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The Kindle is fine, but could’ve been much more

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Re: The Kindle is fine, but could’ve been much more

#11

Post by lemoncucumber »

dgarrett wrote: post #7

Everything the author complains about is a feature of the Kindle. Just use your iPad if you want more than an “electronic book”.

Bad typography on a device whose entire purpose is reading is not a feature by any stretch of the imagination.

Even if all you expect from the kindle is an "electronic book," they should at least attempt to reach parity with the typesetting of paper books, but they clearly don't care to.

Re: The Kindle is fine, but could’ve been much more

#12

Post by muddi900 »

Kindle is stuck in the iPod model; it is a device that supports the wider Amazon market place, like the iPod was a way for Apple to lock-in people to itunes. It is great if you want to sell hardware, but don't expect any innovations on the software side.

Some of the blame lies on the publisher's feet. They literally colluded to stop Amazon's rise. However, Amazon did not think of reading as an activity you can create a platform around. You can, the rising popularity of Pocket is testament to that fact.

Re: The Kindle is fine, but could’ve been much more

#13

Post by danso »

> The Kindle can’t even display web pages well! Its browser is slow and bad, though if you do manage to navigate to a page with an article on it, you can enter “Article Mode” and have a mediocre reading experience.

This statement is made as if the author thinks rendering the contemporary web is a trivial achievement.

Re: The Kindle is fine, but could’ve been much more

#14

Post by jhbadger »

lukifer wrote: post #5

I'm more of a fan of the Nook and Kobo series (ability to sideload DRM-less ePubs is non-negotiable). But I like the less-is-more approach for e-readers; if anything, I'd prefer they had even more spartan/minimalist UIs, mimicking the "zero UI" affordances of a physical book as much as possible. I'm just being finicky, but I still find the e-ink screen flash a little distracting from the flow of reading (even in newe…

Epubs and Mobis are for all purposes identical and can converted back and forth with ease (they are both just HTML containers), and you can certainly sideload DRM-free Mobis on Kindle, so I don't see that as a major problem. What is a problem is the very poor handling of PDFs on Kindles.

Re: The Kindle is fine, but could’ve been much more

#16

Post by drewg123 »

The big problem for the kindle for news is the unreliability of updates. My wife has subscribed first to the New York Times and then later to The Washington Post on her kindle. Both subscriptions have randomly failed to update for days on end at times, leading to frustration and amazon customer support calls. We finally cancelled NYT and switched to the Washington post after a period of several days with no NYT updates. Sadly, the post is not all that much better.

Re: The Kindle is fine, but could’ve been much more

#17

Post by lowtolerance »

lukifer wrote: post #5

I'm more of a fan of the Nook and Kobo series (ability to sideload DRM-less ePubs is non-negotiable). But I like the less-is-more approach for e-readers; if anything, I'd prefer they had even more spartan/minimalist UIs, mimicking the "zero UI" affordances of a physical book as much as possible. I'm just being finicky, but I still find the e-ink screen flash a little distracting from the flow of reading (even in newe…

You can side-load drm-free content on a Kindle, it’s pretty straightforward.

Re: The Kindle is fine, but could’ve been much more

#18

Post by mcherm »

danso wrote: post #13

> The Kindle can’t even display web pages well! Its browser is slow and bad, though if you do manage to navigate to a page with an article on it, you can enter “Article Mode” and have a mediocre reading experience. This statement is made as if the author thinks rendering the contemporary web is a trivial achievement.

It IS trivial.

Now, I'll admit that there is an enormously complex process required to render modern html and css properly. But there are several engines that do this rendering and are available as open source. So it is easy to render web pages... use one of these engines.

Re: The Kindle is fine, but could’ve been much more

#20

Post by christoph »

lowtolerance wrote: post #17
lukifer wrote: post #5

I'm more of a fan of the Nook and Kobo series (ability to sideload DRM-less ePubs is non-negotiable). But I like the less-is-more approach for e-readers; if anything, I'd prefer they had even more spartan/minimalist UIs, mimicking the "zero UI" affordances of a physical book as much as possible. I'm just being finicky, but I still find the e-ink screen flash a little distracting from the flow of reading (even in newe…

You can side-load drm-free content on a Kindle, it’s pretty straightforward.

Amazon even give them all a unique email address so you can just send it supported files as easy as emailing a file. PDFs can be converted to native format by putting "convert" in the subject line.
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