Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

I wanted a fancy Voyager, but the $99 Paperwhite is getting hard to resist.

wonder how long it takes to crank out one of the thrillers? how long are they, 150 pages?

welp it only took me nigh on a year to figure out that text highlighting WILL cross page boundaries if you move your finger to the right place

: /

Wait!

I was wondering about getting a Kindle for my girlfriend, but have never looked into them before at all. How does the basic one stack up against the Paperwhite and the Voyager in the real world? I'm not too familiar with what the spec. differences really mean.

I also ended up looking at the Fire line-up, as she does watch a lot of netflix and online tv/movie streaming via an old laptop at the moment. How annoying is the Amazon-ness on those - do they forever bombard you with ads and hamper using non-Amazon related features? The prices are very keen - I can't see any alternative tablets under £200, let alone £100...

I upgraded from 2010 gen Kindle Basic to 2014 Kindle Paperwhite (periodically on sale for $99), and while I could live without the fluorescent whitening agents they use on the e-ink display, the higher resolution screen is nice and the backlight is invaluable. It gets most use while I'm out of town, and I read most of a 300 page book under moonlight on a beach last week.

There's a next step up (Kindle Voyage) which is just gilding the lily, AFAICT.

I'd been using a Nexus 7 as my reader for a couple of years, but between its (relative) weight and my eyes, and the daylight glare, I finally bought a Kindle Paperwhite this week. The I think 6th generation one, the one before the most recent resolution upgrade, was going for I believe $90. Looking forward to reading outside.

The Voyage is over twice as much, isn't it?

Kindle Voyage:
"PagePress is a custom-designed force sensor made of carbon and silver, which reacts to a subtle increase of pressure, triggers a page-turn and provides a haptic response only your thumb can perceive"

haptic feedback just in case you don't notice that the thing you are actively looking at has changed as a result of you actively pressing the thing you've just pressed.

That Voyage does seem like an expensive extravagance, especially as the Paperwhite is already near perfect.

It is, and it is a bit uncomfortable to hold since it's super-thin and made out of metal.

Thanks. I'll concentrate my thoughts on the Paperwhite. How about Kobo e-readers? Looking at their Glo HD now at the same price...

With an unlimited budget, the only upgrade from the Paperwhite I'd consider is the Waterfi (aftermarket waterproofed) version, waterproof down to 200 ft. I used to love reading in the tub.

just put your kindle in a ziplock bag.

kobo do the H20 which has an IP67 rating, which is good enough for the old bath tub.

the new nook glowlight is waterproof. It's $99 right now, but it's a different infrastructure from Amazon, so

does anyone use a holder/case for the paperwhite? i never bought one since i was fairly broke at the time i acquired my kindle, i've mostly just been carrying it around cautiously in my bag or whatever, to be nice to the screen.

For goodness sake get one fast, they are inexpensive and will save your screen.

like just one of those book-cover ones?

Just search for magnetic paperwhite cover on e-bay, it won't cost you more than a couple of dollars.

Mine cost £5 and is still looking good 6 months later.

naw mang i'm like asking about styyyyyle, what's the coolest/most useful thing

I also ended up looking at the Fire line-up, as she does watch a lot of netflix and online tv/movie streaming via an old laptop at the moment. How annoying is the Amazon-ness on those - do they forever bombard you with ads and hamper using non-Amazon related features? The prices are very keen - I can't see any alternative tablets under £200, let alone £100...

I have a 3 year old Fire that I really like.

If you are wifi or 3g connected, when you boot up or turn it back on from standby you'll get an ad from Amazon for some promotion that you swipe past to get to the main page, it's no biggie, you can pay extra for that feature to be disabled. I've never gotten the impression that they are targeted ads from your Amazon browsing history or cookies which can be annoying, but I guess they could be.

"it's no biggie, you can pay extra for that feature to be disabled"

I have got one for my son and found that after I closed the account they installed on the device in my name and did a factory reset all that intrusive shit was gone, because otherwise I was going to find a way to root it before them parasites got a penneth more out of me.

xp j.:

I've had a neoprene (wetsuit material) sleeve, with fleece interior, for my previous generation kindle (this one) which works fine for the Paperwhite. The folio-type covers made no sense to me (I'd be constantly removing them anyway), and the sleeves are cheap, allow me to carelessly toss the kindle in bags, and help to spot these charcoal grey devices across a room.

one thing to know about the Nook eReaders is that even though they have "4GB" of storage, only 2.5 of that is available for eBooks, and if you are sideloading, you only have... 500MB of space to work with. 2GB is reserved for eBooks purchased from B&N. that is frankly pretty terrible.

my kobo came with 'only' 1GB of space.

i have used about 10% of it... epubs are tiny, about 1MB each

(pdfs and cbrs are much bigger)

articles downloaded from jstor are annoyingly large : /

a lot of epubs are not tiny! my Nook is currently full and I have to rotate out books when I have new ones... a decent chunk of my collection is books that take up >5MB each, for example Bob Stanley's book is 12MB. the average size is 2MB but if half a dozen are 20-30MB, all of a sudden you find yourself running out of space.

ebay is a great source for cases - I got my first kindle cover from there for pocket change and it was terrific.

