f13.net

In a moment of weakness and peer pressure (a bunch of my coworkers really like their original kindles) I pre-ordered Amazon's Kindle2.  It showed up yesterday and I've bought and downloaded a couple different things, most notably Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, which I read entirely on the kindle.  After a couple chapters I largely stopped paying attention to the device itself and was pretty much just reading the book -- though every now and again I'd stop to fiddle with the device (new shiny!). 

This generation will not completely replace the printed page, but it's getting closer.  It's a lot better than the original.  Thinner, feels more solid, and the display refreshes more quickly (still flashes on refresh, unfortunately, but I found that as most people have said to me, after a while you stop noticing -- or at least stop being bothered by it).  The e-ink display is easy on the eyes.  More like reading a printed page than an lcd display.  It could stand to be slightly bigger and slightly higher resolution (smoother fonts), but is a decent size, just slightly smaller than a paperback page.

I think my largest complaint about the kindle is that it makes sharing books harder.  You *can* decrypt the .azw files (they're basically .mobi format and the crypto for that has been broken), so at least stuff you buy is not trapped forever on the kindle should amazon get bored making and supporting the product or should you move to a different ebook reading platform later.  I still think it'd be nicer if there was some kind of sharing or loaning built into the platform.  I tend to keep books forever or give them away, so while I'm annoyed that the ebook world doesn't give you a valid way to resell the content you bought, that doesn't impact me personally.

One of my main motivations for buying one of these was to simplify travel.  I get shipped off to Taiwan or Korea periodically for work and 12-14 hour plane travel absolutely requires books.  I like to bring a few books on a trip and they eat into the total volume of my luggage pretty quickly.  This critter lets me carry pretty much as many as I could ever possibly need.

The pricing makes buying new books much more appealing to me.  Hard cover not only costs a lot, but they tend to be unwieldy -- too heavy and bulky to hold and read comfortably.  The instant gratification of being able to buy something on amazon (either from the web or the built in store thing) and have it turn up on the device in a minute or so is pretty appealing.  The fact that they don't have a way to set a password is obnoxious though -- I'd never want to lend it or leave it laying around with basically the ability to buy books with a single click. 

I'm torn about the inclusion of the keyboard -- it is nice to be able to search for books or within books, and serviceable if you want to take some notes, mostly I feel it serves to add about 2 inches of extra height to the device that's not strictly needed.  Ditching the keyboard would bring the size down to that of a very very thin paperback with some margins for holding it without obscuring the content.

Overall it's a pretty nice device.  Still a bit of an early adopter thing, I think, with the $350 pricepoint and all.  It's got some cheesy DRM but you're not prevented from putting your own content on it and you can extract the paid content if you don't want to be locked in, so I can cope.  Overall construction is a lot nicer and less klunky than v1.

Is the new Kindle able to read PDF files? I thought i read you could switch between the kindle native format (i dont know what its called) and PDF files.

The technology is getting developed enough to be tempting. Maybe when we get some color e-ink displays.

It handles the amazon format (azw) which is basically mobitext (mobi), as well as plain mobi files, text files, etc.  You can email a pdf to youraccount@free.kindle.com to get it converted and mailed back as an .azw (experimental service, does not work great with all pdfs, but did a reasonable job with the one I tried), or to youraccount@kindle.com if you want it delivered wirelessly ($0.10 fee).


I don't really care about color, but if they could get e-ink to not flash on refresh, that'd be pretty awesome.  The new display is 16color grayscale and ~20% faster to refresh than the old one.  Also it does partial updates well enough that they ditched the secondary position indicator display in favor of just moving a cursor or underline bar around.

We're thinking about getting one, too.  Mostly for newspapers.  I love reading them, hate touching them.

I hate the kindle. I'm pretty sure I've ranted about it in other threads, but here's why I hate it:

* Vendor lock in
* Heavy DRM
* No memory card slot
* Cannot lend books to others
* Does not support common formats. I'm not going to play conversion games to use my $350 device.
* Does not use wi-fi, instead uses cellular tech (another lock-in and it dies with the service!)
* Price point still too high for 'digital' books. I can buy a new paperback for less than $10. There are virtually NO production and distribution costs, so drop the price.
* Price of the device ridiculously high with all the above limitations.

While the technology is tempting, the DRM is unaccectable. My circle of friends share books like there is no tomorrow. Replacing it by something that makes that illegal is a step backwards.

I read the other day that the Kindle has some sort of free cellular internet thing built in.  What's that all about?

Also, yeah, fuck not being able to share your books.  If I didn't care about being able to lend my books out at a moment's notice I'd just borrow them from the library.

It is a bit expensive and DRM always puts me off a bit.  Maybe they'll adjust things, including the price, or something better will come along.  I'd only be using it for newspapers, really. 

The DRM thing is annoying but some book publishers are doing away with it which could make the kindle and things like it more useful. If one likes scifi or fantasy check this link out http://www.baen.com/library/defaultTitles.htm lots of free books for folks to read.

Free isn't the same as DRM-free, though. I want to buy my books so that authors get paid and write more books. I just don't want to lose control what I do with them after I buy them.

Actually the baen library books are not only free they are also not DRM'ed which would be pointless to DRM a free book they WANT people to read them and tell friend about them and share with them. Just read the home section of that page it describes what they are doing and why. I believe even for their purchased online Ebooks they are also DRM free.

I get that, I actually peruse Baen and like them. My problem is that if I buy a book from Amazon in paper form I can lend it to others, which is my right as buyer of that book. When I buy an E-book they take away that right. So they can go screw themself.

Cellular service is more widespread than Wi-Fi. With the Kindle you don't have to hunt for a Wi-Fi location to download something, you just need a cell connection. There's no charge to connect/download/upload/etc.

Yup to many current publishers are still thinking in terms of that as stealing and so try to lock their stuff down in crazy ways. As they point out on the baen page this is a pretty silly idea given that many people already are doing this in a form called a library. If libraries and sharing and reading books for free hurts book vendors then why are there bigger and bigger bookstores now. Used to be when I was a kid I had to hit the library a lot because it was the only place to find the books I liked to read as the local book stores were kinda pathetic. Now days there are many big book stores with huge selections. I would never have gotten into sci fi or fantasy books had I not had access to the many free books from the libraries and it just baffles me why more companies are not going baens route in this matter.

I see the difficulty in electronic form. Ebooks can be copied lossless, whereas if you go to a copy machine you get an inferior version of a paper book.

Easy solution for the Kindle - the lend button. Disables your copy of the book and sends it over to another persons kindle to read. That can be circumvented just as easy as DRM, but it gives me the feeling I still can share my library with others. And not get books back, thats half the fun of it  :awesome_for_real:

Yeah, the lack of a good model to lend or resell later is annoying.

I look at the kindle and amazon's store as a way to "rent" books indefinitely, which is certainly half-assed, but for a lot of content the convenience makes it reasonable for me.

I think the primary use cases for me are:
- being able to carry a bunch of books while traveling with no impact on luggage volume/weight
- substitute for the lack of 24hr bookstores

Since the crypto for the DRM is already broken and there are scripts out there to convert/extract the content, at least I can backup what I buy and read it elsewhere if I want.

I've heard some good things about Sony's e-ink e-book reader stuff -- anybody use one of those?

Either way, I'm not likely to stop buying real books any time soon.

EDIT: typo.

I would never buy anything with DRM, particularly books, unless the price was trivial. Yesterday I picked up a copy of Ringworld and read a few chapters. That book was purchased almost 30 years ago and I am extremely dubious that anything I bought with a kindle would be available to me 3 years from now without a call to customer support and a lot of arguing, nevermind 30 years from now.

A low cost rental or a subscription service? That is a lot more appealing. I pay for the subscription version of Rhapsody and I love it. I feel I get a very good tradeoff in breadth of available music for the reality that I don't actually own it.

Can you do Web browsing over the cell connection as well?  That would make the Kindle worthwhile all on its own.  (I like the concept of cell internet but hate the concept of paying $60/mo for it.)

It supposedly does have a simple experimental "text mode" Web browser but you'll have to ask Quinton about it. There is a charge to use it that way, though (not sure how much it is). The "no usage fee" stuff is for things like downloading books, browsing the store, using Wikipedia, and some Web searching (not sure how extensive that is).

Wikipedia + Google Maps would be most of what I'd want portable Internet access for anyway.

I use a Sony E-Reader. The Sony stuff has DRM (the stuff that you buy from the store). Other than that, it's better looking than the kindles, is made of metal, and lets me load almost ANYTHING onto it. Not to mention the new ones are supposed to be pretty great (I have the second revision of the first edition).

A couple of reviews:

http://blag.xkcd.com/2009/02/25/kindle-2/

http://www.suntimes.com/business/1451062,ihnatko-kindle-2-review-022609.article

Yes but it is clunky. I have managed to post on message boards from my kindle, though.

Yea, when they sell these things for $20, they're linux based, and I can buy the books directly from the author avoiding the publisher, I'll buy one.

I really don't feel like spending hundreds of dollars to buy a thingy that has the sole purpose of allowing me to give that company even more money.

Oh yea, and PDFs? Who still uses PDFs anyway?

I do, for almost everything. They look fucking great.

And you don't have to pay for the web connection at all beyond the purchase of the gadget?  I'm still trying to wrap my head around this.  I mean, it's how the world SHOULD work, but I thought we were still decades off.

ok, yea, I grant you can make them look nice.

But you can't edit them unless the author allows you to (or you crack them), they are HUGE, and they require proprietary software to open.

No.

PDF is an open format. You don't need Adobe. On Mac OS X it's built in to the OS (the whole display is PDF-like) and built right in to the OS is "Preview" application that will allow you to read PDF and even convert to other formats. And you can DL Skim (http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/), a nifty open source PDF application that enables you to annotate, add notes, draw on and save right in the PDF document. An free ebook reader application Stanza will also convert PDF into .epub (open ebook format).

I'm sure Windows users have application options similar to these.

AFA Kindle goes, price needs to get under $100 to suit me. And the DRM is troublesome but having a persistent mobile EVDO connection is enticing…

PDF is used very heavily in academia for papers, studies, presentations, etc. Its a way of putting a final seal on a MS wod doc, xls sheet, etc. Nearly every downloadable document on my university department's website is in PDF format.

Also, regarding books and DRM, the simple fact is that if its data and that can be shared far and wide. Being able to share a book with your friends is nice, but there's little option for data-based books.

I mean, if someone can come up with some secure way of sharing data between select people that simultaneously prevents abuse by the l33t warez kiddies, I'm sure Amazon would jump on it. Regrettably, we ain't there yet, hence DRM.

This could not possibly be more apropos: http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/13/video-android-powered-e-ink-display-kindles-our-e-book-fantasie/

Granted, it looks like the technology is still a ways off, but it's really awesome to see all the different things that people want to do with the platform.  For those too lazy to click the link, a mobile development group up in San Francisco has built a device which runs the android OS and displays to an e-ink screen.  Of course, there are some technical hurdles yet to be overcome--the screen has an annoying flash on each screen refresh for instance--but it looks promising.

Android is not currently tuned for something as slow as an e-ink display -- we really want ~60fps capable.  That said, it's certainly possible to do some hackery to the surfaceflinger (the Android composition manager) to better support slow displays.

Also, Kindle is linux based (just not super open)....
http://blog.rlove.org/2007/11/kindle-powered-by-linux.html

There might be some repeat info in here, but I have the first generation Kindle, I got it as a surprise present for Christmas and I freaking love it! The price tag may seem daunting, but it's not that far off from the larger iPods. When I got it I thought, "You bought this overpriced gadget?" and now I think it's worth it, definitely.

It can read other formats other than Amazon's DRM format. And you don't have to email or pay for it... it comes with a USB hookup so you can dump things straight from your computer. I've downloaded free ebooks that are text files, or plain vanilla MOBI files and they load just fine. The built-in wireless connection works great, it piggybacks onto AT&Ts cellular network, and is free always. The built in dictionary is great, the screen is easily legible.

I've read about 3x more than usual because of it. It's completely gratifying as an accessory to impulsive book choices. I don't have to make a trip to Barnes & Noble anymore, I just pop onto Amazon and buy something on a whim, wait 30 seconds, and there it is. The Kindle Store is also accessible through the device itself, so you can browse for new books while using it I guess, but it's kind of awkward. Older classics are a great deal, I downloaded the complete works of Nathaniel Hawthorne for $1.99, and Edgar Allen Poe for about the same. It's not that hard to find "warez" versions of some books out there too, if you have trouble finding something. I couldn't find an Asimov book anywhere, but downloaded a text file of it and got to reading it right away.

The feature I don't use much but look fun was magazine and newspaper subscriptions. You can go download today's copy of the New York Times or something for like 25 cents. Or Time magazine or whatever. Pretty neat trick.

So yeah, I think it's great. Thumbs up!

I bought the first gen kindle for my wife about a year ago and she absolutely loves it.  In my quest to get content on it for free i came across the following two links that might be useful to anyone with any ebook reader.

* http://manybooks.net/
These guys take the classics that have expired copyrights and have a handy drop down to export to all kinds of e-reader formats.

* http://www.lexcycle.com/stanza
This program will convert pdf's to the various e-book reader formats.  For the kindle this is a very easy way to get a pdf on the device.  For the sony device (i'm not sure if later versions fix this) it will allow you to read a pdf and still use the built in font scaling.

Apart from all the other disadvantages already cited I have two more gripes with the kindle.

1. Proprietary wireless (Amazon's WhisperNet over EVDO) and only usable on Sprint USA.
2. No availability outside of the US

Teardowns of kindle2 reveal space/pads for a SIM socket, so many speculate a GSM/UMTS version is in the works for other markets.

I don't want a goddamn EVDO/GSM/UMTS/'insert stupid mobile phone standard here' module.

1. GSM only is too slow for book downloads and the kindle store. UMTS modules are expensive and draw a lot of power.
2. You need a contract with a mobile phone provider that includes a data plan in order to use it. GSM/UMTS data plans are still fucking expensive in Europe.
3. W-LAN is cheap to install and there are already a shitload of public access WIFI networks all over the world that you could use. Hell in the city most people that read somewhere in public are sitting in a goddamn starbucks or other coffee shop with free (or cheap) public wi-fi.

I can buy 4 to 5 books for the 50 bucks that a contract with data plan cost over here.

No, you don't, at least not the way it's setup here in the US. All the basic connected services are free as mentioned above.

So what are the release dates like for kindle books?  Do they release stuff as soon as it hits hardback or is it later in the time line like trade paperback or paperback?

You can judge this by going to the Kindle Store (http://www.amazon.com/kindle-store-ebooks-newspapers-blogs/b?ie=UTF8&node=133141011). Look for the last half-dozen or so books you've bought, and see if they are available for Kindle or not.

I did this myself, and was unfortunately unimpressed.

As far as I'm concerned, a Kindle is mostly attractive as a device to read content that I'd attach short retention times to. Newspapers & magazines in particular. A delivery subscription the New York Times is $630 per year. The annual subscription cost to the Kindle edition is $168. If you don't value the crossword or other stuff missing from the Kindle edition and want a major newspaper, then the device is currently something of a bargain. When you're just going to be throwing out old newspapers, the DRM is irrelevant and the Kindle makes throwing them out considerably more convenient.

Although the DRM nonsense is off putting for purchasing the sort of books you'd like to reread in a handful of years (your souped up 2015 e-paper device made by Chinese manufacturing conglomerate Walmake probably won't read old Kindle DRM) it is attractive for the sorts of reference books that have short shelf lives - computer stuff which gets superseded by new versions for example.

Righ, thanks for that post. I didn't realize NYT was so deeply discounted for kindle, things that like are one of the better arguments I've heard in favor of electronic devices like this.

Apparently the kindle is not available in canada :(  Why does america hate us?
I noticed that you can email your kindle email address a pdf and it will convert it for $0.10 per pdf.
This isn't all that bad. There are other options though to convert pdfs for free. From what I understand though the kindle 2 does not nativity support pdf though and when it converts complex pdfs they don't format correctly.

I would love to get one of these if the pdf conversion was easy (a bit of a D&D nerd and would love to have all the books on one of these) and the pdf  conversions looked good.

Blame the multi-national media companies.

You can email youraddress@free.kindle.com for a free conversion (mailed back to you instead of delivered over the air).

I've only tried on pdf and it looked okay, but it wasn't very complicated.

Same reason DVDs are encoded to region — publishers carving out sections of the globe as "unique" markets for "rights" to be sold…

Yup.

I'm going to miss book covers  :cry:

I'm on board with the Kindle-suspicious.  I see the benefits of ebooking, and I love that eInk makes it happen without the eyestrain, but I don't want a reader that's so deeply bundled with the content and the bookstore.  I've got books on my shelf that I bought 25 years ago, I have no idea where I bought them, and I don't care.  I need that functionality to be replicated in bits.  Yes, I know I can crack the DRM, but who's to say Amazon won't want to play arms-race and have the reader download mandatory system updates that try (and fail) to fight the cracking?  Making the whole issue a massive irritant.  And maybe I don't want to buy my books from Amazon.  Maybe I like the bookseller down the road.  The bundling is garbage.

Unfortunately, I require a keyboard of some kind, because I think searching is one of the biggest draws of text digitization, and as far as I can tell the Sony readers don't have it.  According to this feature matrix (http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/E-book_Reader_Matrix) the iRex Digital Reader is the only other e-book that takes input (and with a stylus instead of a keyboard.   :drill:), but it's . . uh. . $859.

So I'm still on the sidelines.

If kindle allowed me to purchase the physical book and then use a code to activate the ebook as steam does for games i would pick one up. Expensive and limiting is not a good combination.

I'd be more on board with the e-book thing if they were significantly cheaper than the physical books.  I don't mind it so much with games because the physical media is such a microscopic fraction of the cost of the game, but if a hardback is $15 and a paperback is $5, I expect an e-book to be $1.

Don't expect e-books for $1. Considering most authors make maybe $1 off the sale of each book, unless the author is selling it directly to you, he's going to get screwed. I do agree they should be cheaper than the physical version, though.

I think that if e-books were 1 - 3$ it might be easier for e-book readers to gain traction and then the "i'm not able to lend/borrow books" becomes much less of an issue. I can just tell whoever "this is a good book, get it" and at this kind of price point they will just grab it themselves. In theory that may be able to sell more books this way. Higher volume/lower price. Not to mention the authors should be getting a higher percentage from e-book sales as the cost to the publisher is reduced to almost nill.

I also see a situation where more and more individual authors will start 'e-publishing' their own works and keeping 100% of the sales. see Raidohead.

I love my books but really, would changing to an e-book reader be all that hard for me? Nope. I think we will always have the traditionalists but by and large we are all going to be moving to an e-book society sooner or later. 

With an e-book model I don't see why the publisher should be entitled to a significant cut, or even be involved in the first place.  All they're doing is hosting a cheap website at that point.  I can totally understand paying the author $1 for the content and the publisher $9 for the binding when I'm getting a nicely bound book, but I'm not going to pay the same $9 for a fucking download.  The author should be getting the lion's share at that point (and at the same time, he should be getting about as much as he got from the physical book sales, which should mean an overall lower price for me).

Kindle books now on iPod and iPhone (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/technology/04kindle.html)

No e-Ink = you will go blind.  There's a reason e-book readers didn't take off until the last couple of years even through the rest of the technology has been around for a decade.  Someone needed to develop a dynamic screen that wasn't backlit.

But what about bedtime reading?

You are correct, he should. For some reason, publishers aren't really ready to agree with you on that one.  :oh_i_see:

There are some services I've looked into for self-publishing that will give the author a significantly greater cut for strictly e-book publishing, though, so there is hope. The most important thing the publishers bring to the table is the marketing apparatus, something 99% of established authors have no hope of equaling and 100% of new authors will never have a chance to equal.

I have never bought a book due to the efforts of any sort of "marketing apparatus" operated by a publisher.  With the possible exception of the fucking Da Vinci Code, and I was immensely sorry afterward.  I do almost all my reading based on recommendations from friends and family, browsing at the library or bookstore, Internet searches, that sort of thing.  A book publisher is the last entity on earth I'm going to take reading advice from.

Marketing isn't just advertising or promotion,  it's the whole chain that takes your prototype from idea to available for general sale.  How do you think libraries and bookstores figure out what books to carry, and in what numbers?

Publishing houses have ready-made services to provide advice, editing, formatting, and advance reading.  They then figure out what market or niche your book fills, and the best way to convince the various booksellers to pick it up.  They get out the ARCs to magazines and trade journals for review and comment,  and now they get them out to the various popular bloggers and reviewers on the internet.  They set up interviews and the works, carry out the meetings with purchasers.

Then,  they might do some advertising and hype promotion, though in the case of books there isn't a whole lot of it except for your obvious best sellers.


Every time you purchase a book from browsing at a bookstore, the marketing apparatus of a publisher has been successful.  It's a long, uphilll battle just to get a new author's book a couple of inches of shelf space at most bookstores.

it is "lit" just not "backlit".  It's very bedtime (lowlight) readable.

Scientific papers are pretty much exclusively PDF, and I churn through about twenty or so a week.  I have hundreds of them laying around my office, lab, and home.  If the Kindle were able to manage PDF without any inconvenience, I'd expense one in an eye blink. 

Expense one of these (http://www.irextechnologies.com/irexdr1000) instead.  It handles PDF just fine.  Or wait a couple of months for the 1000SW, which will have Bluetooth and WiFi built in.  The only thing keeping me from getting one is cost, and if I had an expense account,  :grin:

Holy crap, those look interesting.

