Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

so the fire is cloud-storage based but with no 3g support? that seems ... crippled

yeah kinda ruins it for traveling

it has 8gb onboard; presumably the idea is you sync what you might want to watch/listen to for the next (x) days every time you touch base somewhere with wifi; i'm not sure how good of an idea that is

relatedly, the 'free cloud storage' is for amazon-bought content

and all these models will be US only? wtf

90 quid in the UK, getting more and more tempted

i need to spend some time with one tho before i'm convinced it can replace a book, but just the thought of being able to carry around multi volume classics in my pocket is mad tempting

I was thinking £90 was a good price too, except the US price being $79 (roughly £50) makes me think 'fuck Amazon' tbh.

everybody fucks the UK over re: gadget prices tbf

I think the UK one is ad-free though, no?

haven't seen ads mentioned on the Amazon site, can't quite get my head around how it works anyway - u pay cash money for some shit that then bombs you with ads while you're trying to read??

when you wake it from standby

i find it a bullshit piece of price structuring, though, & hopefully they will phase it out

wouldn't want a pc that showed me adverts during startup either

then you buy the somewhat more expensive version

the Kindle 3 ads are easily ignored imo - screensaver graphics when you shut it off and a banner ad at the bottom of the home screen only. No ads while reading books, playing games, etc. Most are for special offers from amazon, though they were pushing that ABC show Revenge hard for a few weeks. I was wary before we bought one but it was worth saving the $50.

I also found that if you load up your Kindle and don't go online for 3-4 days, the ads disappear and are replaced with a generic "Please go online to receive special offers" graphic.

yeah the ads are only when the kindle is "off." i don't have ads but i can't see how it would be much more annoying than seeing the same 20 pictures of boring authors over and over again. there's apparently an easy way to hack the kindle and put your own pictures in, but i haven't tried it and it probably wouldn't work on the ad-based version.

You can jailbreak the cheap ad-supported Kindle to make it ad-free.

yeah i've got the ad-supported kindle and the ads really don't intrude at all--they're only there when it's off, and funny thing is i don't really look at the thing while it's off

cool. it just seems like an odd feature in the first place?

it really is, when it first came out i remember people saying it sounded like a joke the dev people came up with that the finance department thought was a real idea

i just emailed myself 4 books-in-pdf, testing out the "convert to kindle format" thing for the first time. we'll see how it goes. also lol at the idea that i'm gonna read all of these books.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm92Tnp953c

I've read a few pdf books on my Kindle. Had to monkey with the text size to make it a good fit for the screen, but eventually they worked out fine.

Yeah I've loaded a couple wire-loaded PDFs on it before, but never gone through the whole "email to myself with 'convert' in the subject line" bit.

At US$200 I'm tempted to buy one just for the hell of it. Amazon won't even stop people rooting it.

huh!

i might finally get myself a kindle...thinking about getting the 3g keyboard instead of the new touch version, because apparently the new one only allows web browsing via wifi. since i don't have a smartphone or anything like that, it would be kinda nice to be email to check gmail or occasionally look up directions while i'm on the road. anyone use it for this now?

It's really really slow to use the browser, but does work okay. I've used it occasionally for ilxing and gmail.

Mine's the 2nd gen btw, don't know if things are different for the 3g keyboard newest ones.

Have the 3G and have used it for same in a pinch but yes it is hella slow

yeah i've been ilxing from home on it all week

just seen the new kindle, was i swindled in getting the old one for twice the price?

Pretty sure they'll be giving these away free in a few years.

new or old ones or both

i pulled the trigger on this. really like it so far...one of the weirdest things to get used to is looking at a percentage rather than page numbers, since i have a compulsive need to know how far i am in a book.

yah and the percentage can be deceptive--at one point i was really puzzled reading a history book because i was only at 57% and very near the historical present. as it turned out the book was about 40% index & notes!

so it just automatically saves where you are? it must be strange to read something really long and have the % not change at all over a bunch of pages. it would be nice if it could calculate how many kindle "pages" are left based on text size etc, even if they don't correlate to the paper version.

holding out for the Touch version but there's still no indication this version is coming to Europe (not sure really why I'm so fixated on having a touch screen e-reader but whatever)

it's the top featured item, and available for immediate dispatch, on UK amazon so i dare say it's coming soon everywhere. where are you?

I think that's just the basic model, no?

so it just automatically saves where you are? it must be strange to read something really long and have the % not change at all over a bunch of pages. it would be nice if it could calculate how many kindle "pages" are left based on text size etc, even if they don't correlate to the paper version.

― hardcore oatmeal (Jordan), Thursday, October 13, 2011 3:38 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark

it seems weird that there isn't a 'page' bit of metadata associated with it -! like wtf do you do if you want to cite one of those books

it would be nice if it could calculate how many kindle "pages" are left based on text size etc, even if they don't correlate to the paper version.

Admittedly I am only using a Kindle app on my iPhone but it tells me I am, for example, 50% through and then says 5,000/10,000 or similar (I don't have it open).

like wtf do you do if you want to cite one of those books

― thomp, Thursday, October 13, 2011 4:06 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

they have "location numbers" which none of the manuals explain the correspondence of

like some random spot in your book will be "location 2974," but there's no indication of its number anywhere at all?

Some books seem to have page info, presumably corresponding to some print edition, but most don't.

At one point I was trying to get that location number exactly right- I think I was trying to put a lot of bookmarks in a reference book that was underindexed- and it was driving me a little crazy. But just started using highlights instead and it was all good.

yeah the page number/location thing is one of the weird inexplicably backward aspects of e-books, the other being the inability to deal with footnotes - seems like this wouldn't be that hard to figure out.

i "acquired" a book that was corrupted somehow on one specific page and i had to keep entering random location numbers to try to get past, but not too far past, that location.

I've had that with books that I acquired in the normal way where somehow the search index was corrupted causing me to get into strange little wrinkles in the text that I had to emerge from in the manner you have described.

i've had my kindle for a few weeks now, and while i'll still use real books when i can, it already feels like an essential. when you're working on something that requires you to have 5,000 odd pages of books at hand it's nice to be able to do that without having a back-breaking pile of paper to be dealing with. the one thing that's a pain is the time it takes to highlight things, i assume that's a lot easier in this new touchscreen generation?

just today i found myself wishing i had real copies of the books i was reading to really highlight because i'll miss the smart-guy cache of having a highlighted copy of "the myth of the rational market" lying around

for half a second even entertained buying a hard copy just to duplicate my highlights in the ebook