kindle2 - some thoughts on ebook reading

[Sky]

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.

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

[Engels]

Ah, the secret of your sexual prowess is revealed.

[K9]

And this is why I will never own a Kindle and remain skeptical about the whole e-book concept 

[Engels]

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?

[Righ]

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.

[Trippy]

And this is why I will never own a Kindle and remain skeptical about the whole e-book concept 

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.

[K9]

And this is why I will never own a Kindle and remain skeptical about the whole e-book concept 

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.

[Kitsune]

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.

[Engels]

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

[bhodi]

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

[Quinton]

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.

[Kitsune]

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.

[Quinton]

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.

[stark]

I call shenanigans on the e-ink thing

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.

[Engels]

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.

[Ingmar]

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.

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.

[Koyasha]

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?

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.

[Quinton]

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.

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.

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.

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.

[Nija]

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.

[Quinton]

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.

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.

[Trippy]

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.

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.

[Numtini]

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.

[Jherad]

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.

[Trippy]

Lawsuit: Amazon Ate My Homework 

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.

[Sky]

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

[Nija]

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 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.

[Numtini]

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.

[Arnold]

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

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.

[Stewie]

So I just bought a Sony PRS 505

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.

[Numtini]

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.

[schild]

Oh god Calibre is the best thing ever.

[sidereal]

Strike two against Amazon's douchey approach to e-books

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.

[naum]

Oh god Calibre is the best thing ever.

Advantages of Calibre over Stanza?

[schild]

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.

[Numtini]

Strike two against Amazon's douchey approach to e-books

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.

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.