Last summer I was sitting in a library and had noticed the person across from me was using an E-ink device I had never seen before. I showed the person my kindle and asked if they like their device more or less than mine. I vividly recall the woman's eyes light up with excitement as she handed me the device and pen she was holding. Perfect written text on an e-ink device the size of a paper notebook with what felt like an almost identical weight to my kindle. Stunning! She told me how she had been using it exclusively for note taking and the battery life was fairly comparable.
I wish I could recall the name of the device but I think it was something by Sony. I couldn't help but be stunned though, Amazon is completely missing the opportunity with these devices and I feel bad for the people who will continue to purchase their obsolete products.
If you are one of those reviewers who honestly reads and reviews books, then you can feel like your signal is lost in the noise of the shill reviewers. Also, for those who were initially interested in what their real-life friends were reading, the majority of those IRL friends will have dropped off the site over the years, either because of a natural attrition or because they have come to prefer snackable web content over books.
Agree completely the broken community is much more important than the aged look of the website.
As much as possible, I find myself interacting with Goodreads through calibre plugins; I've got a library with zero actual book files that contains an entry for every book in my library, and I mainly use that to browse my collection. Since syncing that list takes so long, my actual calibre libraries are also synced to Goodreads, as that's where I actually make my changes.
With Library thing's recent removal of library limits, I'm thinking more and more about abandoning Goodreads--except I don't know if there's a calibre plugin for PT, and I've spent so much time adding and updating book records for items in my goodreads library, which would have to be redone for LT.
Amazon should never have been allowed to buy Goodreads.
This is why big social media sites have such high valuations. Any small group could develop an alternative to Facebook. However, the chances of that usurping them is almost zero. The same goes for Goodreads.
reMarkable would perhaps fall in the same category (eInk readers which are miles ahead of Kindle) https://remarkable.com/
https://gizmodo.com/sonys-beautiful-e-ink-tablet-made-me-fee...
There are probably at least a few good places to buy replacement batteries; I got mine from batteryship dot com. I have zero association with them except that I bought this one battery, and will probably buy a phone battery from them in the future.
https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/next-generat...
[Edit]
Sony might be closing down the Digital Paper division
https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/sony-might-b...
In the tablet vs laptop for travel I'm going to go laptop every time. So laptop + Kindle.
And to another comment, yes the Kindle is small and light but it's something else I need to keep track of so I tend not to bring laptop + tablet + Kindle. (And I've never been able to make an iPad work for me as a laptop replacement.)
Really tablet is just crappy movie watcher or smaller webpage reader. Having all this was good since on that trip my SSD de-soldered itself from my motherboard on my Laptop, forcing me to use USB Sticks and turn it into a $3200 chrome book.
I basically equate the kindle to a charging or backup set of wireless earbuds in weight.
Amazon didn't want to expand on Kindle functionality because
1) They were scared people would stop reading books
2) They were scared of it becoming something they couldn't control
3) They have their heads up their asses and think they can make software and hardware better than anyone else when all they can make is stuff like Kindle and Kindle Fire Phone and other useless crap
you know how originally Steve Jobs didn't want an App Store on iPhone
That's what Amazon was like
They are control freaks
EXCEPT
they are useless at hardware and software as far as it comes to devices (Kindle Fire Phone is a good example of how bad, though Kindle is also devolving fast)
Also they can't make a good ecosystem because they screw over everyone they work with
You see it in AWS where they copied and cloned successful AWS companies
You see it in Alexa where they steal ideas from companies in the Alexa Fund etc
It was the same story in Kindle eInk App Store
*
We built apps for eInk and all the other developers who worked on its shared the same sentiment we did. None of the developers could believe how bad Amazon were at working with devs
It was the most godawful experience you could ever imagine working with anyone on anything
A) They were so bad at letting apps go out to customers they had to close down the app store
B) For every app that did well they started contacting other developers to clone the App
That's why you saw 2 of everything. One high quality version, and then a cheap clone because Amazon's mindset was to have 2 or 3 of everything that started selling well
So all the early developers who spent money and time on it, instead of getting rewarded, got screwed
C) I had an Amazon guy literally tell me on the phone - You've already made $200,000 this year. Why do you want to make more? Our development costs were not even covered with $200,000