Do you have one? Can I sink back in my armchair and read one without arm strain? How easy is 10pt text in a PDF to read?

In the version with the stylus, can I scribble notes and save them back into some form that I can email someone? (No dodgy handwriting recognition, please, there aren't enough hours in the day for that shit.)

No, but I've held one.  So take the rest of my responses with the appropriate amount of salt.


It weighs 1.25 lbs (half a kilo).  I've never weighed a trade paperback, but I'm guessing it's a little lighter than the analog version, especially if it's a Robert Jordan tome.


Pretty easy.  It's a big screen for an e-book reader, and it'll scale a page to the edges.


Yes, it exports them as PDFs.  Also, it lets you jot notes directly onto other documents and it saves them as a bundle, so when you open up the original your notes (optionally) get pulled up on top.

From what I understand, the big downsides are the price and the fact that the interface is pretty tough to navigate, but the latter doesn't bother me much.  The company is a bunch of linux hacker beards and the device is pretty much what you'd expect to come out of that.

That is really, really interesting. If only for the workflow of reading other peoples' stuff, making comments and sending it back to them. Damn, I wish I could get my hands on one - I hate to lay out a thousand bucks for something I've never seen in the flesh. Thanks for typing up that review, sidereal.

No problem.  Positive review aside, I'm probably holding out for this (http://reader.txtr.com/) or this (http://www.itechnews.net/2009/03/02/onyx-boox-ebook-reader/), which should come out this year.  Note the Boox has a stylus as well.

Sold. It looks like this year I'll be getting me an e-ink pad of some kind.

Just bought the comploete Windows development .net Set from Wrox Publishing. 6000 Pages worth of text distributed among 4 Books.

I'd desperately need some sort of e-book device for that stuff otherwise I'll get an hernia from lugging them around.

Why don't you just get a Safari subscription or buy comp books that have PDF versions?

I really can't afford any of those nice gizmos but being able to get an e-book reader for PDFs would make my life (and environmental impact) better. I get sick of printing out PDFs and piling them in folders or chucking them and also of reading on my computer screen.

???

Not available in Europe?

http://my.safaribooksonline.com/

I just found out something interesting in regards to ebooks.
I was reading the Globe and Mail and saw an article saying that the Vancouver Public Library is starting to buy ebooks for people to 'check out'

I love this part The library's licensing agreement means the files don't have an expiry date, and so won't disappear after a set amount of time as other electronic resources are sometimes programmed to do. "We can't encourage people to download entire books and keep them forever, but there isn't a technical limitation,"

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090320.BCLIBRARY20/TPStory/TPNational/BritishColumbia/
 

Apologies for the necro -

I occasionally splurge on Amazon, and as I was filling my basket with books, it occurred to me that much of what I wanted (I'm on a philosophy binge at the mo) was freely available at Project Gutenberg - a book reader would be nice.

I know much of this discussion has been about the Kindle, but has anyone had any experience with this puppy?

http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&productId=8198552921665562069
(Sony PRS-700)

Apparently has a touch screen, built in front lights, native pdf(with reflow and zoom)/rtf/txt/BBeB/ePub support (with Word docs transferable via software), plays mp3s and displays photos in black and white.

I'm really liking the idea of a touch screen with it - but they've yet to be released here in the UK, so the international delivery and possible customs charges have tempered my enthusiasm for now. If anyone has one, or has seen one, I'd appreciate a view on how they hold up.

The Sony eReaders are sold at the Borders where I work part-time.  They're definitely snazzy looking, and the ability to turn pages just by swiping your finger feels much more "natural" than pushing a button.  Plus it comes with a built in backlight.

That said, my understanding from others who have used both the eReader and the Kindle (I don't have the money for either) is that the additional layers on the eReader's screen which allow the touchscreen capability also detract from the reading experience; there's reflections, and it's more like reading from your computer screen than a book.  Also, there's less than half the amount of titles available for the eReader as compared to the Kindle.

Again, that's mostly hearsay.  It's certainly a more snazzy looking product than the Kindle, though.

I have the eReader prior to the touch screen ones. I looked at the touchscreen ones, yes, they do take away some of the readability. The one prior is nicer in that regard, also, pushing a button wasn't too bad.

Thanks chaps. The touch screen option is attractive because it appears more natural, as Zar says. Also the 700 model comes with text search apparently, which the previous model lacks. Theres still a delay between turning pages on ereaders from what I can see, so the ability to search for text to cut down scanning for a bit you are looking for is nice.

On the other hand, the whole point of buying one is to be able to read on it. Aargh. I'll hopefully be over in the states soon, so I'll see if I can compare.

Cheers.

The new Kindle DX has been announced:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/06/live-from-amazons-kindle-event-in-nyc/
http://www.amazon.com/kindle-store-ebooks-newspapers-blogs/b?node=133141011


Also, rumors of an Apple touch screen ebook machine/tablet are in the air ...

I'm starting to become a believer in the Kindle, if not necessarily in eBooks.  As a go-anywhere web appliance, the Kindle seems to be pretty damned good, especially the newest version from that announcement.  Not so expensive and delicate as to make me cringe at the thought of dropping it, but a big enough display to be useful.  All it lacks is code execution and geo-location services, and I can live without those (especially as it seems to have basic web scripting functions).

--Dave

I don't understand the allure of the giant kindle.

I just got a kindle2. I'm not convinced its any better than the first one.

Can I have your kindle 1?

actually, its the gfs. she guards it jealously. won't even consider swapping to read each other's books.

Worth a try.

Textbooks. The DX is big enough to present detail, small enough to go in a satchel, briefcase or bag. It beats a rucksack full of textbooks.

I've wondered about the academic uses of e-readers. Carrying around stacks of textbooks + papers is annoying, and it's useful when you can go and follow up on other references as opposed to hunting them all day.

Without the capability for annotattions and highlighting I don't think its too useful.

The latest Sony one handles both (not sure about Kindle).

None of these devices have the necessary input resolution to allow annotations. And text entry (using mini-keyboard or handwriting recognition) is far too slow for jotting notes on the fly. This is a stopper for me with the current generation.

Having said that, though, the Kindle DX is pretty awesome for pdf's. I'd much rather carry one of those around than someone's 2" thick PhD thesis. Great for reading while flying.

In the future, one of these devices will have the words "Don't Panic" imprinted on its face somewhere.

I should get that laser engraved on the back of my eReader or on the leather folio.

I have spoken to a few publishing executives (parents of my kids' friends) and all of them insist that Amazon actually loses money on most of the Kindle books since they are charging less than the royalty.  Color me skeptical.  Some might be loss-making, but it would be insane for Amazon to price like that.  Doesn't mean Amazon isn't insane in the short-term to lock in market share.

I also find it amusing that these same executives pooh-pooh e-books since "it is only 1%" of the market. This is the same attitude that got newspapers in trouble.  When I point this out, they just say the businesses are not the same - which is true, but avoids the issue. When your marginal, affluent customer makes a significant change in a core habit, you better take notice.

One word: TEXTBOOKS.

There is no reason why a student shouldn't get a Kindle, or something similar, when they get to a school with every book they need on it.

Yes, it will kill the textbook publishing industry.  But frankly, publishing industries in general (Music, Movies, Games and Books) need to die.

If I was still traveling all over the country like I was a few years ago, I'd prize owning one of these… …not having to lug books (and more importantly all the PDF documents that I would be studying on the plane ride) lightens the luggage load plus free internet…

Yeah, I wish the input was better but that will improve. Funny, first time I touched one I tried using it like iPhone with finger gestures — it was sort of disconcerting, and a strong signal how intuitive touch UI truly is…

The textbook industry won't care if they have to create actual books or not. As long as they get paid a fair royalty for the content, it shouldn't matter. The actual printing costs are a small part of total costs. Of course, the printing cost per unit goes up as the number of units goes down since there are large fixed costs, but most publishers outsource the actual printing and binding these days to one of a half dozen global printers.

But the campus bookstore won't be able to resell used ones for 90% of the original price while buying them back at 10% the original price!

Hey, Hey, Hey.  They SWEAR that's a legal issue thing and they CAN'T sell them for less.  It's even written on a sign and everything. 

I can see the appeal of native pdf support, but honestly I'd want a *smaller* kindle not a bigger one.  I could stand to lose the keyboard and generally shrink the device (but not the display) a bit and then, presto, something about the size of a trade paperback page but thinner. 

Other features I'd like (but are not in DX) include "higher resolution display" and most importantly "display that can update faster when you're flipping through pages".  The slow refresh is fine for reading speed, but if you want to flip back or forward more rapidly, it suuuucks.

Since buying the kindle2, I have been reading even more than usual (and I tend to read a lot) because it's just too damn easy to pick up books.  The free preview where you can get the first ~2 chapters or so is massively evil.  I've grabbed the preview of a bunch of books mentioned in the book thread or by other friends in passing and ended up buying and reading the full books.

The book pricing honestly feels a little high to me, but considering that I already tend to order books from amazon, and I don't pay shipping for the electronic ones, and it's basically instant...

Probably going to stick with the k2 until they come out with something that actually advances the state of the art of the e-ink display technology.  If the DX had much faster refresh it might be tempting for databooks and tech manuals (which, for the SoCs I work with tend towards the 2000-3000 page range -- I kill trees a chapter at a time for readable hardcopy that I can scribble on as I discover all the lies about how the hardware works...), but I really really need to be able to flip around rapidly for them to be usable, and ideally write on 'em and mark stuff up.

My dream eBook reader:

basically a thing that allows me to read everything that get's thrown at me at work.

- Reasonable screen update rate
- high contrast and dpi (that's one of the advantages of e-Paper really)
- color e-Paper
- Ability to display PDF documents
- fast switching between documents (great for editing)
- ability to highlight and annotate documents easily, especially great would be the ability to use handwritten annotations.
- size of kindle2 is sufficient
- sturdy design
- wireless internet access for document down- and upload
- with touch screen and interface keyboard is not really necessary.

If the publisher is doing the work of selling the book to the schools they should get a cut but why should they get a royalty fee?  Regardless, their slice of the pie is going to shrink along with their clout if distribution goes from being the critical point for a successful work to trivial.

So, the Kindle 5 or 6 or 7. Ok. Just be patient.

I'm still probably waiting on a txtr and/or a boox, but these stealth readers just got announced and are releasing in a couple of weeks (http://www.coolreaders.com/)

No wifi or wireless plan so the transfers are all done over usb, and no keyboard.  But it's kind of a cool entry-level reader at $250

(http://www.coolreaders.com/images/cooler-large-fan.jpg)

Bump! I read this DRM nightmare article this morning (http://www.geardiary.com/2009/06/19/kindles-drm-rears-its-ugly-head-and-it-is-ugly/). He upgraded his iphone to 3.0, got a touch and all of a sudden he couldn't download his ebooks to it.

The tl;dr of it is that he was told they restrict the number of times you can download a book, period, and that includes when you upgrade from a kindle1 to a kindle2 and when you upgrade iphone or ipod touch versions. It goes through several levels of customer service and they all tell him the same thing, then he gets to a different level they tell them that they mean devices, it can only be installed on X devices and that's determined by the publisher and they don't always know how many that is. And when you reach that number you'll just have to buy the book again.

Uuugllyy.

I read this last week and found another article iwth more information about it. The actual limit is the total number of devices that an item can be downloaded to, but once you reinitialize a device, it may count as a new device. They can reset it by deauthorizing a retired device, but its apparently per book and it's not a consumer option--you have to call in to do it. Which all sounds like a nightmare.

Contrasting this, I have a similar DRM thing for subscription rhapsody. I can only run it on so many computers at once, but it's by account, not by track. And if I run out of authorized devices, when I go to set it up on a new PC, it asks me which other one I want to deauthorize.

I suspect they never really anticipated it because they were thinking of kindle as an object that would rarely be replaced, not a service that would be used by multiple devices, some of which might be reinstalled.

I have major technolust for a kindle, but I'm just not sure it's all there yet. I'll probably give in eventually.

Short version of this post is the price on the Kindle 2 has been dropped to $299.


Mea Culpa. I'm a very happy Kindle 2 owner. My guild's raid leader was talking hers up and then I saw someone reading one on the train while on vacation and was just amazed by the screen clarity. I held out a month and kept looking at the thing and finally ordered it. What pushed me over the edge was not being able to find a copy of a book I know that I have among the thousands in our basement. Even arguing with CSR about a DRM'd book has to be easier than this. Good thing I waited as I qualified for Amazon's unspoken 30 day price guarantee.

Having had it a week, I'm sold on the kindle. My views would be almost word for word Quinton's. I started reading the book rather than reading the kindle wow tech in about ten minutes. It feels very natural. I keep thinking it would be nicer without that extra keyboard. Maybe they need a "lite" sample that is USB only with no keyboard. Also the ability to download a sample, generally the first chapter, is an excellent feature. I'm not sure if it will cost me more because I'll try things and get hooked or save money because I have a stack of books that sounded good, but I didn't get past page ten on or that I ordered because I was putting in an amazon order and might as well pick up this and that since shipping was free and got lost somewhere in our stacks and stacks of books.

I don't view it as a replacement for books in total, but I view it as a replacement for most of my purchases which are mass market paper--usually mysteries or sf/fantasy. Oddly, what I can't imagine reading on it is a textbook or a manual. Too many graphics, too much formatting with sidebars and such too much paging through looking for something. I'd have killed for this when I was dragging my Riverside Shakespeare and Riverside Chaucer around though.

Since getting it I've also become aware of the availability of ebooks that aren't available on the kindle. (Search for 13130 and torrent.) I have recreated probably 90% of my entire library going back to stuff I bought when I was in elementary school. I find it ironic that some of the files have a notice that you should only use them to "back up" books you already own, which is exactly what I'm doing.

Converting PDFs is very easy, just load them into Mobi creator and export them as a mobi prc file and move that to the kindle. I use Calibre for managing my library and if you're not picky about formatting it will mass convert pdfs. On pdf conversions, mobi converts the pdf to an html file, then assembles the html file into a prc book file. I usually clean up the html a bit and if it doesn't have one I grab the book cover. I have it down to a science: replace all the paragraph and line breaks with p/ tags, dedupe the p/ tags, remove all paragraph returns, put new ones in after ever p/ tag. I'm picky.

This is one benefit to marrying a librarian :) Just throw some books on a shelf and automagically they get organized by little elves.

Ah, the secret of your sexual prowess is revealed.

And this is why I will never own a Kindle and remain skeptical about the whole e-book concept (http://gizmodo.com/5317180/amazon-remotely-deletes-legitimately-purchased-books-from-thousands-of-kindles)  :oh_i_see:

I'm not sure this is Amazon's fault. I think the bottleneck is the publishing industry, who are scared to death of electronic format. The switch is inevitable, imho. Kindle is the shot across the bow, but how long will it be till even more versatile and highly readable screens are produced?

How gloriously ironic that they would take Nineteen Eighty-four away - if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

Do you use iTunes? Steam? Those are the same thing. You don't actually "own" anything you purchase through those services. Those services have also deleted/locked out things you are purchased "just because". At least Amazon gave people refunds. Apple and Valve don't bother to do that.

I don't use either actually, I'm still broadly wary of digital media and always prefer to have a hard copy of anything. This is in part due to a couple of experiences with disk drives dying and the subsequent loss of all that data. I still prefer to have the actual CD/DVD/Game/Book in physical form when I can. I take your point, and this isn't intended to be an exclusive indictment of Amazon; however the notion that someone can 'un-sell' a purchase I have made, without my consent and without warning is something I consider highly suspect and worrying.

In the case of the Kindle, even if this wasn't an issue I would be unlikely to buy one, as the cost and negative elements do not even come close to passing any supposed benefits. When you include the fact that anything you download onto the device can be remotely manipulated by Amazon, or other persons unknown, I am completely put off.

For the cost of a Kindle you can get an ipod touch, load stanza on the touch, and then wallow around in your piles and piles of free books forever, without anyone remotely deleting them like assholes.  The touch is also far sturdier, in color, backlit, pocketable, and has thousands of applications.  The Kindle's only advantages are a bigger screen and access to Amazon's DRMed catalog of books.  And the bigger screen's a non-issue for books without illustrations; I scaled up the fonts in stanza so that they're plenty easy to read, just have to turn pages more often, oh noes.

You're missing the entire point of the Kindle, which is the screen technology; it reads like paper without tireing the eyes.

Actually, I'm seriously scouting that new itablet thing, just to use as an ebook reader.

Yeah, the e-ink display technology is the whole point.  Much easier on my eyes.  I dislike reading things on LCDs.  I tend to print hardcopy of long documents rather than read them on a monitor.  The main problem with e-ink right now is the refresh time is too long for comfortable random access.  For reading a novel, it's fine, the refresh time is not really much slower or more distracting than flipping to the next page.  For jumping around in a technical document or textbook or somesuch, it's painfully slow.

I call shenanigans on the e-ink thing.  Having used Sony's reader, I found it no easier to read than LCDs.  If anything, it was actually a little worse, thanks to the lower color contrast of black text on greenish-tan screen and lack of backlighting.  My time with the reader was only a few minutes of playing with a friend's, but I've stashed and read a few dozen novels in my ipod, and have never experienced any strain or discomfort.

It may well vary from individual to individual, and I can only speak for myself, but after reading several tens of books on a kindle, I'm pretty convinced it's easier on my eyes than LCD.

I think the real advantage is that e-ink does not drain the batteries, it only uses power to change the page at which point it essentially permanent.  The kindle even comes shipped with the introduction instructions already on the screen.

I went on a 3 week vacation with my kindle, reading almost every night  and did not need to recharge the batteries.

I'm into my second month of using my kindle every night and the battery isn't even half down. Wireless service is off, of course.

I just got a Kindle and the screen experience is fucking fantastic. Comparing reading something on it to reading something on a tiny backlit iPhone is like comparing listening to music on a high end stereo system vs. a PC speaker circa 1989. There's no comparison at all to be made, the Kindle blows it away in every way.

Seriously until I got my hands on one I was skeptical too, but its absolutely amazing.

EDIT: I like it enough that I'm seriously thinking about getting the bigger native-PDF-reading Kindle to replace the giant pile of books I haul around to RPG games, once WotC gets back to offering PDFs.

It doesn't really matter who you blame, the fact is Amazon built these devices with this functionality or they wouldn't have been able to do it in the first place.  That in itself is a problem.  They actually designed, tested, and set up a way to remove things from your Kindle without your authorization.  It doesn't matter who "made" them do it.  The fact that they were even capable of doing it in the first place is unacceptable.

I've actually considered getting a Kindle a couple times, and I've been held off mostly by the 'I don't need it' angle - not to mention since I can read a 3-400 page book in a few hours without difficulty, I might wind up buying way too many books if it was convenient.  But after hearing this, there's no way I'm ever purchasing a device like this.  I think I'm going to be even more careful about what I buy in the future - unless I get physical media that isn't online and can't be ordered remotely to delete itself, I'm not going to be buying.

This is definitely a risk.  I'm buying more books now that I can get them in a instant-gratification manner.  Also, the "download the first chapter or two for free" option is insidious.  Way way too easy to check out something you might not have otherwise looked at.


They don't prevent you from backing up everything on your kindle by copying it to pc via usb mass storage (thus my copy of Animal Farm is still in my backup directory on a pc), and the crypto for the kindle stuff is weak, has been broken, and tools exist to extract to non-drm formats, so the lockin issue is not so bad.  I do think it's unfortunate that they do things they way they did, but given that they're trivially circumventable, I'm not as worried about it as I would otherwise be.

I'm posting up a storm today. Work is dying down.

I got a Kindle DX for father's day. It's amazing.

You plug it in via USB and it shows up like it's a usb thumbstick. Drag pdfs onto it, unplug, read. I've already spent like $40 on books so far. I have a huge selection of pdfs, too, so those are all on there.

Luckily I do a lot of work with IBM products, so having the IBM Redbook library available online is quite a plus. I have about 9000 pages worth of technical documents sitting next to me right now, all on the kindle. All those stupid books I had sitting here on my desk are long gone. Storage room.

All the reviews bitching about the "next page" button placement and the keyboard being crappy and the "tilt on demand" feature being twitch are crack smokers. I'll field questions, but I'm a believer now so I probably won't give the best responses.

Does it have a native pdf reader?  Can you just drop a pdf on via usb mass storage and have it work?

That's a complaint I have with kindle2 -- you have to email your pdfs to amazon for conversion.  Also the kindle2 doesn't have a big enough display to show them 1:1, so it pretty much just extracts the text, which often ends up with pretty funky formatting.

Yes the DX has a native PDF reader. Yes you can just copy PDFs to the device via USB. However it doesn't have a way to change the font size(s) in the PDF on the device itself (if you have something like Acrobat Pro you can reformat the doc that way). You can rotate it into "landscape" mode which will give a slight zoom effect (usually) as it'll fill to the width even if that means you have to scroll down to see the rest of the page.

There are other limitations with the format on the DX as well (links don't work, no highlighting, no notes). The keyboard is apparently horrific (numbers are merged into the top row of letters) and there's a distinct lack of navigation buttons -- the paging buttons are only on one edge -- even though the form factor basically demands that there be buttons on all four edges.

Edit: BTW, the Sony Reader has native PDF support as well if you prefer the small screen size.

On the Big Brother book recall. The deal is the book is out of copyright in Australia, but it's still under copyright in the US because of Mickey Mouse. Mobi publishes a huge amount of out of copyright stuff and this inadvertently got included in their offerings, but they didn't have the rights for US publication. Amazon removed it as part of a copyright complaint from the actual rightsholder. Amazon has announced in the future they will refund the amount and remove it from your account so you can't download it again, but won't go into your kindle to delete the file. (We'll see how long that lasts after a publisher sues to force them to remove it from your kindle.)

