Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

makes it easier for me to read on the bus w/o motion sickness too.

Really???!?!? Add this to my list of reasons why I want an ebook reader REALLY BAD NOW.

i'm almost totally digital when it comes to music, and almost always prefer reading on paper, even when it comes to online articles for school...i don't look at CDs as collection objects though, for one thing the format doesn't change your listening experience the way it does for reading, and for another thing cds can become unreadable after about a decade and will probably give way to other technology soon anyway.

Jenny, it would still hit me occasionally during the summer, if the sun was flashing off the lake or car windows while we were moving, but yeah - for me, less nausea has been the very best unexpected benefit.

Search function is great, especially if you have some film and music books on there, you can get all sorts of information. Non-random access, manually moving back-and-forth is not great when you don't know exactly what you are looking for, starting judiciously using the highlight feature on potentially useful information to combat this. Graphics that don't scale and are too tiny to read not great either. I'm talking about 6-inch original Kindle, bigger, newer model has better graphics- if the book has been prepared appropriately. Moral of the story: great for biographies if you don't care about the photos, not great for certain other types of reference books, but maybe will be soon or is already on bigger Kindle.

I actually had a broken Kindle for a few weeks and took a book out of the library that I was in the middle of but, since I do most of my reading during my commute it was actually easier to wait for the replacement than to carry the thing around.

And yeah, I might not buy as many brick and mortar books as I did a few years ago, but I had already stopped buying lots of books in the past three years because of space and time constraints, with the two-guitar attack of the Kindle plus library books I have tons to read that doesn't take up a permanent place in my apartment. Tend to only buy reference books or stuff that's not available any other way. And once and a while the impulse buy, but much more infrequently.

Besides the convenience of the e-readers, the most appealing aspect for me is the idea of being able to increase the font size. I really hate paper books with the small font you find all too often in the classics. I think I'd end up reading a lot more and longer since you can make the type pretty big, so it should be easier on the eyes. I usually have to stop reading these days not because I want to do something else, but because of eye strain. Yet, I'm still reluctant to take the plunge (though this thread and thinking about it the last couple of days has almost convinced me).

How does the integrated dictionary work with Kindle? Can you just highlight words and bring up a definition? Is it smooth? And does this work for books in languages other than English, or only for English books?

Very simple: just click on a line and it looks up every word on that line. There is a default dictionary but you can put other dictionaries on there, presumably in a foreign language, although I haven't tried it.

You can also use the dictionary by just searching on a word you want to look up.

You just position the cursor in front of the word (using the little stick control) and the definition appears automatically at the bottom of the screen. It seems to have at least basic French and Spanish dictionaries, but I haven't really put it to the test (cooking terms and the slang from The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao mainly).

xpost

Hm, maybe I should think about upgrading one day.

Blerghn can't seem to delete certain bookmarks.

man, i bet this is one of those technologies where some of us hold out for years and then eventually come to see it as a necessary addition to our lives. like mp3 players.

doubt it

i don't have an mp3 player ; )

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Finding-the-Kindle-a-Poor/8808/

When Syracuse employees first heard that Kindles would have a read-aloud feature, "We thought, yay, this is going to be great" for disabled readers, said Eve Hill, senior vice president at the university's Burton Blatt Institute, which advocates for people with disabilities. But staffers soon realized the device's menu options were not spoken aloud. "If you're blind, you won't be able to turn it on," Ms. Hill said.

LOL

haaaaaaa

"We thought, yay, this is going to be a paperweight"

Looked at a couple of ebooks recently -- full of stuff like this:

[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

Useful.

Bght Open (Agassi's autobiography). Yeehah!

Still loving my Kindle app for my iPhone. I'm almost on my fourth book!

Ever.

Been downloading books like crazy (from Vuze). FOR FREE. WEEHAAAA!

do i want one of these?

no?

no

ok, two gentlemen i trust

chomping at the bit waiting for an affordable bare-bones e-book reader and god knows apple aren't gonna be the ones to produce it. how long was it between the release of the ipod and the glut of £25 (but perfectly usable) mp3 players?

also wonder how the tendency toward having one all-consuming product (phone, mp3 player, camera, video camera, etc) will effect this? i'd say the next gen of products need a bigger screen and more suitable battery life.

there seemed a time when e-book readers seemed real unnecessary and doomed to failure because of this, but i guess this disproves it. (apologies i couldn't find a non-dickish news source).

and im still amazed/frustrated there isn't a homebrew pdf reader for the DS. though i think there are programs for reading doc files, which could be handy for reading website articles and non-picture ebooks

it's apparently hella complicated but there's about a dozen different half-working pdf readers for the ds. Here's one with a ton of tech background.
http://ands-pdf.blogspot.com/

damn i couldn't find any of that when i last looked. that link is just baffling though, i think i'll just convert it all to text and use a simple text reader with my acekard. <a href=http://www.ds-xtra.com/ReadMore>;this</a> sounds good but basic, can you or anyone recommend a more advanced reader?

doh http://www.ds-xtra.com/ReadMore

ok, readmore doesn't work on my DS, the touchscreen doesn't work so i can't load any books. seems it's riddled with bugs and hasn't been tinkered with in years. annoying as it looked like the best text reader out there.