I got my paperwhite cover from a 3rd party seller on Amazon, I paid more but it's really pretty and well made and fits it like a glove, also the magnetic clasp wakes it up when you open the cover: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IN0QKAI/ref=cm_sw_r_awd_fBNAwb082MME2

Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love and Matos's EDM book are currently on sale.

thanks! been meaning to read the Carl Wilson book for years

Yes, thanks, same here.

Wondering if all the new bonus essays by others are needed though. Less is more.

I've had a neoprene (wetsuit material) sleeve, with fleece interior, for my previous generation kindle (this one) which works fine for the Paperwhite.

thx sanpaku, this seems like it will do just what i need. also makes me feel like i should buy sleeves for everything i own, books, sandwiches, socks, whatever

Wait, looks better than I thought at first glance, I take it back.
(Xp)

As it's looking like nook is nearing its end as a maker of ereaders, and I need to get a new one soon (e-ink not color thank you very much) I'm close to jumping over to the kindle paperwhite. Main thing is, I have shit tons of (non drm) Epubs and PDFs, and while I don't mind converting them piecemeal to mobi, I want to make sure people have had good experiences with kindle's little thingy where you email yrself other file formats and they convert over. Have the results been pretty readable? Anything come out butchered to hell? Thx.

iirc epubs don't convert—i occasionally mix one in with my other files when i'm sending. pdfs are copied, not converted, and they are as readable as the originals (w/ allowances for some w/ very poor rendering which is usually made up for by the more powerful desktop renderer).

calibre will bulk convert. generally my epub->mobi conversions are plenty usable; occasionally i noticed a bit of wonky formatting, but nothing to mind.

Oh right I can do ePub to mobi in calibre, that's true...

Calibre will pretty much convert them on the fly when you copy them to your device, in practice I don't even think about it. I've yet to encounter a PDF that wasn't an unreadable shitshow on an eInk eReader, so I don't mess with them.

Does using the Amazon email conversion thing mean the title is then tied to your Kindle account and available via the cloud?

you have to convert to mobi before sending it to your kindle, I've accidentally sent myself an epub and it immediately bounced. I 2x calibre, works perfectly for me (and it strips drm if you ever have a need for that as well).

I can access docs I emailed to my paperwhite on the cloud, there's also a small app called send to kindle for pc that amazon provides, you can just right click on the mobi you want to send and there's a toggle for uploading it to the cloud of not.

Thanks, that's good to know!

I love my Paperwhite I recently got, everything has been great.

On newer kindles I think converting to azw3 might somtimes provide better results than converting to mobi - since azw3 (mobi’s replacement) is a html/css container, like epub, whereas mobi is its own thing.

I wish there was a way to convert PDFs to epub/mobi, I have tried loads of converters and always get the same broken results, even from the trial versions by these gits that try to gaffel your money for some useless shit that is no better than the freeware. If anyone hears about a functional PDF converter, please post it onto this thread.

in the uk the kobo auras seem to be reaching end of life as well - argos has them for £55 (£25 cheaper than usual) and nowhere else seems to have any stock. time to upgrade (backlight! sd slot! shiny!) from my mini? (which was only £10 cheaper than that when i bought it)

(oh, i'm too late by the look of things, gone from argos website)

xp

Calibre is a good converter with lots of options to tweak the output

Results are usually bad with pdfs, but it's a problem with the source format not the converter. Even the best output will have problems with paragraph structure and line breaks. In calibre you can play around with the line un-wrap factor to try and improve this. If you want to get rid of repeated page headers and other formatting elements that break up the flow of the text, you need to go into advanced find & replace / regex. Calibre does that too.

Are PDFs which displayed tolerably on my nook simple touch likely to be fine on kindle as well?

i can't compare but honestly, i read a lot of pdfs on my paperwhite and rarely have a problem with unreadable renders of text. and when i do, they're discernible, just not so pleasant to use as most pdfs.

anything produced by a computer (like print to pdf or a digital production from a publisher) rather than a scan will likely appear to have nothing wrong with it at all.

Yeah PDFs which consist of scanned page images are p much impossible to enjoy on anything but a tablet screen.