Why was an illegal book up there? The kindle system has a very easy to use self-publishing system where you can get your book up and online on the kindle with very little difficulty and no up front costs. But that also means without review. Ayn Rand's stuff, the Harry Potter books, and other stuff has been uploaded, offered, and revoked and removed in the past. But the 1984 thing was such a juicy story it really took off.

But what absolutely didn't happen was what everyone reported: that the actual rightsholder just decided they no longer wanted kindle users to have the book and forced it to be removed and refunded. There have been books that were horribly formatted, full of typos from bad OCR, or had rights sold, and have been removed from the Kindle store, but if you bought one, you got to keep it, and can continue to download it. (Presumably a lot of people also bought the badly formatted ones and demanded a refund as well.)

The PDF conversion thing is just plain bad layout choices by the original publisher in word or pagemaker or whatever. There are right and wrong ways to do things in Desktop Publishing, but they will both look the same on the printed page and a lot of people take shortcuts. Your book will be fine if you've done all kinds of manual page breaks and line breaks and formatting with strings of spaces, but it'll be living hell if you try to convert the file to something else. (I spent a year cleaning up old dtp disasters and converting them to html for Lexis.) Also, if you're converting from pirated sources, it might be something that's been converted from doc to pdf to mobi to rtf back to pdf--some of the torrents have multiple versions and you can even see where they went wrong.

Hrm. It's still an incredibly bad precedent.

What happens when a book gets banned? What they did was precisely the tinfoil hat scenario that people worry about with DRM, and they've shown that at the moment, they aren't to be trusted with the technology.

Waiting for the next Sony - not quite happy with the PRS505, and the screen on the PRS700 doesn't look great.

Lawsuit: Amazon Ate My Homework (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/07/30/lawsuit-amazon-ate-my-homework/)  :awesome_for_real:

Quick summary: boy takes notes about 1984 on his Kindle. Amazon deletes book. Notes still there but inaccessible since book no longer on device. Lawsuit follows.

Since this isn't politics, I'll bite my tongue about the motherfucking lawsuit.

On the bright side, the PDF problems are things that can be addressed in software. We just need more haxx0rs to buy Kindles, since the OS is open source. Someone will completely fix the PDF support. Eventually.

I'm skeptical you can do this with software. It looks to me like the DX is actually displaying the PDF as a PDF image rather than deconstructing it which is what you want it to do to take advantage of the wide screen. The minute you change the size of the text on the DX the formatting is going to go to hell. It's going to push paragraphs past graphics and you're going to see all the sins of manually formatted line breaks and all that. Sort of the same thing that happens when you convert a PDF and send it to the Kindle 1/2.

I spent hours and hours reading ebooks on my old Toshiba e740 Pocket PC with the Microsoft ebook reader software.  It was easy to read and my eyes never got tired.

So I just bought a  Sony PRS 505 (http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&productId=8198552921665245739)

I wanted to get the 700 as it has a touch screen and an onscreen keyboard to search with. Although they have stopped selling these.
Sony is releasing 2 new versions in the next few weeks. I figured that I'd pick this up now and see if I like it and if I do I would return it within the 30 mbg period and then get the newer one.
So far it is ok, as I read more with it I am liking it more.
I originally thought the kindle would be the better option but being in Canada I cannot get the kindle 2 and I was turned off of the "proprietaryness" of the kindles.

The Sony supports many more formats and I was able to find a program called Calibre that manages my library and converts .lit files into .epub which look best on the prs 505.
I am not too impressed with the pdf functionality so far and am hoping for more with the new versions.    

Overall it has been pretty good and as the evil torrenter that I am it will make getting new books much more affordable in the long run.

Another plug for calibre. I can't imagine trying to manage files without it. I find I have to do some cleanup of PDF conversions, but if you're not fussy it will do in a pinch. And it has great conversion for lit files.

And having spent one too many days fighting over the thing, we now have a second kindle 2 on the way for my partner.

Oh god Calibre is the best thing ever.

Strike two against Amazon's douchey approach to e-books (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=53076s=3139d6f8864b58a4eb47dc02482d78af&)

Amazon bought Mobipocket in 2005, and one of the licensing rules for Mobipocket DRM is that hardware manufacturers aren't allowed to decode it on a device that also supports another DRM format.  So new firmware that adds support for growing formats like ePub is disabling Mobi support.  So people who 'bought' 'books' with Mobi DRM now suddenly won't be able to read them.  Nice work.

Advantages of Calibre over Stanza?

Stanza is a bloated piece of trash with a crap interface made for Moms that think their iPhones are just so spiffy.

Calibre is 900x more utilitarian and does fantastic device management for a plethora of eReaders.

I assume you use Stanza for the iPod/iPhone, because there's no other reason to use it. I deleted it 5 minutes after I installed it.

I'd like to see epub become the future, but I suspect that's not going to happen. I suspect the kindle will become the ipod of books and we'll all be locked into amazon's DRM until DRM as a whole begins to fade. Right now Sony's store with epub is more expensive than amazon's kindle editions and they don't have the selection. I don't know who else is selling, but I think it's just small players. And AFAIK B&N's plastic logic reader will read epub, but the B&N books will be locked into a different proprietary drm.

I honestly wouldn't care if the Kindle's format became the standard. If it became common enough there would soon enough be good conversion software and I could then switch them to epubs (or whatever) and then use them in my non drm'd Sony reader.   This is what I am doing with .lit, .doc and .rtf files now. Although my readers uses some of these I find the epub to look the best.

I suspect somewhere there's a de-drm plugin for calibre, I just haven't found it.

/yes, the iPhone e-reader is the best I've seen, the desktop app is, as you colorfully allude to, is crude but it does perform conversion tasks.

/shuffles off to install Calibre

I just replaced my Sony 505 with the prs 600b.

I like it well enough the finish on it is much better than the 505. The 505 had slightly better contrast. This is because the 600 series has a touch screen. The dictionary feature is pretty cool, just double tap a word and a small dictionary definition comes up at the bottom of the page. You can also hit another button to get a pull dictionary entry on it.

It has the ability to highlight, or write notes right on the screen. A stylus is included.

The Sony E-reader library software has not worked at all for me, keeps crashing out to desktop or freezing and Calibre doesn't recognize the device yet. Although I was on the Mobileread forums and the guy who created Calibre said that he will have updated drivers today or tomorrow for the prs 600. 

Once that is done I don't think I will ever use the Sony library software as Calibre is just soo much better.

Overall I am pretty happy with it. Just the fact that I can get pretty much any book I want and have them all with me wherever I go is handy.

I hadn't realised that the 700 had been replaced.

Side by side:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/24/video-sony-prs-600-touch-is-fast-but-too-dim-to-satisfy-prs-505

Looks like it still has big glare and contrast issues, compared to the 505. Sigh. Still waiting.

To necro, I just got an update and the Kindle now does PDF natively and there's something about screen rotation that I haven't had a chance to monkey with on mine.

It's half-assed PDF support. It's like saying Wordpad is able to edit word documents.

On the kindle, if the pdf document has these embedded features, you won't be able to take advantage of them:

- text selection for dictionary lookups and text string searches
- left/right arrows to skip chapters
- in-document links to jump to various sections of the book, like a table of contents or a reference chapter

Lack of zoom makes the on device PDF support pretty much useless for a lot of documents.  If your PDF has small text, multicolumn text, etc, it's likely going to be unreadable on a kindle2 (probably not as bad on the DX).

It's not that bad now on the DX because they're auto-cropping the PDFs to remove most of the margin whitespace.

In landscape mode it's very readable, but the page turns take so long that it's very annoying, and you're doubling the number of page turns required when you go landscape.

WHORE ALERT:

You can get the ebook versions of my novel, Under the Amoral Bridge on the Kindle (http://www.amazon.com/Under-Amoral-Bridge-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B002WN2XDU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=digital-text&qid=1259483686&sr=1-1) for .99 cents from now until Christmas. Buy it, read it, review it and give me any feedback you want, no matter how savage.

Whoring completed.

Hahhah, purchased. Can't promise I'll read it soon. In the middle of Girl who Played with Fire.

Currently looking at a Kindle DX, should I be comparing it to anything else?  If so what?

P.S. - Yeah I'll use the f13 referral link, so I guess schilds opinion becomes immediately biased.

If you need a display that large that's your only choice ATM AFAIK. There are a bazillion devices now that use the 6" display.

If you're looking at the DX because you want a large(r) display, that's your only option for the foreseeable future.  If you're in the market for a Kindle2-sized device and aren't a fan of it/Amazon for whatever reason, next year is looking to be pretty neat on the ebook reader front.

I'm not a fan of any eReader atm (including the nook, having seen it just yesterday at BN). Frankly, I'd hold off. But that's me. Having handled a Kindle though, I still prefer my last-gen Sony with that software with Calibre.

I got myself a nook for Christmas, I'm happy enough with it.  I passed on the Kindle because I wasn't a fan of the keyboard and because of the proprietary file format.  I've mostly been checking e-books out of the local library and reading stuff I've downloaded from Project Gutenberg and google books.  I was kind of surprised at how natural it feels to read on it, since I hate reading anything longer than a page or two on my PC.  My biggest gripe was that page turn was kinda slow but this morning's software update made that better.

My wife got a Kindle for Christmas (she LOVES the keyboard -- but she teaches English, and wants to write in books all the time -- so she uses it to annotate somehow).

I broke down and just bought one. I'm hoping to collapse a few shelves into a single Kindle. Or several large shelves. My house is packed with books. Most of them aren't available on kindle, but enough are there already that I expect the others will follow sooner or later.

Playing with hers made me really like the e-paper.

I've been toying with the idea of buying one, but the books aren't any cheaper on the Kindle.

Right now I'm reading "Use of Weapons" by Ian Banks.

Amazon Kindle Version: $9.99 (http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=ian+banks&x=0&y=0)

The paperback version on Amazon is twenty cents more expensive.

I still like the handiness of it, and the instant delivery.  The DX is $450 which is a hefty pricepoint, and the smaller one $260 which is still a little pricey.

I got the smaller one. And with my house PACKED with bookshelves, and my personal belief that a three-day vacation requires 10 books, minimum, I'm happy to pay extra to save some space.

The fact that I can copy the files to my harddrive and back them up, and that a lot of classics are free is a big selling point too.

I have a small house and WAY too much stuff, but I'm not prepared to simply "get rid" of books --- I do a lot of rereading for light entertainment and I like books! However, I am prepared to digest my books in tinier, e-book form, and the Kindle is a heck of a lot more portable and readable than my PC or something.

I guess the extra is worth it to simply my life and make my library more portable.

Anyone have any experience with magazines on a Kindle, specifically Time and The Economist?

I'm much more a periodicals guy than anything else, the subscriptions prices are pretty good (like, pays for itself in ~3 years good), and like Morat I'd like to ditch the house-full-of-paper school of decorating.

All I've heard is that the Kindle sucks for graphics -- doesn't do much for even simple charts. I mean, it's good considering how they DO graphics -- but it's not great for anything with a lot of graphs or charts.

You can probably get a free trial or something. I might try it for a few of my favorite periodicals if they offer a trial or a single-issue deal, just to see.

I'm looking forward to them moving the backlog of older, "giant fucking fantasy series" stuff to Kindle (you'd figure they'd do it for stuff like Eddings, since it'd be a chance to resell his work with minimum actual cost, although to date only about half of Edding's stuff -- all the newer stuff that I never bothered with -- is on Kindle) so I can get rid of tons of older hardbacks.

Jordan, Goodkind, Eddings, Martin, The Dark Tower stuff, the Dune novels --- I think I'll hammer all of Modesitt's work with the "Ask for it on kindle" --- I could probably empty an entire bookcase just of older works that I keep around just for the occasional urge for a mindless re-read of something complete and finished.

The publishers have been REAL reluctant to embrace the eBooks. That whole MacMillan/Amazon fight from this past weekend was a part of that. The Kindle store has traditionally given SHIT for royalties (35% WTF?) and of course, the publishers are shitting their britches over the thought that eBook sales will cannibalize their precious hardcover sales. Now that there are a million Kindles out there, though, and Amazon is offering a 70% royalty option, you'll probably start to see more coming out. Whether it'll be priced obscenely or not is another story. I think most of the traditional pubs are still adamant about keeping prices as high as other editions.

The MacMillan fight wasn't really about cannibalizing sales, it was about price fixing. For some ebooks Amazon sells them for less than what they buy/license them from the publishers for. MacMillan said "no you must sell them at the price we tell you to". Which would be pricing fixing if these were real (physical) books.

Tired of reading justifications for ebook prices that are roughly equivalent/greater than paperback equivalents.

Costs for paper and ink are growing more exorbitant (especially in relation to bandwidth, disk space, etc.…) and the rationale that the author needs editors and proofreaders and fact checkers is bogus — it's a one-off cost and more essentially, significantly cheaper in post-internet-age.

Ebooks should cost no more than $4.99 unless it's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire sized, and even then, no more than ~$15.

Have a Kindle, love it.  Not an Apple fan, and I basically look at this as Apple driving up the cost of ebooks I buy.  What I really hate though are pricing situations like this on Amazon:

Evil for Evil
Formats:
Kindle Edition: $9.35
Paperback, Bargain Price: $4.94

The Escapement
Formats:
Kindle Edition: $9.35
Paperback, Bargain Price: $4.05

The one good point regarding the new deal for Amazon is that ebook & hardcover releases from Macmillan are supposed to be simultaneous now.  I read quite a bit from Tor (part of Macmillan) and their frequent long delays have been annoying me.

I'm not sure I'm willing to pay $15 for an ebook at release.  Of course I'm not convinced the publishers even care about that -- I think they'd rather you but the hardcover for some absurd reason.

They'd rather you buy the hardcover because it justifies the continuance of the business model they've been making money on for a century. We fear change, especially when there's money being made. To their eyes, it ain't broke, why fix it? They are facing the same dilemma the recording industry was facing, without the added stigma of widespread "pirating." There's also the business of the book distribution business, places like Ingram, which are completely cut out of the loop on eBooks. You know book distributors, the guys that will not carry a book from a publisher/author unless they get 50-55% off the sale price from the get-go. So the publisher which sells a hardback for $25 only gets $12 with which to pay the author royalties (and they get fuckall, let me tell you), pay for marketing and distribution and new talent discovery. The paperback situation is even worse.

The entire publishing industry from magazines to books is seeing a sea change in their business model and they want to extract every bit of profit that they can from the old model before it gets tossed into the bin.

Wife is updating the Nook to 1.2.  I hope that it fixes the issues that it has, like not turning on.  That would be nice.

Can someone with a Kindle and/or Nook tell me if DND guides are available on them? Does Wizards even publish like that?

Neither the 3.5ed nor 4ed D&D books appear to be available for kindle from amazon.

I'd advise against using e-ink readers for content that you want heavy random access to -- that's where they really fall down at the moment.  Love the kindle2 for reading novels but trying to flip pages / navigate around rapidly would drive me crazy.

If you found a pdf version of the handbooks you could load them onto the nook or the Kindle but it wouldn't be terribly useful since navigation would still be painful and slow.  Current e-books and their readers are designed for linear start to finish reading, they all have search, highlight/note taking features but they all seem painful to use and limited.  I bought an epub version of the Bible and even trying to do something as simple as navigate to the daily readings is so awkward that I finally just gave up and archived it. 

I have the 4e books in PDF from when they used to offer them, and they don't translate well at all to the kindle format.

So now that I have an iPad and a Kindle2, I'm still not sure which I like better. The irony is that now I find myself wanting to go back to the kindle as it has a 'warm comforting feeling' that  the iPad doesn't provide. The same exact nonsense I felt when first using the kindle and felt towards paper books.

Humans; I'm one, and I'm stupid.

Anyone tried the new one?  I'm waiting for Amazon to send my Kindle 3, I have half a garage full of books I'm going to be able to throw out. 

Hyped because I've not tried an ebook reader before, made the mistake of talking to my neighbour about it, ended up having an odd Bill Hicks type conversation, he can't see the point of books, he's nearly 40 and the last book he read was in school.

I kind of disagree with you here as established authors have very little need for marketing, IMO. Do you really think George R R Martin is gonna need anyone to mention he finally wrote another book? (Maybe if he takes another 10 years to do it heh). I'm starting to wonder which will come first, the next book in the Fire and Ice series or my death from old age. New authors I'd go with full agreement though. Publishers, IMO provide their most valuable service with what they've been cost cutting on majorly recently, editing. A lot of authors wouldn't have near the respect they do if they didn't have decent editors cleaning up their prose.

P.S. Sorry for the necro, don't really come to general much. Too much like politics.

Still no epub on kindle, so still not buyin'.  Waiting to see if a nicer nook 2 comes out.

Been playing around with the Kindle phone/desktop app, the Whispernet update thing where it remembers your last page read across all devices is really cool.

After someone linked me an article on some Sony Reader devices at work today, I started reading up on them. So I read. And read some more. And then I went out to the nearest Sony store in Montreal, and bought a "Touch Edition PRS-650"! So I'm an eBook-reader(eReader? eBR?)-owner now! Amazing. Have owned it for about 3 1/2 hours now, though I have yet to actually read anything on it, since I've been busy downloading every eBook available in the public domain and installing Calibre to try keeping track of them.

Yeah, the Sony readers are pretty good -- the biggest issue with my PRS-600 is the relatively low contrast when compared to a kindle (or even Sony's earlier, non-touchscreen offerings). I like how it takes ~1 hour to fully charge it, and that charge is good for several thousand pageturns worth of reading. Beat that, tablets!  :awesome_for_real:

A battery-related protip: when you're putting the device away for a long time (a day or more), it's a good idea to turn it off completely by holding the power switch in the 'off' position until it asks you "do you really want to shut down blah blah". If you just turn it off normally (pushing the power switch into the 'off' position without holding), it'll go into standby mode which drains the battery somewhat. I found this out the hard way, and didn't really see anything about this in the documentation... maybe I didn't RTFM the right sections.

My parents got a Kobo as a gift, it's not a bad little e-ink reader. Handles PDFs and EPUBs ... Calibre works great with it. It can be a little flaky at times but supposedly a firmware update is coming soon. If it freezes it's a got a nice paper-clip-ready hard reset button.  :-)

Let me also reiterate that Calibre rules; easy easy format conversion alone makes it worth it.

I too find ebooks a little overpriced. It's not as if there's the huge overhead of actual paper book production.

I'm interested in getting a reader of some sort ... but I'm content to wait around for awhile for these devices to hit the third-generation sweet spot of more functionality, more stability, and more reasonable price.

Was never much for the bleeding edge ... if you're there, be prepared to bleed.

Like the.....Kindle 3? I believe it retails for 140, has a massive battery life. :)

I'm actually really happy I went with the non-touchscreen Sony pocket version. It's very bare bones, no extras like annotation or dictionaries, but it does exactly what I wanted it for.

That firmware update already came out, unless there's still issues after the first one.

Is it the non-WiFi version? Girlfriend loves to read and want to get her an eReader for Christmas, but I'm not sure if I should get her the Kobo or a Sony.

I believe there's a second update in the works, so my old man said, not really sure though.

It's the non-WiFi version, USB ... I've never used any other readers yet so I can't really compare it to anything else fairly.

Thread necro! New firmware for the Kobo seems to have fixed the flakiness. I'd also like to re-iterate that Calibre rules.

Calibre does rule, and for all the Kindle haters, Calibre will happily transform epub into Mobi for reading on the Kindle.

Just went to order a Kindle for my Dad for Christmas and estimated delivery to Canada was January 19th. Changed the address to our Houston R&D Center and the estimated delivery date is... friday.  :uhrr:

Why isn't the Kindle sold in Canada?

Funny, I just did exactly the same thing.

Well, didn't send it to your Houston R&D Center, but to a friend in the US that my wife is visiting this weekend.

As much as I love my country and all, there is a long list of things that suck in Canada. Amazon sells part of their store up here. No Hulu. No Zune Pass. Netflix has a sucky and useless selection.

The Kindle thing is entirely on Amazon's part. They refuse to stock in IN Canada, so it's always shipping out of one of their US distribution centers, which has the nice added bonus of added customs fees to your purchase. I opted for the Kobo WiFi for the girlfriend's Christmas present because of all that garbage.

Why does the DRM not bother any of you? I google kindle DRM and get pages of horror stories. I like to keep books and  it sounds like the DRM will screw me out of the book when I either hit some undisclosed amazon number of download limits, or buy some non Kindle reader next time and they refuse to switch the books over to the new reader.

Since other ebooks are being mentioned.

Nook just came out with the new 1.5 update.  Synchronized page turns across all devices, ridiculously fast page turns now (not just from their marketing, my nook changes pages soooo fast now, even on PDFs), and a bunch of other goodies.

I think I'm heading this direction too. The Kobo doesn't care about DRM, it just reads things. Combining it with Calibre, which will convert pretty much anything into Kobo-friendly .epubs ....it's a win.

Lots of FUD here...

DRM on the kindle is a solved problem - Google the calibre plugin for kindle for pc.

Also, the kindle will happily read any unlocked book in Mobi format, which Calibre generates from any other popular format.

I don't much care about DRM because I download 99% of my ebooks from the local library or epub versions from the Guttenberg Project.  The library books are DRM protected epub versions that use Adobe reader.  Adobe syncs up with my nook pretty seamlessly so I'm a happy camper.  I like my nook a lot and have had zero problems with it.  My wife is on the fence about getting an ereader and seems drawn to the kindle for some reason, but she doesn't want to come up off the bucks for one.  I told her I'd buy any one of her choice that supported e-pub but so far she's not taken me up on it.