D) We had one hit game in one area. Let's say (just as an example) card games. We had a separate card game pending approval, Game X. They kept delaying it
Meanwhile an Android developer contacted us saying - You guys have this card game. How is it doing? Because Amazon is contacting us saying card games are hot and asking us to make Game X
So, we put in the effort to do R&D and discovered card games were hot
And they stopped our READY FOR LAUNCH app in the same area (card games) and started contacting other developers to make that same app. It's the kind of stuff you can't even imagine a business partner ever doing to you
*
E) They kept one set of developers (ones who they thought 'had already made enough money') completely out of launch of the Kindle Paperwhite
So some of the people who invested in their Kindle eInk App Store, they Screwed over by purposefully keeping out many of them from the launch of the new device
What is crazy is they invited other developers to clone the same apps
Many of those were low quality devs from 3rd world countries who were asked to make clone apps. They found some unknown company from India (no disrespect, just implying that it was not some known game studio) to clone our card game app and launch for Kindle paperwhite (while our game was kept out)
So our apps were kept out of launch and meanwhile low quality knockoffs of our apps were sent to customers
We literally had customers emailing and writing reviews complaining 'why is it not available for Kindle Paperwhite'
*
you might be talking about the Sony eReader
It was the first mainstream eInk based reader. Amazon takes all the credit but Sony did it first
All Amazon did was get lots of authors to offer free books and use that to get market share. Now everyone thinks Amazon invented eReaders and eBooks
Well, guess in a sense they did as history is written by the winners
Amazon is very good where it can get subsidies from the government (no sales tax, USPS special rates) or where it can make a platform and invite people in and later screw them over and replace them with someone else
AWS is pretty impressive
Sooner or later they are going to run out of affiliates/developers/companies/suppliers to screw over
For context Sony's reader required a windows app. Kindle had whispernet.
I wasn't a huge fan of either company at the time but ended up working at both in the following years.
I read fiction on a Kindle oasis. Its fantastic. I can't think of a single improvement.
Its impossible for me to work with technical materials on the Kindle. Specs, tutorials, tech blogs, tech books. All are unusable because of resizing figures.
I have one and I can. The case is too slippery. It's hard to operate one-handed while lying on the couch because it slips out of your hand. My old Kindle 3 is very easy to operate one-handed at any angle, no slipping.
I crank out the desktop for technical content almost universally. iPad doesn’t cut it either.
But at the same time I have actual physical books for very technical stuff. They are still easier to use.
They probably should be two different devices. Personally I'm waiting for the new Remarkable.
But my biggest complaint is that Kindle made books ugly. I love beautiful typography, and bad typography can ruin a reading experience. Reading Kindle books are like stepping back in time to low-quality mass-market paperbacks.
Using John Crowley's Little, Big as an example:
* Original print version: https://i.imgur.com/pLmQyja.jpg
* Kindle: https://i.imgur.com/xRu0eLo.jpg
* Kindle Cloud Reader: https://i.imgur.com/GDqCD9u.jpg
There's absolutely nothing stopping us from being able to render the book beautifully with the right font. In this particularly egregious example, they didn't even bother to include the ornamentations. That's one thing, but those underlined chapter headings? They didn't even try.
As I understand it, modern e-books are just HTML, designed to be reformatted to different screens. There appears to be limited support for fonts, and whatever Kindle uses to render text is awful.
Another frustration about the quality of the books is how a lot of older fiction is only available in very shoddily digitized versions that don't even use correct typography ("smart" quotes, em dashes, indented paragraphs, etc.).
Funny you should mention that. I usually watch old movies with the closed captioning on, and it's clear the captioning isn't even proofread. Lots of times it will be a sound-alike word that doesn't fit in the sentence. Perhaps they employ non-native English speakers to type in the text.
I consider it a well-made piece of technology that Just Works. (actually, a recent software update changed something that required changing my muscle memory... wish I could disable updates!)
Once something sticks to the wall, they are absolutely ruthless at getting it to product-market fit and commercial success, but interestingly enough, they stop there and all further development is merely iterative. They usually have some of the first decent and usuable products in any market, but tend to go for full commercial exploitation and pure maintenance mode from there.
Redshift used to be an absolute game changer for the Big Data market (I still remember their 1 TB for under 999$/month claim to this day), but Snowflake or BigQuery are just much better products this day and they never made the architectural shift from the client/server based architecture.