the acekard 2i i use lets me open text files, but it's crap - text has to be black on white (no colour choices) and if a word doesn't fit onto one line it just cuts the last few letters off and puts them on the next line, looks ugly. also tried a program called DS reader but it doesn't separate paragraphs too well so certain text files just look like a huge slab of text. frustrating how something as simple as 'showing text on a screen' can be implemented so very badly.

the best one seems to be DSlibris but for some baffling reason it won't open text files, you have to convert them into xht files, so i'm downloading openoffice for that now. all this waffle probably shouldn't be on this thread but i just wasted a whole evening arsing about with all this so i'll leave it here in the hope it'll help someone else out in the future. </martyr>

I got a Sony Reader for Christmas. Agree with the post above that their software and store are both crap. I bought a couple public domain books for $.99 and they were essentially just unformatted text files in Times New Roman. You get what you pay for, I guess.

I don't know how much reading reading I'll do on this thing, but I've uploaded all of my design book and Adobe help PDFs on it and can see the Reader becoming a big boon as a portable reference library.

also wonder how the tendency toward having one all-consuming product (phone, mp3 player, camera, video camera, etc) will effect this?

I've wondered about this too, and further wondered whether the next trend in a couple of years will be separate gadgets that each do their thing really well, while being perfectly interoperable as need arises?

lol will this be the kindle-killer

http://images.barnesandnoble.com/pimages/bravo/whiteout/nook_tech_crunch_burst.gif
http://images.barnesandnoble.com/pimages/bravo/intro/Nookpanel_1.jpg
http://images.barnesandnoble.com/pimages/bravo/intro/Nookpanel_2.jpg
http://images.barnesandnoble.com/pimages/bravo/intro/Nookpanel_3.jpg
http://images.barnesandnoble.com/pimages/bravo/intro/Nookpanel_6.jpg

http://www.tgdaily.com/images/stories/article_images/apple/mac_tablet/mac_tablet_mockup_001_perspective.jpg

hope the new tablet actually has a click wheel a la http://www.theonion.com/content/video/apple_introduces_revolutionary

http://static.howstuffworks.com/gif/how-story-reader-works-2.jpg

next iteration of the Kindle is edible

http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2010/01/20/PH2010012001267.jpg

one simple and much-needed thing that magazines/newspapers should provide for these new e-readers: the ability to *easily* download pdf (or text/html whatever) files of specific articles for a small cost, say 50p or £1. as well as making it real easy to download an entire magazine for the same or slightly-less as the print copy price.

some magazines are already doing this - i recently bought a couple of articles from sound on sound for £1 each - but it needs to become commonplace with the nme, q, etc. all the time i see articles mentioned that i'd love to read, such as the casabalanca records article in this month's Q but there's no way i'll trek to the shops and pay 4 or 5 quid for the full thing, whereas i won't mind paying 50p or a quid to download it at home in seconds. happy customers, more £££ going to the publisher/magazine, it's ridiculous that this isn't widespread already.

WTF, Amazon pulls all Macmillan books from the Kindle in a pricing dispute

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/technology/30amazon.html

shitty---I have a book under contract with Macmillan; though it is lol academic so it's not like the sales, with or without Amazon, will push me into the upper tax brackets. Anyway it will look great ON IPAD.

$15 for an ebook is insane, especially given the limitations on the form (you can't loan it to people, for example). $9.99 for an ebook is too high, I think, and is the main reason why I haven't gotten a Kindle.

15 bucks may be too high for some people, but amazon is not selling *any* of Macmillans physical books *or* e-books at the moment, which seems like a shitty way to negotiate.

Good post from Cory Doctorow:

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/29/amazon-and-macmillan.html

The tactic work well recently for Costco wrt Coke products, it's a very Wal-mart strong arm approach

Macmillian is just losing sales here. People who are looking for a specific book they publish will buy it elsewhere, but other people who find one of their books through a keyword search won't be able to buy it, and will probably buy a book on that topic that's put out by another publisher.

And Doctorow's right, $15 is ridiculous because hardcover books are often discounted to ~$15, especially on Amazon, so it would make little sense for someone to spend that much for a DRM'd digital file when they can get a hard copy--which they can legally resell, share, and put on their bookshelves--for the same price.

One last thing: I really want to buy an e-reader, but I'm going to have trouble justifying the cost to myself until the technology becomes more open. For music, you can already buy non-DRM'd music in FLAC and MP3 from various websites, but right now for the Kindle you can only buy books from the Kindle store for use on your Kindle, and as we saw with that whole 1984 debacle, Amazon can always just take your books back if they decide to. While, as people said at the time, Barnes and Noble can't change their minds and break into your house to steal the copy of 2666 or whatever that you bought a week ago.

other people who find one of their books through a keyword search won't be able to buy it, and will probably buy a book on that topic that's put out by another publisher.

I really don't think so. I've worked in bookstores before, and while some buyers may do this, the majority do not.

15 bucks for an e-book doesn't seem ridiculous to me. not when a kindle costs over 250 bucks.