As noted, Calibre happily converts between formats -- it's basically iTunes for e-readers, with support for pretty much every e-reader. Very plug-and-play. At this point, it's really down to features and look-and-feel.

I don't see DRM being all that big an issue at the moment, or likely ever. In any case, Amazon's pushing hard for the move to an e-reader format (and their own Kindle) so they're not going to want to shit their bed too much on the issue. While they're at the mercy of publishers, to an extent, their long-term plan seems to be basically luring writers into self-publishing.

Can Kindles read e-books from library systems yet?

Well, certainly not if they are epub-based, which as far as I know, they all are.

They can't, and as far as I know Calibre can't handle converting from DRM'd epub to Kindle's format.  I've used Calibre once to convert a free book from Baen into epub format but other than that everything I want to read seems to be available as epub.

There are tools out there for removing the DRM from the "adept" mechanism used by Sony, Kobo etc. for DRMing epub.

I'd agree. They offer authors who use their DTP platform for publishing eBooks the choice of DRM'ed or non-DRM'ed books.

Not to mention that 70% of 2.99 is probably a hell of a lot more than their % of trade paperbacks are hardbacks, unless they are seriously big name authors.

Only issue, really, is the marketing one. However, Amazon's at least got a partial solution their -- their 'recommended' and 'others who bought' networks will likely be the backbone of their system to tie self-published, unknown authors into the big-name authors system.

I just ran into the Nook Color review over at Engadget (http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/16/nook-color-review/) - looks pretty nice. Has anyone heard any rumors of a color Kindle? I'm _really_ interested in getting digital color versions of magazines on one of these things .. the Nook doesn't seems to have very many of interest though (only 75 to pick from).

They're blocked by the big increase in price for color e-ink. Nook color bypasses it for a straight-LCD, right? Which means no reading in sunlight, and a shorter battery life.

Amazon apparently doesn't wish to compete with the mini-tablet market (Nook, iPads, and any of the other "more than a phone, less than a laptop" gadgets), and appears to be sticking with "Long battery life, works in sunlight, feels more like a book to read". I think they feel the market is bigger for straight-up e-readers than the LCD stuff.

So, until they get past their technical roadblocks on color e-ink, don't expect much.

Good summary. I'm personally really scratching my head over the LCD book reader concept. Surely if you're willing to go with LCD over eInk, you'd want a full-on tablet like the iPad or Galaxy instead?

That was my thought. *shrug*. I'd have to admit, I wouldn't want to compete head-to-head with iPad, especially if my real money was on books, not gadgets.

As far as Amazon is concerned, they make their money if you buy  a book for Kindle or for iPad. (I doubt they have much of a mark-up on Kindles. I wouldn't be surprised if they're sold practically at cost). Kindle's just an ereader for folks who don't want a tablet. It's designed as a book that can be any other book, without all the fiddly extras.

Pretty much what I thought when I played around with one the other night at the local B&N store.  It seemed not bad, but didn't bring enough to the table to justify buying one.

Google has started selling e-books http://books.google.com/ebooks they using the Adobe ebook format so there's no native Kindle support.

Dad bought Mom a Kindle for Valentine's and I was setting it up this morning.  A few thoughts:

1) That screen is pure fucking witchcraft.  When I turned it off and the screen refreshed over to some birds or something I just started giggling out of a mix of amazement and fear.

2) It's kind of a hassle to browse Spanish-language books on the site and on the device it appears completely impossible.  Easiest way I found was to get to Advanced Search via the Books proper storefront and then do it by Format/Language.  This isn't a huge "OMG we have to return it now."-type issue as my Mom reads a lot in English too and if she's looking for a specific book it'll show up.  They could just add Language to the sidebar on results on the site and add something to the device's store though.

3) The case-with-the-light is pretty slick.

Project Gutenberg has a relatively small Spanish language selection so I'll probably grab a chunk of that for her later today.  Does doing it manually versus Calibre make any difference to how it shows up on device?

What do you mean by "doing it manually"? Specifically, what is the "it"?

Copying over the .mobi(.noimages) files to the documents folder on the Kindle.  I didn't know if it would stick them somewhere obscure if they were sideloaded like that, but it just puts them in the Home screen list like everything else she bought so it's all good.

It won't make a difference, it just moves them to the device. You can do a lot of massaging of the files and their titles and such in calibre though.

Calibre is awesome and dangerous - I'm a daily newspaper reader, and at this point, I prefer reading the daily paper on my kindle than the deadtree version.   Not only does it show up on my kindle at 7am every morning, but it includes all of the various web-only blogs (with the commentary deleted which is a good thing for my blood pressure).  

I got banned from Slashdot for trying to feed it to my Sony PRS-700 using Calibre.

Serves you right for reading Slashdot.

Headlines are fine, just don't read the comments on anything but >3

My wife is out procuring a Kindle 3 for my birthday as I type this. Very excited!

I have the Kindle 2 and bought my wife the Kindle 3 for Xmas.  I'm now majorly jealous of her high contrast screen, slimmer form factor, and better web browser.  Am I wrong to hope she gets bored with so it becomes mine, mine, mine?

I just got the 3.1 software update and the new sections/article handling is really slick.

(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/_R85dKVRG87Y/TXD15G1SrPI/AAAAAAAAFC0/KKhxZZGJx6I/s400/IMG_20110304_084244.jpg)

No longer quite so enamored of my new Kindle. Went to buy another book (finally slogged my way through book 6 of Malazan, and I am taking a break from the series...god it just DRAGS), so I hit Amazon and started going through my Wish list and recommended titles. Nearly every title I have found so far is MORE EXPENSIVE ON THE KINDLE than a fucking paperback. Can someone please explain this to me? I understand that publishers and authors get their piece of the pie. I have resigned myself to the fact that I pay the same price as the paperbacks, even though there is exactly zero cost to the publisher for printing, binding, art, and shipping. But I will be godfuckingdamned if I will pay MORE for an e-version than a paperback. This is exactly the kind of shit that turns honest customers into dirty pirates.

Posting this here rather than the book thread:


While checking the release date for the new Steven Brust "Vlad" novel, it seems Amazon is selling this for $1:

The Desecrator (http://www.amazon.com/Desecrator-Tor-com-Original-ebook/dp/B004OA64IE/ref=tag_dpp_lp_edpp_ttl_in)


Though it appears you can read it for free here:  http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/03/the-desecrator

Take my comments with the filter that I am a self-published author who intentionally prices my eBook versions way below paperback prices (single book $2.99, compilation books vary and my first novel is $.99).

The explanation is that publishers are trying to protect their revenue. Hardback sales are in the toilet for all but the best sellers. The publishers either don't have the expertise to convert their digital files into proper eBook format (and there are at least 5 or 6 different fucking standards for eBook formatting) or they do and they need to charge someone for it. They can't charge the authors (though some do) so they charge the customers. They don't want to cannibalize their hardback and paperback big releases by offering a product that is so much of a value that people wonder "Why am I paying $25 for a hardback when I can have the same content for $5?" Oh and the publishers don't want the authors to have control over the pricing of their eBooks either. Hell, most authors probably don't even have any control over whether their books are put out in eBook format or not.

It's the same argument Wizards of the Coast uses to price their virtual MTG cards the same price as their physical ones. There's very little actual justification for it other than protecting their normal revenue stream.

And the more that shit happens, the more I am happy I self-publish as opposed to trying to suck up to a publisher.

Interesting piece on ebook pricing...

http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2011/03/amanda-hocking-and-99-cent-kindle.html

Good article. And it's spot on. I probably make more on a $2.99 eBook than an author with a traditional publisher does on a $9.99 eBook. The difference is that the author with the publisher has people to do his/her editing, marketing (though publishers are foisting that off on most authors these days too) while I have to do all that shit myself. Oh and I don't really get the benefit of big retailers like Amazon spotlighting my book in email campaigns or on the front page of any of their promo efforts.

An established author who doesn't try to get control of his own eBook publishing is either making enough money doing in the old way (and thus has no reason to change and probably no ability to affect his eBook prices) or is too afraid of the self-publishing stigma or is technophobic about the internetz. Or is a complete idiot.  :why_so_serious:

I've read some established authors bitching about it -- from having no say in pricing to having no say if there even IS an ebook version. (Charles Stross, to name a recent example, mentioning that every book but one of his Merchant Princes series was available on Kindle, and he had no idea when the one book -- like book 4 -- would be).

I've seen a lot of big batch releases of older novels for ebook in the last year, though, so it appears publishers are biting the bullet on converting even if they're being dickholes on prices. (Modesitt's entire collection seems to have transitioned, including some older difficult to find books).

Baen books has a very nice, very cheap ebook selection -- only Sci-Fi, sadly -- but they tend to charge 5 bucks a pop, have tons of books available free (I picked up 1632 and 1633 by Eric Flint for free, just to see if they were any good), and even their new releases aren't priced badly -- much less than the paperbacks.

Heck, they have an ARC version of upcoming new releases -- 15 bucks, and you get the author release copy well before the book is actually published, if you just can't wait for whomever's newest novel.

I get that part- it is the part where the e-book is more expensive than the paperback (and in some cases of older books, the hardback) that I don't get. Why doesn't that price point drop as the others do? I  can see paying $10 for a book when the paperback is the same price, or $12-15 when the hardback is $20. I refuse to pay those prices when I can get a physical copy of the book cheaper. I emailed Amazon and told them that I would be walking in to B&N to buy those books instead of buying the more expensive e-version from Amazon. I am sure they really tremble at losing my $200 a year in sales.

I ended up picking up The Know Circuit  :grin:

Pricing has put a damper on my Kindle purchasing -- and just when I got used to shelling out $9.99 for new non-fiction releases, prices now are now approaching $15. Wrong direction. Prices should be no more than a large coffee at Starbucks -- and at that price, they would sell a whole lot more ebooks -- I believe every experiment and study has borne this out.

But a much bigger annoyance to me, is the formatting and typo glitches -- it enrages me to pay money and then get a book that is missing the Table of Contents hyperlinks and footnote links, or worse, littered with extraneous hyphens (i.e., book converted from print manuscript, has a bunch of hy-phens inter-spersed through-out be-cause words at end of line in doc-ument now show like that in the middle of the sent-ence, or even more annoying, wordsare smashedtogether as spaces are squashedbetween words on end of line and start of nextline).

I fear this will only get worse now that Amazon has gone public about how eBooks are selling faster than regular books.

Not to mention, you emailed the wrong people. Publishers set the price, not Amazon.

But yeah, 12 to 15 for a new book AND it's filled with conversion errors? If you're going to claim you need to charge that much because of 'overhead' like editing and publishing, you should show some indication it was edited and published properly.

I realize Amazon doesn't set the prices. They also don't have to sell the e-books of the publishers who are trying to rape Amazon's customers (since the Kindle is their baby, and I assume they want to sell more of them). All Amazon needs to do is tell publishers that e-book prices have to be at or lower than the lowest price point of a physical book or they don't get sold through Amazon. Pretty simple. I can't imagine there are too many publishers that would want to cross Amazon at this point.

Hmm. I think they tried that. Which was why Jim Butcher's books -- all of Penguin Press, IIRC, weren't available on Amazon for months.

Sadly, the leverage is on the publisher's side -- after all, ebooks aren't as profitable as hardback books, especially not the mass discount ones they sell to Amazon. Amazon blacklisting their press would result in higher per-unit revenues, and frankly the bigger presses can always count on the fans of their big-name authors (the ones that really make their profit) to trudge down to a brick and mortar store.

Yeah, Amazon tried that shit, got a few concessions from the big 5 pubs and quickly backed down. It's a mutually symbiotic relationship. Amazon needs those big name authors to be on the Kindle. So far, the publishers don't think they need those big name authors on the Kindle. The balance will change rapidly.

It's unclear to me that "ebooks aren't as profitable as hardcover books."

I think that if we aren't there already, we're very near the point where that statement is untrue, especially if publishers were interested in obtaining the best profits for books instead of propping up traditional paper books as their primary distribution model.

The publishers are basically betting on printing and distribution remaining the dominant medium and I think they're making the wrong bet.  I doubt print books are going to vanish completely, but I suspect within the next decade things are going to invert and ebooks will become dominant with print as an important niche.

(If ebooks are the CD or MP3, I think print is more like vinyl than the 8-track).

I've always kind of wondered how much it costs Amazon to do the free Whispernet thing, but I guess since they aren't actually even setting the prices themselves that doesn't have a big impact on book pricing.

I'd bet it's on the order of pennies ($0.05-0.10) per download (similar to what they charge you for sending your own documents), when you consider that they probably pay some bulk rate for all their data usage and the costs they incur for "free" data usage (like browsing their store from the kindle) are defrayed by costs they factor into the part of the cut they take per-book.

EDIT: grammar

The current printing model is seriously outdated and straining. In terms of efficiencies, bookstores themselves are outdated. With the rapid development of print-on-demand technologies, there is no need for centralized book printing and shipping/distribution. Book stores should be print-on-demand hubs that only carry a handful of physical products on hand. The rest should be in a database, to be printed out when someone comes into the store and wants a print version of a book. That 50% that the brick and mortar retailer gets? It's actually a lot less than that.

My paperbacks are available through expanded distribution, which means any bookstore that uses Ingram Book Distributing can order a copy. Now, before that book ever gets to the retailer, the distributor has gotten a 50% discount. If my book is $10, they pay $5. The bookstore probably pays something like $8, so their margins are pretty thin. Now my printer gets another 20% of the list price, so between them and the distributor, I make less than $2 off a $10 paperback. If it's sold through Amazon (who gets 40% of the list), I make about $3.20 off a print-on-demand book that costs $10. To get that royalty rate, I paid a one-time fee of $40.

My eBook is available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and a shitload of other places through Smashwords. Depending on how I price the book, I make between 35% (if the eBook is less than $2.99 list price) and 70% of the list price, minus the vendor's cut which is variable based on the size of the download file but usually no more than $.10 cents. It costs me nothing but the time and effort required to prepare the file properly and upload it. The majority of my sales are eBook these days, and I attribute that mainly to prices. $.99 cents for one book, $2.99 for the other (and a compilation of the two for $3.50), something like 25 times more eBook sales than paperbacks. That's with the same amount of marketing done to both, and less eBook readers out there than paperback readers. On a per unit basis, yes, the paperbacks are more profitable, but I will never sell as many without big time marketing support because I can't price them low enough to move. I'd be crazy not to concentrate on eBook sales.

A guy like Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling or William Gibson could go eBook only and KILL. Why they don't I can't understand.

Gibson's latest was the first one I looked at when I started shopping. His publisher is part of the problem. I wonder if he knows/cares?

They probably lose out on the marketing machine pushing their books, for one thing. I'm guessing the major book reviewers don't give a high priority to ebook-only publications.

There is one legitimate reason for authors to dislike eBooks that I've seen: Generally an author can "claw back" his rights to something if it's out of print, if the publisher has let it drop out of the catalog and has no copies to distribute.  They can take the rights to it back and find another publisher.  Some authors have tried to use this provision and been denied because there's an eBook version available on some obscure format.

--Dave

Contractual obligations would be one reason -- big names might be obligated for several more books. There's also losing out on the editing end, and Robert Jordan and Terry Goodkind are excellent reasons to "want to hire a real editor".

Pish, TOR doesn't have editors.

(Both of them are published by "our paperbacks are more durable than our hardcovers, you can actually read them TWICE before they start to fall apart" land)

(http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5053/5543339001_077853c2ce_z.jpg)



 :awesome_for_real:

Obviously if you're serious about it you're probably going to end up paying somebody for editing, cover design, etc.  But that's a solved problem -- it sounds like publishers already often outsource that work anyway.   At least if you're paying somebody to design you a cover you probably have better odds of getting art/design you like rather than some random crap picked by your publisher.

Try absolutely fuckall priority to eBook only publishing... unless it's from a big name. My point with listing those particular guys is that at this point, they really don't need the big marketing machines. They have built-in fanbases that will do a lot of the marketing for them.

EDIT: As for proofreading, editing, cover art, hell even PR, there are tons of good freelances and/or services out there that provide these things without needing to go through a publisher.

Love the E-Pub Bingo graphic.  :why_so_serious:

Another interesting costs breakdown from a self publisher.

http://bidinotto.blogspot.com/2011/06/face-of-self-publishing-revolution-mine.html

Makes it tempting to really begin work on my philosophical treatise.  Trouble is that I (and many people) could really use an editor, so how much does that cost?

I only charge $125/hr.

Heh, I spent a lot less than that on all 3 books I've done combined, mainly because I did all the photography, layout and cover design myself - which not everyone can do. As for an editor, on the book I just published, I found an editor who did the first draft edit for free because she was trying to get a job as a professional editor. I could give you her name if you want to see if she'll still do the same.

Well, not only is my philosophical master-work so far unwritten, I seem to change my mind about things over time. :oh_i_see:

Then call it a religious tome and say that anything written later superscedes what came prior.  You were confused about your prior visions and BOB clarified them for you.

I'm mostly calling it a philosophical work instead of a religious one because I haven't yet invented any insane stories to put into it.  But that's a good idea.

Just got a note from our library director that they are supporting kindle. At least with our implementation, it seems like pretty much everything is available in either epub or kindle and apparently the libraries don't need to purchase additional copies, it's just a new format for their existing contracts.

Yeah, read that in the paper today. After I grind through the backlog I already have loaded, I am off to the virtual library! Very glad this is finally getting done.

Count me as one that loves Kindle.  I estimate I buy and read books 5x more than I did before, and I bought a lot before.  With 4G, I also never find myself without a book anymore.

I used to joke about the ability to enlarge the text for easier reading, but I now read with it bumped up one notch.  *sigh* I'm old.  The funny thing is that most people that see me carrying it or reading it ask if they can do just that.  I'm old, but not alone!

I haven't read all posts here but to add to some of the marketing discussion:  I do not buy "real" books anymore.  If a novel isn't released for Kindle/Amazon.  I will not read it.  The only time I step foot into a brick and mortar book store anymore is to get a coffe and look around (I still like to do that.)  Ultimately, I'm just shopping around for the next ebook I want to download.  Ok, I'll pick up something sometimes for the kids (picture-centric, etc.)  I'm not big into graphic novels or photography, but if I were I could see those being a brick and mortar purchase.

I still get cook books in paper. And picture books for our daughter. That's about it. In terms of a standard novel. No.

Oddly I find it makes me value the kind of books we buy in paper more. We started to sub to Lucky Peach, the food zine, and they have very high quality graphic presentation and the fact that most of the books we get are electronic makes the effort they go into to create an object, not just text, all the more interesting.

Have tried this out and it works OK, if a bit convoluted, but still superior to ePub and PDF library checkout protocol that required either loading obtrusive software onto your computer or other bit gymnastics. My library has a big "checkout Kindle books from metro library partner" button on its home page. You click through and you can browse titles, though I find it ludicrous that they treat digital copies as if they were scarce paper items (i.e., most books have "0" available out of 1/2 "copies" library "licensed"). Validation is a passthru with your library card number and your PIN that then lets you add things to your "bookbag" and checkout. Then you get redirected to Amazon that triggers the book DL just as if you were purchasing. It looks like you can only select one device (I have like 5 Kindle reader "devices" setup -- phone, iPad, Kindle, Desktop & laptop).

Kindle is excellent for reading plain text but books with diagrams, charts, photos, code, etc.…, ePub is a far superior format. However, Kindle wins with the click and easy sync that is so hokey with other eReaders (i.e, using iTunes or launching an app to manually sync, etc.…). Reading a O'Reilly/Addison-Wesley programming/developer title on a Kindle is painful, compared to the ePub experience on iPad (or computer).

Just got a kindle 3 from someone who went the nook route, what's important to me is that books I already have in epub sync between it and my ipad/iphone. Turns out it's pretty easy to do, just use Calibre to convert the books, and then sync them to your Kindle. You also will have to put the books directly into the Kindle App/Library/eBooks folder on your iphone/ipad, so you'll need to get a program that browses your iphone's folder structure.

Tip: If you publish an ebook trilogy (*cough*Haemish*cough*) please add a ToC/Bookmark for the beginning of each book at least!

Yeah, I did that. Like a hundred times. Smashwords converter NEVER got it right, despite allowing it through the conversion process.

This seems to be popular, it's made a very noticeable change in our system in how many books are available immediately and how long the waiting list is for ones that aren't.

So if I get a kindle and my wife gets an android tablet can we share the same library?

If you use the same account with the kindle app as you do on the kindle device, you will access the same books.  I primarily read on a 3rd generation kindle, but sometimes when I'm stuck waiting somewhere I'll fire up the kindle app on my phone and start reading something.  This gives me more incentive to leave wifi on on the kindle so that books I'm readying will be synced to the latest page.

You can have multiple Kindles and multiple Kindle Reader apps registered to the same Amazon account (i.e. Kindle library). The limit actually varies by title but 6 devices/app readers is the norm. Subscription-based content is bound to a single Kindle device/reader.

You can also turn off sync if you and your wife are reading the same book.

Leaving the wireless turned on will kill your battery life something fierce. It goes from weeks to hours.

Feels like the difference between 3-4 weeks and 1-2 weeks for me.  Which is enough for me to tend to leave it off.  Except that I do like the last-page-sync feature.  Life is hard!

Yup, this seems to be the difference to me too. I can get almost a month with wifi off and a couple weeks with wifi on.

