. Also the on/off switch is broken but I can switch it on by plugging it in.

should've broken it when they were 20 quid off, just before Christmas.

you can also turn them on by waving a magnet over them - it's how the sleep cover works. top left back seems best on the clara.

as for the count, mine gives me options for setting both header and footer counts. v4.22.15190.

Yes and the footer count is set to current / total pages... will try the magnet trick though.

curious as to whether the new amazon comixology things worked the same way as the text ebooks do i downloaded 49p of random comic and had a go. and it was fine. every page is just the same as the covers on normal ebooks: a div and a JPEG, and coverted to epub perfectly and it's easy to convert from there to cbz

also fixed the problem i had with calibre resizing images too small to be readable - i was using the default kobo settings which are only 400x600px or something

Amazon now shows the size of downloads and some of those 600 page Usagi Yojimbo omnibuses are 1.5GB!

do you… have a script?

it's the same calibre plugin everybody else uses

gotcha

good lord did they fuck up comixology, though. the old app (on iPad, and the web reader) were a lot better, the new website has dead links despite it being new, and I’ve found multiple different ways to view the library, some of which toss you into all kindle purchases, one that shows your comixology purchases, and one that lacks the “from comixology” filter entirely but does include a “comixology unlimited” filter

Chunky is great for iPad + nice developer

the amixology app on my tablet crashes after 5 seconds every time. i have effectively lost all my drm-ed purchases (the old drm-free ones are still downloadable and viewable in any cbr reader, thankfully)

none of the three things that caught my eye from the monthly deals for may seem to have made it across to kobo.com. I'll give it another week.

i have a script now that will scrape the monthly deals into a text file and it's interesting to see how they change from one week to the next.

(two of those now on offer)

does anyone have cataracts and use a backlit kindle and if so how is it? thinking of getting my mum one for Christmas but she has problems with some light sources.

another question, is the a thread for terrible shovelware ebook covers, like this one? i see so many...

https://kbimages1-a.akamaihd.net/a8ed6d40-33af-4baa-b798-ed918cb61d32/353/569/90/False/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-roman-empire-volume-one.jpg

Lolol

found a book covers thread here Demented Book Covers

I've got mild cataracts and also corneal epithelial dystrophy that makes glare and pinpoint light sources excruciating. The kindle Paperwhite is more comfortable for me to read with than physical books. Adjustable light level and font size ftw

that's what i was hoping. plus no more having the light on in the middle of the night. thanks jaq.

(i did nothing about buying ma a kobo and then yesterday when i looked they were £20 off so...)

where?

I can see the high end libra and low end nia on sale in the kobo store but not the middle end clara which I want to replace one of our broken ones.

my kingdom for a modern Mini

yeah, just those two (same deal at Argos). they had Black Friday deals on the crazy expensive ones and the clara h2o thing (recycled plastic, waterproof, more money) but i think the vanilla claras have been replaced by those (although they have a refurbished one)

the nia has arrived (argos do overnight delivery to a checkpoint 10 minutes away. first time i've used one. it's just a kiosk inside a sainsburys local and you enter your order number and name but it seems to rely on a staff member noticing you hanging around)

the plastic feels a bit more plasticky and the on/off/sleep button is inset a lot more than my clara, to the point where you need to use a fingernail and which makes it easy to turn it off when you want sleep. new firmware as well by the look, and the fonts seem to start a lot smaller than mine. lower resolution is noticeable if you're used to the hd clara but doesn't look too bad (it's worse whilst changing pages, but then it settles and looks no worse than some books i have)

the bit i do like is that the logo on the front is now embossed and not printed (i had to go over mine with a sharpee because it was a bit too white)

was £70 on offer, down from £90. my clara was also 20 quid off the original price when i bought it, £80 i think, but they went up and then got replaced by the recycled plastic / audiobook thing. the nia's not great but i'm not sure i'd pay the extra £60 to get the clara e2

(looks like the other non-kindle alternatives could be the newer nooks and the pocketbook range. only links to the nook i can find go to amazon that just seems to show me random stuff.)

I've ordered a nia, the £60 saving (compared to the clara) was an offer I couldn't refuse. I'm not sure what our previous models are - touch or aura I guess - I got two new for £100 after they'd been superseded by the clara. what I like about them, just aesthetically not functionally, is that the screen is not inset, the whole front is a single smooth surface.

I was reading a book and as soon as I got to the acknowledgements, Kindle popped up the "rate this book! Read this next!" thing. I was so mad.

gah. bought actual official penguin classic version of Notre-Dame de Paris and it's full of typesetting badness. have seen the following several times:

‘some speech’, and then,’ some more speech’

where the third apostrophe is also the wrong shape, a 9 rather than a 6.

épice appears as ¿pice in the footnotes

and generally the footnotes are per-page, and each has its own entry in the toc, meaning the toc is 18 pages long and, of course, the ebook pages aren't the same as the original's so the numbers are pointless. the footnote markers are also superscript leading to a bigger line gap on the lines where they appear.

(all of this fixable locally but annoying)

> I've ordered a nia
> ledge

how are you finding it?

It's my wife's, I haven't used it myself but she's perfectly happy with it. I'll try and have a go with it later.

https://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2022/03/22/how-collections-work-after-latest-kindle-update/

Anyone had any luck trying KOReader on the Kindle?

reading Jennifer Saint's Ariadne. but they've hard-coded the font (Sabon LT) and it's very spindly especially on a backlit screen. but i have an editor, i can change that...

20 different 'txt' styles and it's specified in every single one. the C in CSS is for cascading. also fixed the first-line-indent which was way too low. and added a margin before the sections. does nobody ever read these things?

(what's bigger than a paragraph? new paragraphs are indented by a character or two but there's no gap above them. but once in a while, one a major change of subject, there'll be a one-line gap and the next paragraph will be hard to the left. is there a name for this? section?)

CARELLA: What made you cnoindente your mind?
PATRICIA: I cnoindented my mind, that’s right.

took me a while to work out what was happening here. i wonder if the original kindle version was correct?

noindent whoever came up with that find & replace.

it's that time again...

just went to download recent purchases and it's forcing me to upgrade Kindle for PC version, which means more reading around on how to break the d r m. only out £1.99 of this doesn't work but it's annoying.

new plugin needs new calibre...

Crosspost with backward steps I guess but it’s bananas that you can find the kindle edition of a book in the Amazon app & it says “This app does not support purchasing. Books purchased through Amazon are available in the kindle app.” & the kindle app itself has the same message. My gut response is always fuck you then, if I’m doing any extra steps it’ll be to get it on l1bg3n

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"!

Wins I think it’s because Amazon doesn’t want Apple to take a cut of every book purchase, so you have to use the Amazon website to buy ebooks.

Confirming my gut response tbh, if the two omnipresent dystopian tech giants can’t come to slight compromise in the name of usability fuck em

it's the payments thing, but also that apple has their own competing book store