Prime Video is an absolute success story despite their awful interface, UX and crappy metadata, just because they got a grip on the hardware, smartly cross-sold it and bought / produced some good & free content.
I could go on and on, but it seems to be company core DNA to stop at 80/20. Whether that's a good thing or not, I'm still unsure.
Reading the tweets, it seems like Bezos made all the important decisions. If he is not around because he is focussed on other projects, who could do it instead? Judging by the story that Bezos didn't allow any pixel to be changed on the Amazon homepage, I can imagine that this is a pattern and whoever tried to implement a change doesn't dare to try it again.
It's okay, but it's also obvious they didn't put any buttons into the Paperwhite to have a reason for the more expensive model which does have buttons to turn the page(and nothing else of value it seems).
I find my Paperwhite to be quite usable, but I agree that almost everything could have been done better. I still don't get why some ebooks I buy land on the Kindle immediately but some will only download once I try to read them(which is super annoying on vacation), I don't know why the library seems to be randomly shuffled every time I look at it, and I don't know why it's not possible to completely shut off the Paperwhite's backlighting.
A lot of little strange decision were made with that thing.
On top of that they're well made and the battery lasts forever, i can't complain at all.
(Not that touchscreens are bad per se, but the responsiveness of the screens/whole OS on Paperwhite is bad.)
It’s also possible that people who read on these devices aren’t tech savvy enough to care about how awful of an experience it is.
Absolutely.
Some people who don't quite "get" computers seem to find it really difficult what they should expect from a device. They can have a laptop that needs 5 minutes to boot and a broken mouse that jumps to a random location on the screen once every minute, and the only thing they'll complain about is that Windows doesn't let them select a lot of files properly(because the mouse jumps around like crazy).
The skit in IT Crowd with the "laptop from the exorcist" is sometimes more accurate than one might like.
People want a cheap device that doesn't ruin the reading experience and has access to all the books they want.
Kobo offers a complete ecosystem similar to the Kindle, with bookstore, devices and syncing. There are a number of regional players as well in this space.
Then, of course, there are all the device makers that simply expect you to bring your own content.
Someone on hacker news talked about using syncthing for their ebook and I had to replicate it. it sounded so much more useful than my previous experience with ebook readers, the nook simple touch.
My quest to find an e-reader that supported Android 4.4+ and both headphone jacks and SD cards resulted in a likebook Mars.
Now I can use syncthing to sync my library...ebooks, PDF, and audiobooks, automatically in the background, no account needed.
I would have preferred to purchase a modern incarnation of the very first Kindle, with a headphone jack, SD card, and keyboard, but nobody makes such a device any longer, or if they do, it is so out of date that it cannot run syncthing.
I continue to be excited about the pine phone keyboard design, because from there it is only a properly sized e ink screen away from being a tiny e-reader with keyboard headphone jack and Linux!
Anyone has any insights into it?
Apparently, Kindles are the worst in the terms of input latency and performance, but then this is also expected given their specification and the price point.
I agree with almost all of the above, except for the touchscreen. I had the Kindle Non-Touch 4 and used it from 2012-2019, and having the touchscreen was an amazing improvement in usability and QOL when using the Kindle. Makes navigating, creating collections etc a lot faster. Other than that, I wish they would show the Kindle more love!
The Kindle 3 did buttons right. You don't even need to push the page advance/retreat buttons, just flex your palm holding the Kindle. Very nice.
May be the browser is not being used by many hardcore Kindle users, but Hacker News on my Kindle Oasis is a delight to use(if the attached URLs went easy on JS, Looking at you TechCrunch); Especially when I was bedridden after a surgery and Kindle was one of the few devices which worked for my accessibility needs.
It feel having 'experimental' tag on the browser is like 'If you keep using this browser, instead of buying books from us, we'll pull the plug anytime'.
I agree about the touchscreen, I'm really happy with just page back and page forward.
I owned several kindles but my current one has been gathering dust for years and instead I just use the kindle phone app.
I'm not talking about the state of E-ink, but the usability of the Kindle device itself. I current use a latest-gen Paperwhite but I've owned almost all of them. The current one, in my opinion, is a huge step backwards in lots of ways from earlier iterations. The touch screen is appalling and has no place on an E-ink device. The software is incredibly bad. There's so much scope there to surface useful information on the home screen but there's nothing of value there - I can't even see more than a couple of books in progress, much less find something I may want to read later. It's just astoundingly bad.