I went with the new little nook for the epub support and'm not regretting it.  Especially since my local libraries are putting out their stuff in epub.  It's a dandy device and nice for reading at home, though on the road I'm still perfectly content to throw the books on my ipod or phone and read them that way.

Same. I dare not toggle off because I do read from separate devices (iPad, iPhone, Kindle primarily, but sometimes I look up annotations and notes on desktop or laptop too).

Also, on the iPhone, have discovered that setting the background to dark has resulted in greater battery life. Have not run scientific benchmark tests on this but I sure note and sense a fuller battery gauge, even after reading for a while that previously would dent it a fair fashion.

On an LCD display, the power difference between black-on-white and white-on-black is going to be in the noise.

On an OLED display, the difference can be enormous (25-50% of your overall screen on but idle power).

New Kindles and Kindle-tablets launched today...I have been thinking about a tablet for my son, and I am sorely tempted.

I have to pay more to get a Kindle without ads? Lame.

They've had a discounted version with adverts since the last generation.

pre-ordered

Kindle Fire TV Commercial (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUtmOApIslE)

Not paying £400 for an ipad but sorely tempted by this.

Lame part is just that they list the ad-version price in their publicity and such.  It's all relative, but when they introduced them they were less expensive (by the same amount I think) than the base models.

It's interesting that while it's kindle branded, they are clearly marketing it as a tablet and not as a color ereader. I think doing the latter was a real mistake that B&N made with the Nook color.

People prefer the ad-version of the current-gen model.

http://venturebeat.com/2011/07/26/ad-supported-kindle/

It makes sense that they are promoting the pricing of the ad-version of the upcoming models.

Can still pick up an HP touchpad new in box from craigslist or ebay for a comparable price to the kindle fire and get more bang for your buck.  New entry level kindle looks like a great deal to me though.

I"m interested in seeing a Nook Color vs Kindle Fire comparison.  It does seem like the media completely overlooks the Nook Color in all the tablet discussions, and I don't know if it's because B&N's marketing sucks or what.

The truth points to itself.

I want an Kindle Fire.

Now plx.

B&N has positioned the Nook as an ereader, not a tablet. They've slowly changed that a little bit, but even now look at the Fire vs. Nook sites. The Fire is all about video, the web, apps, oh and it reads books. The Nook Color is about reading. And there's some apps and the web. AFAIK the only way to get video is to rip something and transfer it where the Fire streams all the amazon video content.

No Kindle Fire for Europeans yet? I guess the Content Mafia strikes again.

Sadly the fire, like amazon prime itself, is available in the US only.

Amazon Prime is also available in the UK, Japan, Germany and France.

Hell, I didn't even know the damn Nook was anything BUT an e-Reader until I started seeing comparisons between it and the Fire. B&N has done a rotten fucking job of positioning the hardware. Their marketing department should be fired. It's even apparent in their web site. Unlike Amazon, they really have no way for self-pubbed authors like me to promote my eBook on the site - unlike Amazon, who has shittons of communities (some even allow author whoring), all sorts of "If you like this" promos, tags, etc. etc. Their guys really really just don't get marketing in this century.

Was interested in Kindle-Fire until I read it was Wi-Fi only.  Need 3G or no purchase from me. 

Get an iPad.

The "gimmick" on the Kindle is the ones that have 3G access have no fee associated with it. It's entirely part of the purchase price. You buy it and it simply functions. They can do that because the browser is b/w, the e-ink is slow to respond, and it's generally a lousy browsing experience. It's something you use if you're desperate. So the actual use of the network is minimal. If you make a device who's highlight is streaming amazon prime, obviously there's going to be some bandwidth usage. And they don't want to muddy the waters with some having a monthly subscription and others not.

I bet they'll do a 3G version for the second generation if things go well.

They're clearly starting with mass market which is super price conscious and not likely to want to pay for a second cell phone bill.

They've trimmed the BOM as much as possible (no expensive 3G radio, camera, extra sensors, excessive memory, or other bells and whistles) to hit their $200 price point (I suspect they're not losing money here, but definitely not making any real profit on the hardware, which is fine given their business model), but made some good tradeoffs -- OMAP4430@1GHz is a nice CPU and should be able to drive a 1024x600 display well -- this thing shouldn't have the horrible performance that a lot of the ultra-cheapo tablets have.

I've been looking at upgrading my venerable Sony PRS-600, and one of its advantages is that a single one-hour charge is enough for a ~month of casual reading - mostly during a daily 1.5hour commute. How does the kindle3 measure up?

(The newer devices aren't really what I'm looking for - I have a smartphone and laptop that can do all that. E-readers are for reading books, demmit! /get_off_my_lawn  :why_so_serious:)

With wifi off, I seem to get 3-4 weeks of often pretty heavy reading out of my kindle (third generation -- what they now call "kindle keyboard") between charges.  When the low battery warning shows up, I can keep reading for another hour or two, then throw it on the charger (usually just do this overnight but I think it charges to full within 2 hours).

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/09/28/analyst-amazon-is-likely-losing-50-per-kindle-fire/

If I had the dough, I'd pick up the Fire. Hate getting a first-gen product, but it looks pretty good from where I'm sitting. We'll see if any more grant money comes along for e-reader training materials :)

Even if this is true or even the loss figure higher, it still going to be a net winner in profit for Amazon. Seriously, Amazon just trumped the market with this price (< $200) and they're going to have trouble keeping any in stock as I predict units will fly off the "virtual" shelf. But, Amazon, unlike Apple, isn't making off the hardware (for Apple, iTunes started as a loss leader, a way to pump sales of iPods) -- they've got the largest, by a wide margin, catalog of books and their music and video repository will still be on par with any competitor. Basically, they'll subsidize the hardware especially when it takes the guise of an Amazon Content Delivery Device.

Tap! $9.99. Tap! $13.99. Tap! $9.99. Etc. And so on…

No USB cord required (in your face Steve Jobs!).

And as the device becomes as ubiquitous as Kindle (even besting iPads), developers will flock to Amazon App Store, with Amazon gleefully skimming their 30% take off the top.

Personally, the Kindle Touch is more appealing to me, especially this feature:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbzOLua2baw

But at that price point, I imagine Amazon is going to struggle to keep up with demand.

Oh, there is a Kindle touch as well I can't get in Europe? I get that with the content-heavy Fire, but why can't they sell this here?

I guess the Fire doesn't have access to the standard Android Marketplace?

Unclear if it will or not yet.  There is some indication that they'll at least support side-loading of apps, but I haven't seen a definitive statement about that either.

My assumption remains that the ecosystem is more valuable to them if they remain compatible with it and don't aggressively go all walled-garden, but we shall have to see, I suppose.

How much you want to wager against a walled-garden setup?

How many times did Amazon/Bezos mention "Android" or "Google" during the big PR announcement?

So much for an "open" (Android is not open, not in a GPL sense, not in an open source model (sorry, releasing source code AFTER is not "open"), and certainly not open as exists in the fragmented nature of android hardware implementations where it is a stew of various versions and bastardized "OS covering" flavors))… …yeah, you can root the devices, just like can be done to the Apple products, but 99% of the customer base are not going to go there.

It shows a marketplace in one of their images:
(http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/kindle/otter/dp/KO-comp-right-02._V166724417_.jpg)

Anyone hear if any local retailers will have this? I imagine not, but I'd like to see one in my hands before buying ...

If it supports side-loading out of the box it's already got a leg up on my Android phone (AT&T :uhrr:).

Well, according to this (http://mashable.com/2011/09/29/amazon-kindle-fire-android-hijack/) from Mashable, it's Amazon's version of the Android Marketplace, not the actual Android Marketplace.  Supposedly that means Amazon will be vetting all apps allowed to make sure they run on the Fire, versus being made to work with Android.

It also mentions that the Fire is using 2.3 which isn't "approved" for tablets, but what difference would that make in the long run?

Yes, that SS is Amazon Appstore for "Android".

Amazon/Bezos were asked (will scour for a link, too busy right now) about other book formats like ePub (limitations of AZW/MOBI/PRC will become much more apparent to color Kindle Fire readers) and the response was "we're open to a conversation about it".

It might sound like Sony v. Betamax all over, but the ePub file format is far superior for image (and heavy use of tables, charts, diagrams, even programming code) laden books -- publishers like O'Reilly don't even offer Kindle versions of many books and those titles I have purchased on Kindle, I have been displeased with. Reading an epub version (on iBooks or other eReaders) is a much better experience.

Also, while Apple iPad steam will take a hit, and Google might be chaffed at Amazon trumping (though it seems to me they really don't care as long as you continue to ping Google with your "Silk" browser and they can keep showing you some ads), the big winner might be multi-mobile-platform app bundling toolkits like Corona (http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/) or PhoneGap. Write your app, programming in Lua and these "wrapper" APIs, and auto-port to each (iOS, Mac, Android, Amazon) appstore.

Most of the stuff the library is offering is epub, with a few pdfs. They'll have to support epub at some point, or suffer for it.

This above is one reason that I've hesitated to look into e-books more deeply - the format.  I've got a Kindle app on my phone but how popular is that compared to any other format that can be used on different devices?  It sounds as if epub is more common and Amazon will just have to give in, but right now, if you get a Fire you're stuck with the Amazon format until they decide to change it.  It's not as if I couldn't get another app to read e-books for my phone if I needed to, or if I had a more "generic" Android tablet I could have both/multiple e-book formats.  But the Fire wouldn't give that option unless someone rooted it (which might not take long the way those modders seem to work).

And yet, the Nook Color still seems more appealing to me for some reason.  It might be the design.  The pics of the Fire make it look really blockish to me.

You can get e-Reader apps for your Android phone that read ePub's. Aldiko is the one I use.

I'm actually pretty confident that while Amazon will focus on their curated app store as the primary experience, they're not likely to completely close up the platform to iOS / PSP / DS levels of walled-garden-ness.  I may be wrong, who knows, but I'd wager a decent chunk of change that you will be able to install apps from other sources than their store.

No, Android is open in the Apache2 sense, the code is there for you to use and build products with, no strings attached -- thus products like Kindle Fire, Nook, and other things that we never thought of and had no involvement in.  A huge success as far as open platforms, really.

The Nexus One, Nexus S, and Xoom all support unlockable bootloaders, intentionally allowing users to flash custom modified OS builds -- this has been true of all the lead devices since Nexus One where we started the trend.  A number of OEMs are starting to do similar things on their own variant builds as well.  Not a perfect world, but nice to have a way to flash your custom build without having to take advantage of a security exploit ("jailbreaking", "rooting", etc) to do it.

Of course for the vast majority of Android devices (AT&T has been a straggler here, but they've recently changed their tune on this, in part due to Amazon's market!) you can install software from non-Market sources, which is also a more open environment than having a single entity (be that the OS vendor, the OEM, or the carrier) having exclusive control over what apps you can install on your hardware without jumping through hoops that as you point out, most consumers won't be bothered to do.

Back to Kindle.... 

I am weak and ordered the new non-touch Kindle.  I like it a lot.  It's another incremental respin of the basic form-factor with improvements over the third gen (now called "Kindle Keyboard") similar to third gen's improvements over second:
- display is the same size, but refreshes a bit more quickly
- no more keyboard. new keyboard button brings up a soft keyboard driven by the dpad. serviceable if you only use this to occasionally go-to-location or whatnot.
- the lefthand and righthand next/previous page buttons are similar to the third gen. easy to hit but not too easy
- overall device is slightly lighter and a little smaller. it's now very compact.

So it isn't the most pressing thing since I'm a filthy Euro that isn't good enough for the Fire but what is the reading experience like with a full colour tablet type screen? One of the appealing things about kindles for me is that I haven't got a bright screen to stare into for hours at a time if I'm reading (which is one of the biggest issues with using the kindle app on my phone, even more so than screen size). The other question I've got is what are the alternatives to Kindle like? I means supply side rather than handset, one of the attractions of Amazon is how easy it is to get the books and I've loaded up with most of the decent classics they offer for free but for the majority of books that I want to read they don't seem to have a kindle version. Are there other equally easy to use sites with better selections? Is it a pain in the ass loading up books from them? Can I grab a decent handset that can do kindle format stuff as well just in case Amazon win the format wars and everyone else just starts going through them?

I may be overthinking it way too much and it might be easier to just get one of the newer gen kindles in the next couple of months. I really want to get one for my dad as his reading habits consist of powering through trashy crime and thriller novels in a day or two, which means he's got a constantly growing pile of paperbacks that he has to throw out or give away every few months to stop from having shelves and desks just covered in books he isn't going to read again. Unfortunately he doesn't like the idea of an e-reader and so will likely never actually try one or spend 30 seconds looking at one, not instantly understand how to do everything and stick it in a drawer somewhere.

I find the e-ink devices massively easier on the eyes than LCD or OLED devices.  I like that I can have the Kindle app installed on my phone so if I'm suddenly stuck waiting (doctor's office or something) I can grab a book and read, but otherwise it's all about the e-ink devices for me.  For magazine content (more colorful) or reference materials (lots of jumping around, so refresh time is important), tablets (like Fire) seem likely to win out over e-readers.  Also for video or game content.

Selection-wise I have not explored other offerings extensively since I've been pretty happy with Amazon.  It is frustrating to run into content that's just not available, but I haven't seen any indication of another service with a larger content library as far as books go. 

Kindle rolled out to Overdrive a few weeks ago and virtually every epub title at our local library and at the Boston public library immediately had a kindle version.

Yeah, simple fact is if most users are on Kindle then I think it's far more likely Library/library service providers are going to cut a deal to get Kindle versions of books to stary relevant themselves rather than Amazon desperately wanting to push a much more open format on their existing customers. The VHS/Betamax comparison is a valid one but in this case the proprietary version is the one that's managed market penetration. The number limitation on library copies I totally get though, it's obviously an entirely artificial limitation given the format but it's also the only way to prevent library Kindle version from being simple a way of reading books for free whenever you want. Having to deal with queues for half way popular books will mean people will still have a reason for buying them other than maybe wanting to read them some time later when they don't have internet access.

Also will you still get fined for not 'returning' your copy past a certain date?

With my library the book just goes "poof" on its due date.

I don't think I've ever really needed the keyboard on my Kindle DX in a couple years of heavy reading use. I think I typed a few web addresses when I was testing out the browser, but that was it. I'm obviously not one of amazon's better Kindle customers though, I've never bought a non-free kindle book from them.

Right there with you, I just wish there was a color kindle based on e-ink.  I am fine with pretty much all of the other limitations other than lack of color.

They've been trying. Apparently there's some serious roadblocks -- they can do it, but not for a price you want to pay.

Given battery life and all, I suspect it's certainly their end-goal for the e-ink displays. Not everyone wants a tablet for reading.

They need a book form factor- 1 side is E-ink, the other is a color screen. Of course, that would be prohibitively expensive, but damn it would be cool, especially for ADD types  :grin:

I saw a demo of a color e-ink display a year or two ago, but it was basically the same e-ink core technology with a sort of filter grille over the display to make a checkerboard of rgb "pixels".  Reminded me a bit of the pentile arrangement some OLED panels use.  It was not amazing, and the effective resolution drop from the checkerboard effect was pretty annoying.  I imagine they're working on something better...

Yep, no fines for ebooks thanks to DRM *winks at tgr*

According to our librarian, at the moment, whatever costs are not being passed onto the libraries. They buy a license (or rent it or whatever) for a particular title and patrons have access to it in epub, kindle, and/or pdf. But right now, they contract with a provider for a license for Book X, not what format it's in.

Yeah, depends on the provider making the edition available. There are plenty that work with Kindle, but if you have something that can do epub, you can get pretty much everything they offer.

I have one of the first generation nooks, but I only use it when I want to read outside, otherwise I use my tablet running nook software and the Overdrive Media Console software that the library uses. between my local library and the big city library nearby that lets anybody in the state get a library card I have access to more books than I can easily read.  The waiting lists for ebooks are considerably shorter than the ones for the hard copies.  For instance I was number 120+ for Ghost Story when I requested it, when I requested the ebook I was only 10 or so in line.  One of the other advantages with ebooks is that when I get a notice that I have a book available I can download it from wherever I happen to be.  This has been fairly handy this year since I've spent a lot of time on the road. 

The good thing for me and bad thing for publishers is that since I got the nook and started checking out ebooks I have cut my book buying back to almost 0.  I think the last year before 2010 that I bought less than 100 books was 1991 and that was due to spending close to 6 months in the Arabian desert with no access to a book  store.

We're also using Overdrive.

I don't think I've seen any other company used.  Are there other ones or does Overdrive have a nice little monopoly on serving up ebooks to libraries?

The annoying thing about the keyboard Kindle is that an image such as a comic book isn't zoomable, and since the picture doesn't actually take up the entire screen it is a bit tough to read.  I'm very interested to see if the Fire has better support for this, not really for color but maybe the lettering will be easier to see.

I do not have any XP with Kindle App for Android (which I presume Amazon is going to ship with the Fire), but Kindle on iOS (iPad), you can magnify images -- it's hokey and nowhere near as neat and pliable as ePub format, but usable. Unlike the Kindle eInk, where comic images (and many charts and tables in general) are simply unreadable, even after tapping the "magnify" button.

Dunno, our library system handles that contract. I have almost nothing at all to do with it, and that's fine by me, I like books. I don't have to find a steam-powered differential machine for the beautiful 19th century Shakespeare collection I found.

Sure enough, which is why I don't think print books will entirely die out.  Although I imagine that in a decade or so publishers will be very selective about what is printed and bound, hopefully as the numbers go down printed books will again become durable things of beauty instead of cheaply produced widgets meant to be disposed of after 1 or 2 reads.

ebooks are a replacement for mass market paperbacks. They're not a replacement for books.

No, not if you peruse the Kindle bestseller lists -- it not just "mass market paperbacks", but hardcover non-fiction, and I'd say about 80-90% of the new releases that you would see on the "new releases" table of a chain bookstore sell just as strong on Kindle. Even technical and programming books sell fairly well, which befuddles the snot out of me. The only exception is image heavy books / graphic novels, etc.… But some of these still sell as ebooks…

And the ePub format can handle image stuff -- it's the old school Kindle format that's crippled here.

eBooks will eventually replace most books sold. Hardbacks really should be a thing of the past, both for being too expensive and too wasteful. However, I do foresee that B&M bookstores (whichever ones survive) will have to become print-on-demand shops with the only "stock" they have being the most promoted hardcover new releases. Mass market paperbacks should be POD's produced in-house with like a 10-minute waiting period, with recycling bins available in the store that give you credit on your next purchase for turning them in and being shredded and sent back to create new books.

Good luck with that  :grin:

I'm taking the long view.  :grin:

It's happening, slowly at first, but as eReaders become cheaper and more ubiquitous, especially as aging boomers and next gen-X flock to the convenience and features.

(http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/4e83885b69bedde86500002d/kindle-sales.jpg)

I believe Bezos stated Amazon sells 105 Kindle books for every 100 print books (where there is a Kindle version). That figure will only grow more in proportion.

Problem is, though, that eBook generation is still an afterthought -- print book is published, and then eBook is produced from that, often leading to a sloppy product -- mis-hyphenations, smashed words, broken links, missing indices/table of contents. I hope this process is transformed, and that the ePub (or whatever format) is used to feed the print process instead of vice-versa.

The conversion to eBook stuff is still kind of a weird black box. Many of the publishers aren't doing the conversion in-house, they are farming it out, so they charge the same prices for eBooks as they do hardcovers/paperbacks (or at least that's their justification - the real one being they don't want to cannibalize their main business model). For an indie like me, even if I wanted to dig into the guts of the HTML myself, I still have to provide a Microsoft Word file for Smashwords conversion process (which generates everything from text files to ePubs to .mobi files) - but at least it doesn't cost me anything. Kindle Direct Publishing is the same way AND requires I save a .DOC instead of .DOCX (the latest Word file format) or .RTF. Conversion to eBook is iffy at best. As we move into color eBook readers and more tablet based eReaders, I'm hoping that we can import straight from Indesign files (for layout dependent stuff) and TXT/HTML files for plain old text eBooks.

The greatest part about that crazy chart is that the Kindle, according to reports, only has about a 3-4 million user install base, but in 3 years has eclipsed physical book sales. Give it five years time when kids in school aren't being given textbooks anymore, they are given a tablet reader with their books already installed, and those sales could treble.

I was thinking more in terms of "if it won't translate well to a mass market, it probably won't translate that well to an ebook."

There will always be people who want a hardcover, but for the most part mainstream hardcovers are sold largely because readers are given a choice of either buying it now in a more expensive hardcover or waiting an indefinite amount of time for a trade paperback and finally a mass market paperback. You don't get a lot of hardcovers sold of books that have already come out in mass market unless they've achieved some kind of "classic" status.

Regardless of whether or not a format can handle graphics better than kindle, I'm dubious about graphically intensive ebooks if for no other reason than I suspect most people will opt for smaller more portable readers rather than dragging around a large tablet.

With a $79 dollar version (and predictions are, that they might actually be "free" soon), Amazon is indeed embarking upon a "Kindle the People"™ campaign that makes ereaders ubiquitous, and a flourishing market across all demographics, not just nerds and aging boomers who inaugurate a reading renaissance with easy "increase font size" tap.

Some of the tools do this rather well -- on the Mac, Scrivner (http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php) (a great authoring word processor that features a "corkboard" (think old school index card organization)) makes it drop dead simple to export your book to ePub, Kindle, etc.…

Anyone have any thoughts on the new Kobo Vox? Based on its specs it looks to me like something I'd prefer over the new Kindle tablet (which I can't have anyway being in Canada).  It handles the EPUB book format and can take up a 32 gig SD card for storage expansion. Aside from that it looks to be basically the same as the Kindle Fire even down to the 200 dollar price tag.  It's coming out at the end of October.

I'm tempted to pick one up on opening day so if someone knows something terrible about it let me know!

I think I've been reading too many e-books.  Last night while I was reading a hard copy book, I tried to turn the page by tapping it.

I can't speak on that particular model of Kobo, but my Kobo wifi has been a solid ePub reader. It does PDF (cumbersome) and CBR (no color, so meh).

The Vox, with color, more memory, more feartures will probably be a natural upgrade for me.
Between my Kobo and Calibre I'm generally a pretty *happy camper*.

I'm looking to buy my parents an eBook reader for Christmas this year and would like some advice on which one would be best for them.  I was thinking of just giving them the Asus Transformer I got awhile ago but I want to keep things as simple as possible since both of them aren't good with technology (my mother can barely use a mouse) and just have it used for reading books.  I didn't realize both the Kindle and Nook had to be purchased from their sites so neither one would get here in time before I leave to go home.  I'd like to set everything up for them before I give it to them, too.  So that leaves basically whats available at Best Buy/Future Shop.  It looks like its either going to be a Kobo or Sony product.  Both of my parents wear glasses so the screen would have to be clear and easy to read with large print.  Ease of use is another big factor because once I go home I don't want to keep getting phone calls from them when they can't figure out how it works like I do with the laptop and computer I bought them the last few years.  Finally, there would have to be a large enough number of eBooks available, esp. fiction because thats what they primarily read.  Advice, suggestions?  Thanks.

If you have a Barnes and Nobles nearby, they sell Nooks in stores.  I think Best Buy even sells Nooks.

Kindle is sold in some stores.

I'd go for the Kobo.  It's readily available in Canada at Bestbuy and Indigo/Chapters.  The Kobo Touch is probably the model to get. It's just black and white and is a pure e-reader (though it does have a built in browser so you can use it for email).  The advantage it has over the more tablet like Kobo Vox is that its batteries last about a month and it's significantly lighter which makes a real difference when you're using it like a book.

I wanted to get a Kobo Vox for myself but once I researched it I decided its CPU was underpowered for the job. I'll  think about a Vox once the next model comes out.

Maybe it's just me, but why is everyone so hot for LCD type e-readers these days? E-ink ones are easier to the eyes. Personally, I've an old school e-ink nook and am pretty happy with it.

I'm old school, give me print baby!

Looks like Barnes and Noble is circling the drain due to heavy losses imparted by the Nook (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203513604577142481239801336.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories). 

I find it sad that the eBook readers are going to lead to the downfall of two big box retailers which represent the end of the local bookstore as we know it.  Amazon is beginning to be a real corporate beast, but even they hemorrhage money.  Ebooks are cool, but I have to wonder if all this advancement is going to really be good for the consumer in the end.  I'm sure Haemish, as an author, could tell us about the trials and tribulations of trying to make money as an author today.  I'm going to miss old fashioned books and bookstores. 

Old fashioned bookstores are REALLY going to have to change. There's no reason they should go away but they have to change. I've written on the subject before. There's very little reason within the next five years that stores should be getting shipments of physical books other than the publishers and distributors like Ingram want to maintain their stranglehold over the business. Every B&M bookstore should be a Print-on-demand library. Walk in, browse the kiosk for the book you want (or ask the clerk to help you do so), put your order in, come back in 30 minutes to have a professionally bound paper back hot off the digital presses. You might still have hardcover for the 1% of the market that still insists on paying $30 for a hardcover, but frankly the whole market is wildly inefficient. eBooks are just pointing that out in spectacular fashion. I barely sell any paperbacks, but eBooks? With no mainstream marketing and little Internet marketing and having spent almost no money on the whole project, I'm selling 200-400 books a month spread out among 5 SKU's (6 as of 3 days ago).

The music industry is in the same boat, BTW. They just happen to want to blame piracy for their problems.

I know some musicians that make their entire living off of playing in a band.  A big issue is how these guys get reimbursed for the actual music.  They get almost nothing from the sales of albums and iTunes (they have their own label) and have to make all their money off of playing gigs.  I don't think authors get reimbursed at anywhere close to the rates that they used to for hard books.  My thought is that it's tough to make a living when you don't get paid.  I guess  you'll see a lot more semi pro authors and musicians in the future. 

They say they lost a lot of money on the Simple Touch, apparently a touch-sensitive ePaper device I never even heard of, much less considered.  I have a Nook Tablet, but I got it mostly as a cheap Android tablet (that I can easily convert to generic Android), not as an eReader.

--Dave

Stupid question:  I got a Kindle fire for Christmas and I have no idea what to do with it.  I don't want to use it for books as I prefer to have a paper copy.  I guess I could use it for magazine subscriptions, but that seems rather wasteful. 

Can you tell that I don't want or own an iPhone/Android?   :geezer:

Install a photo viewer app and use it as a digital picture frame?

I got one of those as a gift 4 years ago... it's still in the box too.

Return it to Amazon, use the credit to buy lots of books you want.

My company gave us all Kindle Touches for Christmas and the 63 year old exec. assistant of the Hospitality group returned hers because - as she put it - "I don't need the damn thing at my age."

It apparently took a little wrangling but it can be done.

Have you *tried* reading something on it? I was pretty skeptical once too.

To be fair to him, I chose to buy the wife a Kindle vs the Fire (before I knew what we were getting) because the Fire is LCD and not e-ink.  Vastly different reading experiences from everything I've seen spoken about.  One is like staring at your laptop the other is still page-like.

While I generally agree with you, I also enjoy finding books on bookshelves and flipping through them. (Especially nonfiction and reference). Plus, the whole place wouldn't smell like books! Interesting covers also catch my eye and will get me to look at a book too.

Have you tried "browsing" Amazon for a book? Yeah, it doesn't work unless you really specifically know what you want.

I love my e-ink kindle.  Not terribly impressed with the experience on the Fire by comparison.

Before the kindle I used to browse in amazon for books all the time. But since then, there's too much shovelware and people buying up old classics (most likely to duplicate what they have in paper) to really make much sense of it all. Oddly, this means that books are about the only thing left I don't browse on amazon.

On the Fire, I'm considering getting one, but as a replacement for our netbook for browsing the web and imdb in the living room, not for reading books.

Unless cost is your driving consideration, I'd hold off on the first generation Fire.  Performance is pretty meh, the touchpanel is not so hot, and the power button is awkwardly placed and a little touchy.  I think the 7-8" tablet form factor has a lot of potential, but Amazon did not quite deliver here.  It's possible some of this may be improved by software updates, but the touchpanel and power button issues feel more like hardware than software limitations.

I was expecting gen1 Fire to be a bit rough around the edges, like the original Kindle, but they managed to underwhelm me even with that expectation.

What Viin said.  Just perusing bookshelves is a great way to find something new, IMO, rather than just clicking through pages of books lists online.  I'm also attracted to what's on the cover and really enjoy seeing some artists I really like do different covers, or even seeing some interesting artwork and looking up the artist to see what else they've done. 

I've found trying to browse for books online to be annoying, actually.  I've decided to stop at a bookstore, look around to see if there is anything I want, and then I'll see about picking it up for my Nook tablet instead.  Because the browsing categories for Nook books annoys the hell out of me.  I pick Science Fiction and Fantasy and somehow, that seems to include a whole host of books I wouldn't shelve in that category (like Stephen King's newest book, or a "steampunk romance").

It's ironic in a way, because the big box book chains were the downfall of the local bookstore as we knew it.

I bought the fiancee a Fire for xmas. She's glued to it, but mostly for Words with Friends.  :oh_i_see: Apparently everyone in the country got ebook readers for xmas, out of 1800 titles available from our digital collection, I think there's a couple hundred available right now, mostly children's and urban romance nonsense.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty much not allowed to play with it, so I don't know how well it reads. She seems happy but is only just getting into her first book on it. I did like that you could f13 it up with white text on a dark background, that was so easy on the eyes. At work I try to swipe it and use the wifi analyzer. Wish it wasn't a walled device, a few android apps I'd like on it that aren't there.

As usual, I'll remind people that we still have libraries in most places.  :grin: Our 'new book' browsing section is still the most popular area, it's where I find a lot of stuff (a new Paul S Kemp SW novel...WHY), and in non-xmas crush a lot of that content is available in the digital collection. So do physical browsing, then whip out your device and use Bookmyne to check it out or place a hold digitally on our free wifi.

The main problem is douchey publishers (really, Penguin?) and price gouging for new books and bestsellers limiting what we can purchase. We're a wicked progressive library stuck in a conservative system, but we're getting there.

Amazon Store
Angry Birds
Graphic Novels
Amazon Store

Seriously, though, the Fire screen is easier to read than the normal Kindle if you use it for books with pictures.  I haven't gotten a recent report from my wife on hers, so there may be more to tell.  I think I'm in a similar situation as you except I'm not very opposed to reading non-physical books.  I'm not denying the appeal of them, but I've accepted the drawbacks along with the convenience of having lots of reference material in a very small physical space.  Whether it's a web site, PDF on my laptop, or a pretend book on my Kindle, as long as I can check the fact I'm looking for I'm fine.  Having it remember what page I was on is also nice.

I still "browse" Amazon -- be it top lists or RSS feeds (it's hidden but you can setup RSS feeds for various categories) or even algorithmic recommendations and "what other people bought after looking at this".

I love my Kindle touch (just gave the old 3G Kindle to my dad) but it is still a poor facsimile of a printed (if it is a quality publication -- as ebooks take over, sadly, most print books now are lacking in quality -- both paper stock and the method of printing which when done too cheaply, is a lesser reading experience than the eInk) book -- especially books with charts and pictures, for which the Kindle is annoying or useless (in that regard, the iPad, in .epub format) shines. Also, while the Kindle Touch UI has improved light years over early versions, and turning pages flip fast enough for my taste now, flipping around the contents or searching still is not as nimble as it should be.

Then there is the proprietary "library" lock-in -- after amassing hundreds of Amazon Kindle selections, am I really able to jump over to a Barnes & Noble Nook device (even if their "library" holdings ever came up to par with Amazon)? There should be a law or some sort of external economic incentive/disincentive imposed to enable owners of these devices to swap in & out with rival ebook providers.

This a serious theoretical problem, but not a practical one at all. With Calibre and the appropriate third-party plug-ins, it is trivial to format shift even DRM-locked books. You should really be backing up all your books in Calibre regardless, particularly if you're buying them from the smaller sites (i.e., anything that isn't Amazon.)

Getting ebooks from 'all the ususal suspects' and using Calibre to put them on the kindle is great. I prefer hardbound in general, but for reading old fiction stuff without either having to dig out the paperback from some random shelf in the house, the kindle can't be beat.

That said, I'm reading Mandelbrot's Fractal Geometry of Nature again, and without being able to flip easily back and forth to the plates, it just wouldn't be as good.

Perusing bookshelves is nice... but market realities are going to make that absolutely impossible within the next 20 years if not sooner. That's part of why big box retail chains put the little guys out of business. They can afford to buy and have shipped 5000 copies of a book to get a sharp enough discount that it makes the cost of shipping that much stuff trivial. These days, the discounts aren't good enough and there's not much fat to trim out of the system - not to mention the fact that having that many copies on the shelf squeezed a sizable portion of the content providers out of the market entirely (the death of the mid-list novel). Big box chains are the only ones that can afford that much space to store enough physical goods to make the location profitable with such a small selection. However, a POD store could have a wider, broader selection, have lower overhead and give the publishers (and by extension the authors) more money instead of having to pay 40% to Ingram to do nothing more than stock and ship a collection of paper with words on it.

As a self-pubbed author with a POD book, I can sell 1 paperback through expanded distribution (i.e. through Ingram). The paperback is priced at $11.99. My POD gets 20% of that price - Ingram gets 40%. On a book I have to charge $12 for, I get $1.91. If I had a publisher, it'd probably be half that which means the publisher (if you add half my cut and the POD's cut) would probably get about $3 out of the $12, Ingram would get $6, I'd get $1 and the bookstore would get $2. Those are CRAZY BAD numbers for everybody involved.

Cut out Ingram's 50%, and suddenly there's another $6 to split between author, publisher and POD bookstore. If the distributors like Ingram had half a forward-looking brain, they'd get into the digital content serving business - i.e. they'd be the guys the bookstores would contact to download the POD digital files for printing.

The Calibre "solution" is also a "theoretical" one. My results in converting books have been mixed at best, with various glitches and formatting bugs that arise (and admittedly, this is a ereader problem still and a major annoyance that Kindle books costing nearly (or more) as much as printed books contain hyphenation errors or words smashed together).  Also, the practicality of doing this on a collection of hundreds of books negates the inherent utility of an ereader where it should be a push-button simple task.

Not very fond of this next generation of e-readers. They're underpowered, locked down, locked in Android tablets. You may as well get a full-blown tablet and use whatever Kindle/Nook/etc app instead, it'll end up being more useful.

This.

This is where I have zero qualms about torrenting, if I already own it in another format then all bets are off.

I've had absolutely no problems with converting commercial books using calibre with the exception of PDFs and those were mainly the fault of the original material.

I guess we have had different experiences, then.

For what it's worth, my first ebook reader was an ePub one. I found the ePub books I bought to have huge formatting problems, and actually became quite expert in the format as I hand-edited practically every book I bought.

Since I switched to the Kindle, I have had effectively no problems, and have never remotely considered figuring out how to edit a Mobi document.

And if you're finding the import to Calibre a chore, you may be doing it wrong. All I do is once every couple of months, download all my new books using Kindle for PC, and then it's literally a single drag from my kindle books folder onto the Calibre window.

I haven't had an issue with the Kindle Fire's power button.  You can rotate the Fire in any direction, I just hold the tablet so it's at the top.

The only thing that is finicky is plugging it in.  Seems the port is a bit bigger than necessary.  The rest of the things is great... web browser and e-reader.  I kind of like the size too.

Er....that means you have an issue with the power button if you have to use the device upside-down. I do the same thing, but some apps don't like that.

I got to use it for a minute two days ago. To show her how to turn off wifi to conserve battery life. One minute. At this rate I'll have to ask her to get me one for my birthday if I want to use it.

Oh, she hates the battery life.

Update:  I found out what to do with my Kindle Fire!  I play games and bought a few magazine subscriptions. 

I don't know what else to do with it.  I like to read real books.  I have my laptop when I travel as I need it for the computing power for the work I do.  If I'm not traveling, every place I go I have a desktop workstation with high speed internet and a good video card. 

Why do people buy these things?  It's like a kid's toy.

I received one for Christmas, here is my take so far. I've read 4 books on it so far.

On the plus side, I certainly do not mind reading on a kindle fire vs. an actual book. I do a good chunk of my daily reading in bed before I fall asleep, and I definitely prefer to hold a fire instead of a hardcover book. I'm still at a point in my life where I rent apartments and move every year or 2 and the idea of not having 10 + boxes of books to move and then find space for is very appealing to me. I've also gotten some utility usage out of having it on the couch while playing something on ps3 and pulling up gamefaq's instead of walking to another room or getting a laptop up and running.

On the (potentially) negative side, I do not love paying for books! For the last few years, I have gotten most of my materials from the library. I understand that many libraries let you electronically check things out to devices. Also, I feel weird if I try and poop with a tablet. I'll stick to magazines in the bathroom. Finally, Bejeweled 2 can go fuck itself with its requirement that I enter a name for a high score after every game.

Hand held web browsing on the couchl, toilet, and in bed.

I strongly suspect that's the same reason people buy any touch pad.  All I ever hear about is game <xyz> or app <abc> from those who own them of any stripe (Fire, iPad, HP Touchpad, etc).   It's another entertainment device that happens to let you read e-books.

I'm enjoying the kindle touch from time to time. It certainly hasn't increased my time spent reading but it's let me start on some old classics I didn't want to buy copies of.

99% of the use I get out of my tablet is RPG pdfs.  :grin:

Niche use, for sure.  Playing Arkham Horror means we have to open the PDF on the television. :oh_i_see:

Seriously. 

I read a large number of news sites, forums, etc. hunched in front of my monitor now, and I mean read.  I've considered a tablet just because reading the same things on the couch or in a lounge chair sounds like a vast improvement.

How do you get your pdf's?   USB cable? 

I keep them in my Dropbox and grab them via the Dropbox Android app over Wi-Fi - although at this point all the ones I regularly use are just stored on there now.

I read a lot of PDFs too, and that's how I do it (Dropbox on iPad). I use GoodReader to sync with various folders in my Dropbox.

I've heard few people here talk about the kindle fire as a plain ole web browser. I take it that folks don't find it handy for that. Is it the screen format, is it the slow java script curn, or some other factor?

If it's the same problem I have with the Nook, it's just a little too small to read without squinting (and thanks to the Chrome/Android core, there's no way to change the base font size).

--Dave

I have no issue with it.

(http://www.csmonitor.com/var/ezflow_site/storage/images/media/images/0506-googlegogol/7847812-1-eng-US/0506-googlegogol_full_600.jpg)

After DLing a few samples of books I've decided E-readers are still totally useless for design and art people. (And probably medical and mechanical repair folks too, now that I think about it.)  The books either have no pictures (  :uhrr: ) or are black and white so you miss the entire point of having photos in the first place. 

Novels, technical writing and other straight reading they seem great for.  They won't be replacing books entirely any time soon, though.

Meanwhile, I now have an Ipad 2 (since Christmas), and it is really excellent for reading.  For that matter, the thing just kicks ass in general.  The only reason I got one is because I had run out of ideas to wish for...but I am really surprised by how much of love this thing.  I hereby retract all my snarky "it's just a giant itouch!" comments.

In theory it really reads like a dumb device. Until you found your uses and don't want to miss it anymore.

On topic, it is infinitely worse as an ebook-reader than e-ink devices for text only. But with graphics and color its the other way round.

Going on a cruise in two weeks, and I'm looking for a cheap reader that is easy on the eyes and supports file transfer between my pc and the reader.

Thoughts?

I just got an ipad2 yesterday for work and it strikes me as too heavy for an ereader, though I may be more sensitive to that as I tend to read while laying down on my back. I also don't think it's quite as easy to read as the e-ink, but at least for short items the readability is far better than I expected. Otherwise a nice netbook competitor, but at the price point, I can't quite fathom it.

Slog -- A kindle will do that.

You can hook a kindle up via usb and drag files over to it, can't get easier on the eyes than e-ink and $80 isn't too bad.

So this one?

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0051QVESA/ref=sr_tc_sc_2_1?&pf_rd_r=C37255CF3FC44C198E16&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_t=301&pf_rd_i=kindle&pf_rd_p=1343222322&pf_rd_s=structured-results-2&qid=1328819197&sr=8-2-tc

What is the "special offers" all about?  Ad content that I have to cancel or something?

The special offers thing means it's ad supported. I've only seen one person come in with one at the library. What I have saw was a single line of crawler text across the bottom of the screen. I seem to recall the person I saw with it mentioned that that disappears when you are reading a book, but don't quote me on that.

I don't have one, but I've heard the same thing. There are ads on the file listing and the sleep screen, but not during the actual book.

This.  My second kindle is the ad supported one, and the ads are incredibly unintrusive.  Actually, I've redeemed a couple of the $.99/1.99/2.99 buy a book ads when they were good deals. 


The only complaint is that the wireless seems to switch back on more often than my old kindle.

ok thanks!

Not sure if you can still find a deal but I also went with an ad supported kindle graphite keyboard+3g (the generation prior to current) ended up paying like $10 more than the current generation low end kindle but it seems to be a fair jump in build quality.

Just a confirmation, reading on an iPad in bed is essentially impossible. Too heavy and keeps changing orientation. My arms literally hurt. It just plain sucks,only positive is being able to whine directly about it on the device itself.

Yeah, no orientation lock is one of the things that made me go for an Android phone, but I thought the iPad had that feature without any subterfuge (well, it went away for a patch for idiotic reasons).

On the iPad, you can set it so that switch next to the volume control buttons locks the orientation. Mine is usually locked.

Uh, yeah, mine is locked as well.  You can program it to that switch on the side.

As far as the reading in bed thing goes, I think it depends a lot on the position you are in.  But in any case, it is still easier to manage than your average hardcover book.

Are we talking ipad or ipad 2 here? Because on the ipad2 there is an orientation lock hardware switch directly on the device, plus is is weights noticeably lless than the ipad1.

Still not enough to comfortably use it for large streches holding it in one hand in bed, though. I have a case that does the holding for me in bed when I decide to be decadent and watch some videos in bed.

I google it and figure out the orientation switch. Thanks because I'd never have found it otherwise. It is a ipad2 and I can't imagine reading with something that heavy. The kindle is very comfortable in one hand, with a button resting on the page turning button. The ipad was heavy enough that I needed both hands or to rest it against something and trying to get a good grip kept hitting the touch screen and changing pages.

Yeah, I wouldn't want to hold it like that for long stretches either.  Fortunately, I never read (even regular books) in any position that requires me to hold the book up off of something, so it isn't a problem for me.  I always have it on my lap, on the couch arm, or on the bed while I lay on my stomach.

Last week while I was in Iowa the screen on my nook simple touch locked up on me .  Cedar Rapids has a Barnes and Noble store so I took it in to see if they had a way to recover it.  They tried all the stuff I had then the manager ended up swapping it out.   Thanks to the 'laptop' seating near the gate and free wifi I had it charged up and synced with my B&N account before my flight boarded.

Pretty sure it is in the user manual how to lock rotation.

Of course, it is one of those devices that reading a manual for seems to be something people don't do.

Originally, that function was controlled by the hardware button but then Apple changed it for all iOS to be mute, which triggered an outcry (you could still toggle it from settings) from many iPad owners, so they also added it to the "multitask tray" (double tap the "home" button to activate the bottom dashboard of app icons, slide to the left and along with audio controls, there is an icon to enable/disable rotation)… …or they might have changed it again, do not have an iPad at my side right now…

Heavier than an Erickson novel?

yes, yes and yes. Then they changed it so that you can specify what the switch did in Settings. Default is still mute though (which is ghey, I can just hold the volume button down to get to mute).

So it looks like the theory that Amazon will use their leverage as the sole delivery pipe to strong-arm publishers was correct. Amazon pulled all IPG books from the marketplace after not getting as many price concessions as they desired. (http://mhpbooks.com/50609/reaction-to-amazon-retribution-against-ipg-spreads-quickly-but-big-six-remain-silent/) Many on here called this, and it seemed like common sense that it would happen eventually.

It looks like the internet is watching this one, along with all the major publishers, since it's the test case for things to come. I did like this quote:


This, right here, is the entire reason I bought a nook.

God-damnit.

At least I always make my books DRM-free. I am getting most uncomfortable with Amazon's growing eBook power, considering 95% of all my book sales come from Amazon. Part of this is the fact that they have multiple channels for me to market the book (forums, tagging) that the other retailers just do not have.

I am buying a Kindle Touch (plain wifi, subsidized) here shortly. Not planning on buying many books from Amazon, but the ability to download dozens of classics which I have not read for free and be able to carry one book-sized item on my trip to Ireland is worth it for me.

My folks want to buy my kid a Kindle Fire for her 7th bday.  Any opinions?  an iPad at $500 is a bit out of the question for her, but the Fire is a nice pricepoint.

How easy to access are the kid's books? 

She would like having some of the little game apps and Netflix on it.  How much trouble can she get into?  Is there a lock on the wallet so she doesn't rack up a ton of charges on her own?

Parental controls on the Fire (or the Amazon Appstore in general) seem pretty weak.  You can't require a password for all purchases, just in-app stuff or you can disable in-app purchases entirely.  On the device itself, you can only password lock the whole device or the WiFi, both of which aren't terribly useful for what you might want to do with it.

Not sure about third party solutions.

There are no third party solutions, apparently. 

So we bought the fire with Prime and registered it to my account.  And, just as you said, in order for Wifi to be enabled, one-click purchases must be too. 

Option A:  Return the fire, buy her an iPad.  But then I have to ask myself "Does a 7yr old need a $500 iPad?"

Option B:  Remove all payment methods from my account that the fire and Prime are attached to, essentially disabling purchases from the fire unless there's a gift card attached.  Create second Amazon account to only buy gift cards for the first account whenever we want to buy something using Prime. 

All this because Amazon can't develop the ability to have simultaneous Wifi on and purchases password protected.  As it stands, just trying to learn the device I've already bought apps I didn't want while trying to test the parental controls.

How is the iPad as an ereader?  How do I go about finding books on the iPad?  Does iTunes do all that stuff?

I found the ipad to be too heavy as a reader. I also by far prefer the eink, but with the Fire you've already gone away from that. In terms of getting books, you can just buy them on amazon and read them in the amazon reader app or you can use Ibooks and the Ibooks app.

You may find this interesting:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2012/04/why-the-new-ipads-retina-display-loses-the-battle-in-the-e-reader-wars.ars

To answer one of your questions, however, you read Amazon kindle books on the iPad, or you use the iTunes e-book store.

Also, the fire has the same display type as the ipad (ipad original and ipad2 that is) so its not really an e-reader. Its an IPS display.

It still does my head in that you can't use wireless without one-click enabled. Have others found this?

Amazon wants the one click enabled to make buying books seamless and easy. For a regular kindle that kind of makes sense and isn't a big deal, but for a tablet, particularly a cheap tablet than can be a child's first tablet, it is a real issue.

Nook.

Seriously, I haven't run into anything with needing one-click purchases in order to have wifi enabled.  It's comfortable, you can get the Color which is essentially the Tablet with slightly lower hardware.  It's far more affordable than the iPad and is probably a better size for a kid to handle than an iPad.  IMO.  I've had a very enjoyable experience so far with buying from B&N.  You don't have access to the full Android app store, but I don't think you do with the Fire either.  As a plus, if you're really into that sort of thing, you can root the Nook and put whatever flavor of Android on it you like.

We let our 3 year old play on our Nook.  It's cheap, she can't buy anything on it without our permission, and the only other use it gets put to is as an e-reader when we fly.  I sometimes use it for websurfing, but I have found 7 inches isn't quite big enough and I want to get a 10-inch for that purpose (not to mention that typing a forum response on the soft keyboard is an exercise in frustration).

Combined with a VTech InnoTab as a media player, traveling with her (or waiting for the doctor) is a lot easier.

--Dave

I just bought my wife the original Kindle for her birthday. We also own an iPad2 (law conference swag > other conference swag), and I could not imagine reading on that beast for as long as I do on her Kindle.

She's actually suggested that she get me my own Kindle for my birthday . . . at $80, it's not a bad idea. Since I already own a tablet, buying a Kindle Fire makes very little sense, even if I got the iPad2 for free. Yeah sure, that conference cost money, but more importantly, it cost my boss money.

My kid's pretty fond of his Kindle Touch (I think the Touch is a bit of a waste -- I prefer the classic one), but the iPod touch beats it hands down because of text apps.

Of course, that's because he's 15, has a girlfriend, and burned through his phone minutes and messages in nothing flat.

I want an iPad, but even if I get one -- I'd still read on the Kindle. I love books, I love reading, I can see something like four overloaded bookshelves from where I'm sitting. Shoving that all into a light Kindle is the greatest thing since sliced bread. An iPad, to me, is a table tablet, dammit. A thing I can read on, if I can't find my Kindle.

Sorta like my smartphone, to be honest. I prefer the display and feel of a Kindle for reading. I think it's pretty much individual tastes, though.

I really like my kindle touch. A lot.

It really is like reading a regular book text wise and as someone that spends about 11 hours a day staring at LCD computer screens for work, it is definitely easy on the eyes.

Still have not bought a book yet. I am all about the free classics.

Doesn't that involve an Amazon Prime subscription? Or is there some source of public domain works of which I am unaware?

If you're a sci-fi and fantasy fan, Baen has a giant library of free stuff. I mean it's very clearly "Read the first book or three of a prolific author, then plunk down tons for their newer ten books" stuff -- but there's a LOT there.

Plus Baen's pricing is a lot cheaper than the shit other publishers are charging. The only books they charge 15 bucks for (collections aside) are advanced reader copies -- you can get some books a month or so ahead of their actual publish date that way. (They're final author proofs or something -- right before the final edit and print stage).

Project Gutenberg, you have to hook the kindle up to your computer to get the files on the kindle but there is tons of stuff on there.

Also, I think anyone can get the $0 books on the kindle store but I have prime so I can't confirm.

Yes, the $0 books on Amazon are free regardless of Prime.  Prime is for the lending library stuff (http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/?docId=1000739811).

Which is fucking BALLS. You have to wait 30 days between items. I checked out a book, by the time the month was over, the sequel(s) were no longer available.

We ultimately boxed the kindle fire and shipped it back.  For the time being, we'll just buy her paper books and when I build my next PC this summer I'll give her my old. 

I think we'll revisit the idea in a year or two, when she's got a better grasp on technology and there are more options available to us.  However, in the meantime a free month of Prime is handy. 

Don't own an ipad, but they sell books in the app store, and there are free kindle, nook and other e-reader apps for it.  I own an android tablet and it works fine as an e-reader using the kindle, nook, and overdrive e-reader apps.  The only real problem with it is that since it's not e-ink it doesn't work very well outside.

E-ink is awesome and I can't fathom trying to read an LCD device outdoors after having used one for a bit.  I keep hoping they'll find a way to do it in color.

Oh, and count me as one of the folks who only reads free books.  Fuck paying hardcover price for a book available in softcover for $9.99 but not needing the infrastructure to support the physical copy.

Cut back greatly on Amazon purchases as new release prices are now in $12.99 - $15.99 range for most titles… …even at $9.99, after initial splurging (mostly due to a stockpile of Amazon gift cards), found it hard to justify, especially when a paperback version (of which you actually OWN and can GIVE away to another) is usually available for just a few dollars more (or often enough, for even less than the e-book).

This blog post (http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2012/04/agency-model-sucks.html) is a good article on WHY the big 6 publishers are charging so damn much for an eBook.

Read that before and that's a great summation post on the state of ebook publishing.

Amazon is about "disintermediation", they cut out the links between producers and consumers.  In most cases, they are the entire chain and for a lot of physical goods they even cut themselves down to nothing but a payment and listing gateway (producer ships directly to consumer).

They don't try to make their sellers produce cheaper (as, for example, Walmart routinely does) other than by making them compete with other producers of equivalent goods.  And in the case of authors, many of those pressures don't apply (there are equivalencies of genre, but no one other than the author can really produce sequels to earlier works).  And Amazon does not produce anything, they don't capture their suppliers to squeeze out that last margin of profit (as many other retailers both brick and mortar and virtual so).  So why would they do it with authors?

--Dave

I don't want to make it seem like Amazon is a white knight in this. Their Kindle Select program for authors rubs me the wrong way. Basically, in exchange for only publishing your eBook on Amazon/Kindle, you get your normal royalties, plus Kindle users can borrow your book for free. You get a payment for the borrowed book, but it's a percentage of the total "borrowed book fund" that Amazon sets aside each month, and the fund varies in size from month to month, so you're never quite sure how much you'll get from each loan. That kind of weird black box accounting doesn't sit well with me, but the program is completely optional so I just haven't joined it.

The big advantage of Kindle Select is being able to do the free promotions that in theory should get your other non-free items more exposure. One of the best options here being to take an older book that's done its early sales or using a short story or novella. Once the free promos are done, get out of Select.

I don't really have a dog in the agency/wholesale-retail conflict. Amazon is a big scary dog in the room and if anyone thinks we're going to have cheaper books and 70% royalties after they are a complete monopoly, they're crazy. On the other side, how Apple and the publishers thought they were going to get away with walking into a room and setting up a cartel in such an obvious fashion is beyond me.

On the third hand, the number one selling book in the country is completely unedited, barely literate, Twilight fanfic. We're all damned.

Yeah, that's what's so funny about this whole thing. Amazon is absolutely kicking EVERYONE'S asses on the whole eBook market. They are the Steam of eBooks, an absolute screaming success because their policies have so far been fairly beneficial to consumers and content producers (unless of course you happen to have been making a killing under the old model). Unfortunately, no one can seem to cut into their growing monopoly because they are too concerned with not pissing off the entrenched industry or cannibalizing their current business model.

And I hate to tell indie bookstores, but their life is about to get INFINITELY WORSE. They are so fucked it's not even funny. Their appeals to the "great tradition of curling up with a book by the fire" are about to go the way of the record (as in vinyl LP) store. Indie stores think they are a niche NOW? When the ereader install base reaches about 10 million or more, fucking forget about it. Indies that want to stay in business better start thinking about some way to leverage in-store Print-on-demand or suck up to Amazon because they are super fucked.

I've never lamented the end of indie bookstores. I'm middle aged and can think of only two that could compete with a Borders or B&N even in their own genre (and then primarily because of out of print new-old-stock), nevermind Amazon or B&N.com

The only indie bookstores I ever frequented more than once or twice were the used bookstores.  Unfortunately they are about to be as screwed as everyone else.

Someone needs to come up with a book recycling model where I can take a print book to a local location and pay $1 to have it shredded in exchange for the same book in digital form.

You're never in BookPeople? Every couple weeks I do my circle of lunch at Whole Foods, coffee at BookPeople and then I bum around at Waterloo.

Actually, it'll be awhile before Amazon tries to eat it's seed corn like that -- at least until the current CEO is gone. They don't need to raise prices -- they basically get a rake off of every purchase.

Not the stuff they buy from publishers directly -- but independent authors, which are quickly going to become "all authors". Why should Amazon give a crap what you charge for the book you wrote, when they get 30% merely for answering a database query and storing your book on the Cloud -- the Cloud that more than pays for itself?

They get 30% PLUS a bandwidth fee (which is minimal really, but still .06 cents a book or something for transferring less than a MB of data ain't bad for paying the bills). Although, if you sell your book for under $2.99, they get 65% plus the bandwidth fee, and if you haven't checked, there's a shitton of .99 cent ebooks out there like my first one, and they are selling an absolute asston of those. I sell easily 3x-5x as many of the .99 cent book as the other one just to get people's beaks wet, and Amazon gets .65 cents off every one.

I literally cannot fathom why an author with any sort of following hasn't dropped traditional publishers and gone eBook/Print-on-demand exclusively. They might sell half as many books and still make more money with a bit more effort.

Charlie Stross had an interesting post on the topic of Amazon and ebooks. (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/04/understanding-amazons-strategy.html) One of the better take aways here was that both sides are businesses in it for the money and authors and readers are there to funnel the money in.

Good article analysis up until the DRM is dead bit. I just don't think they'll go for that until it's too late. If anything they're retreating on that one, Penguin just pulled out of library distribution because they're afraid of piracy.

It's a business. Of course they're in it for the money.

The publisher's problem is that even if they felt Amazon was acting as an effectively monopoly, the fix to that is not to indulge in wide-scale price fixing to break the monopoly -- it'd be to, you know, use all that fucking money to get the DoJ on Amazon's ass.

Amazon isn't Walmart -- they're not squeezing the fuck out of the supply chain and driving other companies out of business by sheer throw weight. They're basically taking a tiny rake from introducing customers to producers  (For their non-cloud stuff) -- which is what they're trying to do to books. Basically be the google of "You like that book? Here's an author you might also like. Feel free to buy his book. We'll take 30% for recommending him".

The DoJ might, if they go after Amazon, break the DRM format to the extent of forcing Amazon to allow other readers and app to view the books. Basically a Microsoft/IE situation.

At some point they may not have any choice.  Similar thing happened with music -- the publishers insisted on DRM and gave Apple a massive lock-in for iTunes/iPod.  They ended up having to allow non-DRM options to allow smaller competitors to enter the space (Amazon and other device vendors, for instance).

I think he's right about losing the DRM being the only option the pubs have left. The Kindle's walled garden is what has allowed it to be such a fast-growing platform so quickly. And the publishers thinking that piracy was so important has, just like the music industry, hurt their ability to be all things to all consumers. DRM was a honey trap for Amazon to sell people on the Kindle.

Kindle Paperwhite Quick Review - no-ads, wifi version

The frontlight is definitely nice in low light situations, but there is some shadow effect near the bezel at certain angles and a sort of ghosty blur along the bottom.  Better light distribution than many frontlight solutions I've seen, but not perfect.

I miss the physical next/prev page buttons.  Touch works okay for page turning, but feel especially laggy for paging through your book list and I think the physical buttons were nicer for that.  The touch based keyboard is a big improvement over the dpad driven keypad from the third generation Kindle, though.

Basic navigation feels a little slower without dedicated home, back, and menu buttons -- I have to tap the top edge of the page, wait for the menu bar to draw, then tap an icon to navigate, and while the e-ink display refreshes faster than the previous generation it is still not instant and still flashes a bit when drawing.

The higher density display and additional font options are nice.

Build quality may be slightly better than third generation Kindle.  Still very solid, and just slightly heavier.  I think the matte black looks a little nicer to me than the two-tone gray/silver, and especially appreciate that all the various consumer electronics logos are very very subdued on the back.  The back seems to pick up fingerprints much more easily than the previous generation.

I got a PW as well. This was an upgrade from a Kindle 2 I bought in 09. I'm very happy with the lighting and find I don't notice it if I'm actually reading--other than the fact I can read without having direct light. Where it shines is in full light, where the combination of screen and lighting really do come off as "paper white." I do not think I could go back to a non-front-lit device.

I agree, I'd prefer buttons to the touchscreen. I also swapped back to a list view from the cover view. The list view is significantly nicer than it was in my K2, title on top, then author below in a smaller font.

On the fonts options, I guess Amazon knows best. After fiddling with them, I ended up going back to their default.

Of the interface features the one I really fell in love with is the time left to finish. The device tracks your reading speed within a book and will give you an ETA to finish either the chapter or the book as a whole. I mostly read before going to bed and if its getting late it's nice to know that it's 5 minutes to finish a chapter and amusing to look at how long it would take to read an entire book: 7 hours and 5 minutes for A Storm of Swords.

I have the ad supported version with a cover. The cover turns the device on when opened, which is really nice, but is killed because you swipe to go past the ad. I suspect I will cough up the $20 and get them removed.

Yeah, the list view definitely feels less clunky than the title view.  I think one of the reasons I prefer the hard buttons is that I am absolutely certain that I clicked one, which helps compensate for the laggy refresh.  Doing swipe gestures to scroll, I just don't feel as certain about navigation.  One other minor annoyance is if I hold the device with a finger in contact with the display, selection mode starts.

On the plus side, the touch based soft keyboard is nicer than the dpad keyboard.

I also spent some time fiddling with the fonts before settling on the default -- several of the other fonts seemed to have issues, especially at the smaller sizes, where words would appear slightly darker or lighter (assume this is due to however they're doing their anti-aliasing or subpixel drawing).

In many ways the PW is a step back in feature set from the Kindle Touch:

- Home button is gone, now you need two taps to get anywhere. Yes, it is an affordance that I miss.

- On Kindle Touch swipe up/down, when in a book, advanced to next/previous chapter -- it is a very nimble method of navigating through text, especially ebooks formatted to take advantage of this (i.e., chapters with subheading links at the top). And far superior to the hardware button navigation (IIRC, could advance chapters but the touch screen has the advantage of more easily popping into a link as opposed to "tabbing" through)

- Less storage, reduced to 2G (from 4G).


This, for me, is the only major plus and the higher resolution is a big win.

Built-in light is meh, considering that my old Kindle Touch had the clamp on light. Yeah, cumbersome, but the built-in light on the PW is not without flaws -- I cannot turn up more than 1/3 or the splotchy light clumps at the bottom of the device become irksome.

My no ads Paperwhite is showing a "Popular Books for Young Readers" section (presumably from the fact that I own Hunger Games) when I view by cover on Device. How the fuck do I turn that off? I didn't see a setting for that and didn't find anything in the manual.

Edit: found it in the manual, it's the "Recommended Content" section but there's apparently no way to turn it off. Fuck.

Ugh, that's obnoxious.  Amazon really seems to be pushing the limits on some of their advertising and advertising-related features.

The list view (which I prefer since it seems to make better use of space) doesn't seem to have this, but when I flip back to cover view, I find that I too have "Popular Books for Young Readers" (weird, of the 150+ books I own, I only think a handful are YA type titles and nothing I've read recently -- maybe just poor targeting here?)

I agree with you guys on this too - it's nice to have the touch screen for selecting books and such, but the dedicated buttons for next/previous page were great. With the touchscreen, if you don't hit it just right you bring the menu up or bring up the dictionary or something. The buttons were better/easier to do especially when laying down.

Haven't seen a PW yet, but I like the idea of a built-in light.

The way the page navigation works on the PW is that that tapping the top 3/4" edge of the display brings up the menu bar (for home, back, settings, search, etc), tapping the left 3/4" edge of the display goes one page back, and tapping the rest of the display goes one page forward.  Long-presses initiate hilight/dictionary actions.  Left/Right swipes do prev/next page. 

I find it's a little easier to accidentally tap the screen than to accidentally hit the hard buttons from the previous generation.  The main annoyance is if I happen to adjust my grip such that I'm touching the display, hilight mode starts and I need to let go and tap elsewhere to cancel.  It doesn't happen often, but it never happened on the non-touch models.

I got an email today saying that there is a possible credit coming from a settlement with the Attorney General on my ebooks. Did yall get this?

Yep, $.30 to $1.30 a book or something like that?

Yeah, in February 2013 mine said.

I think it's the settlement on the price-fixing/collusion thing. The total amount is probably pretty big, the individual amount if you aren't one of the lawyers is probably fuckall.

I just took delivery of a Kindle, international version (the black Kindle 4), shipped from Amazon US to Australia.

On the default page-turn setting it has massive, ridiculous ghosting of text from each previous page, until the full refresh on every 6th page, which starts the ghosting again from scratch. I can fix this in the options by switching on full-refresh on every page turn (Kindle 3-style page turning). It works fine that way.

A search reveals lots of people changing this setting to fix it, but lots of people also returning them to Amazon for a replacement. Has anyone else experienced this? Reckon I should return it?

I'm not getting excessive ghosting on my Kindle Paperwhite. If people have reported less ghosting on replacement Kindles it's probably worth pursuing. Refreshing on every page can be annoying even if you don't care about the hit on battery life cause of the noticeable flash, which is especially bad with the PW in low light situations with the light turned up.

I can imagine it would be worse with the paperwhite. I don't think the "flash" is going to bother me on the standard Kindle.

Without the full-refresh, mine looks like the "exaggerated" picture on the Tom's Hardware review (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/kindle-touch-review-display-quality,3078-5.html). A bit distracting, because my eye notices the edges of the ghosted letters behind the real letters.

(http://media.bestofmicro.com/9/U/321762/original/kindle4th_ghosting.png)

On mine, I see a gradual shifty darkening behind the words until it refreshes. I definitely do not see ghost words like the Tom's example. I never noticed it until someone pointed it out.

My 3rd Kindle Keyboard 3G arrived (I am an asshole and lost the first 2). Would have been nice to hold out for a next gen one, but I was just about done with the last paperback I had and needed to access the dozens of books on my Kindle I still haven't read  :grin: I bought this one from ebay- got it brand new for $118 including shipping. After I won the auction I realized I had bid on another one that was cheaper- I was eventually outbid but that one went for $92. ARGH.

Disappointment: bought an ebook, started reading it on my PC on Amazon Cloud Reader, don't own a Kindle, tried to download it to my wife's Kindle to read, looked online for help and told no, called CS and told no. 

So I can log into my Amazon account and read my ebooks via Cloud Reader on my wife's PC or even her phone, but I can't do it on her Kindle.

Wow.   :oh_i_see:

You can, it just involves a download or two.

http://calibre-ebook.com/
http://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/

Because yes, the fact that publishers got in the way of stupid shit like I READ A BOOK. I WOULD TO SHARE IT WITH MY WIFE WITHOUT GIVING HER MY FUCKING KINDLE SO I WILL LET HER BORROW IT. is beyond obnoxious.

That's cause you don't actually own the Kindle books you purchase :awesome_for_real:

You can, if you want, temporarily reregister her device to your account. You may also be able to "loan" it to her account. Or you can do what JWIV posted and get rid of the fucking DRM and transfer the unprotected file to her device.

Thanks guys, I'll check that out.

Of course, there is no easy way to download anything to Kindle -- no usb, no SSD....  Yeah I'm not happy.  Disappointing.

If you want to see a very clear reminder of this then look no further than the woman who had her Kindle remotely wiped (http://www.reghardware.com/2012/10/22/amazon_accused_of_remote_wiping_kindle/) by Amazon without being given a reason why beyond “We have found your account is directly related to another which has been previously closed for abuse of our policies. As such, your Amazon.co.uk account has been closed and any open orders have been cancelled”.

After it hit the tech news sites they unwiped (http://www.reghardware.com/2012/10/24/amazon_unwipes_previously_wiped_kindle/) it, again with no explanation.

I don't know what it's like in the US but in the UK Kindle versions are not significantly cheaper than actual physical books that you really own.

The Kindle charging cable is a USB cable that you can connect to your PC. You can then use Calibre to transfer the files over.

It's better now in the USA after three of the major publishers agreed to stop pricing fixing stop using the agency model for their eBook pricing. Random House is not part of that settlement, though, so their prices on Amazon are only slightly discounted, if not actually more expensive, than the paperback versions.

Madness.

Ever since they started making them I've really liked the idea of e-readers, but the stupid shit they've all been inflicted with has kept me from ever buying one.

I find myself sounding like a Luddite (who actually weren't anti-technology, but that's a rant discussion for another time & place), but I'm sticking with my paperbacks dammit!  :awesome_for_real:

I assume you also got a mail from Amazon regarding some kind of settlement that means we are all going to get a refund of some kind, yes?  I expect it will amount to very little, but there it is. 

How much have they actually come down in price in real world terms?  I haven't bought one since the "agreement".

After 14 years of hearing about those game companies that ban people for no reason (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=22549.0) I'm was skeptical of the story.

It came out shortly after that they didn't remotely wipe her kindle, they closed her account for abuse and she went on using her kindle until it physically broke. The error was her account was blocked entirely rather than being closed and allowing her to continue to download pre-existing purchases, so when she got another device or used the software, it didn't work. They fixed it.

While I think region locking is crap, it's not really Amazon's fault and it sounds like she was trying to evade it and that the same address had been used by other people who were less than innocent.

The easiest way of transferring books to another kindle is actually email. Use the "manage your kindle" page at Amazon to find out your email address. Then it is a one-click operation in Calibre to mail a book. You can then pick it up on the recipient kindle by wi-fi sync.

The recipient can even choose to save emailed books in their cloud archive, meaning they can be downloaded any time from any device registered to that account.

That's basically what I do with mine.  I have it set up to basically generate and send me the local paper every morning at 5:30 am or so. 

This is one of the reasons I always make sure my Kindle versions (and any other eBooks) do not have FUCK YOU FUCKING FUCK DRM. Goddamn waste of effort pain in the ass bullshit.

Oh sure, send illegally cracked (it violates the DMCA anti-circumvention clause) ebooks through Amazon's email system. That sounds like a good idea :why_so_serious:

Are you scraping RSS or parsing web pages?

Instapaper will do this but I have to remember to click on the browser bookmarklet whilst perusing the web. Would be nice to just automagically deliver a 5:30am bundle… …but I have far too many Google Reader subscriptions (>3K now).

It's all RSS.   You can create a basic Calibre recipe pretty easily - just go to Fetch News and click the arrow on the right side to open the option window - Then select 'Add Custom News Search' and you cna just throw RSS urls into it.

You may also be able to find the paper of your choice is already created in the recipes, and then you can just schedule that and off you go.

Danny Sullivan nails it: Why Do Amazon & Apple Hate Families? (http://daggle.com/amazon-apple-hate-families-2867)  No household account or profile linking.  AOL had this in '99.

It's not as bad as all that... Amazon allows five devices to be linked to a single account. If that isn't enough for your family then... you have a big family.

Not the same thing. E.g. if I let my non-existent wife borrow my Kindle and she reads one of the books I was reading when I get the device back the book will be on the page she last left off on not the page I last was reading. Yes I could go through and add a manual bookmark to every single book on the device but that would be a fricking pain in the ass.

Edit: wive?

Question:  Does it let you register to five devices concurrently, or is that 5 devices that over the lifetime of the account (i.e. devices no longer in use still counting against the total).  I sure hope it is the former.

It's concurrent. You can go into manage your kindle and remove devices from your account.

Okay, that seems relatively fair, then.  I dislike DRM as much as the next guy, but it isn't hard to see why they would have such a limitation.  Or rather, in theory I understand it...it would all be so much easier to swallow if an ebook didn't costs roughly the same as a physical book, despite the lack of materials, production process, logistics, storage and waste involved.  That is what really pisses me off.

I honestly just gave up. I run everything through Calibre and the plugins just strip it all. Among other things, the number of books I've found that have problems with the PaperWhite are pretty surprising. They really need to figure that out.

This is right - I have two Kindles, an iPad, and two iPhones registered to my Amazon account. All devices get access to the same books.
The problem, as mentioned a few posts ago, is that it assumes the same person is reading the book on all of the devices. So if you open a book on your iPhone and your wife opens the same book on her Kindle, she is pushed to the last page you read. (You can cancel that, but it is nice to sync between devices as I switch between iPad and Kindle a lot - I can't do that if my wife is reading the book at the same time).

Do you guys read at such a breakneck pace that you have to have sync turned on all the time? My GF has two kindles, the original and the 3rd one, and I just download her books I haven't read yet, then turn off wireless/3g and select 'go to start' and the thing remembers where I am. Maybe there's some scenario where you absolutely need to sync all the time, but I can't think of it.

Stop being such a cheap bastard and buy your non-existent wife her own Kindle!!

I let her use my hand-me-downs :awesome_for_real: (My PW is my 3rd Kindle).

I just never sync. Wireless is never turned on except to buy/download a new book.

I read on the Kindle at night and on my iPad during the day at lunch or while traveling. I leave wifi on all the time, so it syncs when I go to read the Kindle before bed, and then my iPad can catch up at lunch time. I read 20-50 pages each night and maybe 10-15 at lunch time.

I leave wireless off because it kills the battery, but running them through calibre kills the sync thing anyway. I guess that's technically a bug, not a feature.

Amazon finally added a feature for reporting content errors, and you can see the status of your reports on kindle.amazon.com... I'm curious to see how rapidly they handle these... I get really annoyed finding errors in ebooks, especially ones that weren't present in the print version...

(http://frotz.net/misc/corrections.png)

Where do you submit corrections though? I can't find a button anywhere?

Also does it tie it to a specific location in the book? Or do you add the comments through the amazon site?

It seems like this feature is only available on the newest hardware (like the Paperwhite) and is not available in either the Android or iOS Kindle app (obnoxious).

You highlight a word or passage (longpress and drag) and the dialog that pops up and offers you "lookup in dictionary" or "highlight" or "share" has a "more" button which pops up a menu that includes a "Report Content Error" button.  Selecting that pops up another dialog where you can enter descriptive text if you want.  Presumably it sends the exact location in the text to Amazon as well as the highlighted text and anything you wrote describing the issue (but only the latter two are shown along with the time/status in the webpage).

Well, the paperwhite is the one where you need it, I'll check when I get home. I have a bunch of books with the unchangeable font/tiny font size issue.

I gave up on my Paperwhite. I was having a problem with "full page" images/graphics messing up which page it would go to next. It would often jump to some seemingly random page well past where I was currently reading, forcing me to backtrack and figure out where I was before the image appeared.

Images and e-ink really don't mix.

Which is a big reason why my Kindle Paperwhite is collecting dust and Nexus 7 is being used more (despite its Kindle app being an ugly sibling of even the iOS version). Being able to zoom in is nice (some Paperwhite books enable this with images, but even then, it is not very responsive). Also, love being able to highlight a word or phrase (again, silly DRM restrictions prevent doing this with more than a word or two) and do a Wikipedia / web search. It makes grokking a book a good experience. (I realize this is moot for most works of fiction).

And Amazon can crow on about how their "backlight" isn't a "backlight" but in a dark room, it is a worse UX experience than a tablet. Even in a well-lit room the contrast is such on the device that I find I have the backlight on (even Amazon recommends full light setting for well-lit room).

I still prefer the paperwhite for novels, but yeah, anything with illustrations, color, or requiring random access (textbook, manuals, etc) goes on a PC or tablet.

I want somebody to build a really good PDF reader for Android -- the Adobe reader is maybe the most accurate rendering but is clunky and slow, and the existing third party readers all have various warts.

If only we knew someone who worked on Android at Google ..

He'd probably already be bitching at people on the inside about the sorry state of pdf reading on the platform, I bet...

The iOS version of Kindle does PDFs pretty well - not so on Android?

I don't use it much, as I typically use Goodreader for my PDF browsing and marking-up.

I use Kindle app for PDFs on Android (Galaxy S II) and it's great.

RepliGo PDF Reader doesn't offend me too terribly for basic PDF reading, but could use some love for larger magazine style PDF's.

Does anyone have a way to turn off the auto-correct on the Kindle 2?  I know you could through settings in the Kindle 1 but I can't find out what to do on the 2.  It's incredibly annoying.   I stops you from basic web searching and wikipedia.

Words -- they fail me.  Someone page WUA.

Amazon to start publishing Fan Fiction (http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/05/25/amazon-wants-to-bring-out-the-writer-in-you.aspx?source=iptimolnk0000001)

It's even worse than you imagine. The terms of the agreement with the writers are that the owners of the brand (it's a specific CW - the TV network - show marketing imprint I think) own all the rights to anything a writer publishes through there. So if the creators like something you did and bring it from fanfic into the show, not only do they own the rights to it, THEY DON'T HAVE TO PAY YOU. EVER.

Fuck that.

It can be no other way, Haemish. Otherwise people could bombard Amazon with every plot idea they can think of, and hamstring the owners of the IP. Fan-fic writers of course should retain their own expression of their ideas, but no owner of the IP could possibly allow them to own the ideas themselves.

And hell, most fan-fic authors would be delighted to see their stuff picked up and moved into canon.

Off to write my story about Spock's lost half-Klingon brother now...

Oh I have no problem with the IP holders retaining the rights to the characters. That's not the issue I have. The issue is that the rights holders can exploit that IP for eternity and not have to pay the creators one goddamn cent more even if that new character creates an entirely new franchise.

I smell spinoffs!

Sure, it's bad if they exploit the IP for eternity, but it's also bad if they create a story that is similar to someone's "published" fan-fiction, and that author tries to sue them for basing the exploited IP on their work, whether it's legitimate or not.  No publisher would agree  to allow Amazon to publish fan-fiction in that scenario.

So at least fan-fiction writers do get some royalty money by publishing their work.

I realize there are some risks to this sort of venture for the IP holders. That doesn't mean they essentially have to codify such blatant exploitation into the TOS.

I think Kall is probably right here. It's not like big named authors and publishers haven't been sued (with and without merit) on "You stole my story/character" grounds before.

Sure, it's over the top. Any copyright holder's is gonna be. And in the end, fanfic writers are playing in someone else's sandbox. If they wanna make money of it, the strings are gonna be a hell of a lot tighter than normal.

Exactly. This is why there's licensing deals. Normally when an author tires of a series they just let someone else do the writing while retaining the requirement their own name appears on the novel.

Fanfic writers getting exposure at all is actually pretty interesting, and pretty risky on its own merit. Here Amazon is giving the opportunity for independents to build out their own portfolio of recognizable works and have some exposure.

It all works in Amazon's favor of course (which is the point of it all).

Edit: I actually meant to ask this question first and then rant :-)

The PW is my first Kindle. I always read on my iPad 1 and then Retina, and that's fine except for battery life. So I picked up the PW and the thing lasts like a month easy, and I barely use the backlight. I mostly just wanted the touchscreen because I am always looking stuff up in books. I am a sporadic reader with a bad memory for characters and locations.

I've found some books are more poorly edited than others. But is that because of the PW or do the edit issues appear on all Kindle devices? I find the sync thing really annoying, but I stopped reading on my iPhone or iPads anyway after I got this thing.

Oh yeah the PaperWhite bug. The deal is that the PW lets you select font and size, but it also uses the new KF8 format that lets formatters do all sorts of neat stuff, including forcing a particular font or size on people. It's intended for things like if there's an email in the text, you can force it to be a sans serif font so it stands out. Unfortunately, all sorts of old books had extra code in them that kindles up to the PW weren't bothered by, but drove the PW crazy. The two particulars are that if you defined a font size in points rather than percentage, it ended up tiny. The "base" normal size font is defined in the PW as about 60 points. Also, if the formatter tried to force a font into a file that the PW didn't have built in, it reverted that text to Helvetica.

A huge number of books, particularly indies, but also books from big five publishers were little more than HTML dumps out of word and defined the font as Times or Calibri 12 point. Times/Calibri don't exist on the PW and 12 points is rendered tiny, so the actual rendering was like 6 point Helvetica. I think most publishers have caught up, but it took Amazon months to fix their own conversion programs.

I think the fanfic thing is going to be a train wreck. The deal sucks, but I think what will kill it is book royalties aren't treated as employee income in tax terms. They're payments to an independent contractor. I suspect the shit will hit the fan when these teenagers are uploading stuff and their parents get 1099s and have to file self-employment tax and all that stuff.

Yes, self-employment taxes suck monkey ass for authors, btw. You are basically paying your own FICA taxes and payroll taxes that an employer might have handled for you as if you were an actual business with employees. I hate 1099-MISC's.

In terms of fanfic, I suspect it won't be the money as much as it will just be the PITA aspect of it.

Every year we get contractors into the office wondering what this 1099 thing is because they've worked under the table for their entire lives and suddenly they did a job for the town and "huh what? well you already took out taxes so I don't have to file right?"

Just had ANOTHER Kindle keyboard crap out on me. Same issue as last time (screen looks broken/part of it doesn't refresh), but this time there was nothing at all that could have physically caused it. Was reading it, closed the case, walked to my car, got in, opened it...screen is fucked. As it stands now, I believe Amazon is replacing it with a Kindle Touch now (apparently they are finally out of KKs, which is a blessing and a curse), but I am not entirely sure...get very mixed messages from customer service. I would like one of the new Paperwhites coming out later this month, but with the track record I have had, I am leery of buying anything new until it is proven.

Anyone have experience with the Touch or Paperwhite? How are they for durability? I am especially annoyed that my $35 leather KK case won't fit a Touch (I assume), so this is still going to cost me money. ARGH. I love the technology, but they really need to work on the robustness. A book should be damned near forever.

Somewhat similar theme to Wayabvpar... My KK gave up the ghost a few months ago, and since then I've been reading using my iPad. I'm surprised how good the iPad is for reading, after being an e-ink zealot for years. My only issue with the iPad is its weight, so I'm also thinking of getting the new paperwhite, and am also interested in peoples' thoughts.

Get an Android tablet, download the Kindle app, forget there ever was hardware called a Kindle. I've been using a first-gen Xoom tablet from work and that thing is awesome for reading e-Books, comics and it isn't locked into only Amazon apps.

Last year I ordered a PW within minutes of it becoming available on the site and I absolutely love it. Best ereader I could ever imagine, though that didn't stop me from ordering this year's model the minute it was announced. I feel a bit silly upgrading from a device I'm so deliriously happy with, but it's not that much money and I can write it off as an expense. I can't say enough good things. The screen is clear. It's easy to read. The front light has zero eye fatigue. (FWIW I have a ipad retina and you couldn't pay me to read on it.)

I don't know about durability though. I'm very gentle on electronics. My partner and I both have Kindle 2's and hers is still going strong and mine only has issues with the USB connector because my daughter tripped over it and that would have killed pretty much any device. I suspect the PW might be more durable than the K2/Keyboard simply because it's a smaller device and there's less room to "flex" and pop a screen. It's also lighter. The case for it is form fitting with a magnetic auto-on/off closure and seems very durable--definitely get the official one.

What Numtini said.

I have a nerve defect of the left eye that makes me cross-eyed when my eyes get too tired (even with glasses). On the iPad that happens after a few hours of intense reading, on the Kindle only if I do nothing but read the whole day without resting the eyes (but then it happens with a normal book as well).

The Paperwhite is much impoved and not as fragile as the Kindle Keyboard. In the case it seems to be safe from wear and tear as well.

I have the Paperwhite and while I like it, and while I prefer it over iPad/Nexus, it's entirely unusable for me as it literally gives me intense migraine headaches (an arc of pain that goes from my eyeballs to the base of my neck) to use for any significant length of time. No matter what I toggle the backlight brightness to -- if it's too low, I have difficulty reading as the contrast is not enough and if it's too high, the 'headache' effect is exacerbated. Never experienced this before with previous Kindles, or even with the clamp-on light -- from the keyboard Kindle to the Kindle Touch that predated the Paperwhite.

It makes me sad because the Kindle app on Android blows (even in comparison to iPad Kindle app) and the increased resolution and improved typography features on the Paperwhite make it unfeasible to go back to the old Kindles.

I'll second this.  Love my paperwhite to death and also immediately pre-ordered the new model when they announced it.  I've dropped mine a couple times (2-3 feet to wood or tile floor) and it's come through okay, no worse than a bit of scuffing on the edges.  Seems pretty solid to me.

I haven't had any issues with the frontlight causing headaches (I leave it on at about 40% brightness in almost all conditions), but wonder if maybe something funky is going on with the PWM (presumably they modulate the LEDs feeding the lightpipe and diffuser -- I'm not aware of any other typical approach) that some people are sensitive to...

edit: typo

Welp, that's good enough for me. Maybe it will be my Christmas present this year.

I also have a retina iPad, and like I said, am surprised how good it is for reading (apart from the weight.) This leads me to wonder - the advantage of e-ink was supposedly that it is using reflected ambient light rather than emissive. But once you start putting a mess of lights on an e-ink device, what, practically, is the difference versus back-lighting? Is there really still a readability advantage?

There's a definite readability difference. It doesn't look lit unless you're in pitch darkness. Instead, it just looks like slightly off white paper.

It's still a reflective, not emissive display -- the built-in light and lightguide in front ensures light still hits it if you're in the dark, shadows, etc.  The main difference between the paperwhite and previous generations is I don't ever need to worry about getting the angle just right when I'm in non-optimal lighting conditions.

Oh yeah, I totally forgot about that. I live on Cape Cod and we occasionally go to the beach. Tablet and phones are tough there. Kindles work fine.

16 pages late to the thread.

iPhone 5, iPad Retina and a Kindle PW.

I bought my wife a Kindle for Christmas. I liked reading it on more than my iPad 1, which I had been doing for a couple of years. But I also wanted touchscreen for the keyboard and they only offer that with backlighting, so I got the PW. Then gave my youngest the iPad 1 (my oldest inherited an iPad 2) and bought a Retina.

Love it. The iPad is great but the battery life sucks in comparison (my PW lasts a week or two with 1-2 hours of reading per day) and the e-ink is a much easier on the eyes.

And that's with the backlight off. I use the ambient light like a normal book. The PW light is a sliding scale. You can turn it off, all the way on, or a bit over a dozen levels of luminosity in between. I'll turn on the backlight in lowlight conditions, and they do recommend turning it on to actually get that "paper white" effect. Ironically, they recommend full brightness in full light conditions and dim in low light conditions. Or maybe not ironically because it makes sense based on their pitch (make it "white" in full bright conditions, make it legible in low light but not so much to strain the eyes).

Anyway, because it's illuminating a piece of paper, it's a lot easier on the eyes than an LCD.

Oh, it's also cheaper, lighter, and more durable than an iPad. But keep the iPad :-)

My 2nd-gen paperwhite kindle turned up today.  Definitely an incremental update.  The frontlight is a little more white (the 1st gen has a slightly more blue-ish tint) and the slight shadow/ghosting at the very bottom of the display appears to be gone (or so subtle now that I can't see it).  The touchscreen / display refresh might be a tiny bit more responsive, but it's hard to tell.  There are a bunch of little UI/UX improvements (which hopefully they'll update the older model to as well) -- most notably when you tap the top edge of the screen for the menu, there's an up-arrow at the bottom edge overlay which brings up a smaller page view and a scrub control for easier flipping through the book more than one page at a time, which seems pretty nice.

All in all a nice hardware upgrade, but probably completely skippable unless you really want the absolute latest or greatest.