411–420 of 433 posts
I asked about whether DeDRM will still work for me to truly own the books I legally purchased on /r/kindle, and my post was removed. It is infuriating there are communities of readers who are so in the pocket of Amazon they block conversations about DRM stripping.
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Ha, funny you say that. Last time I was at Everest Base Camp nearly everyone had an e-ink kindle. The long battery life and light weight are ideal for long isolated stretches in the Himalayas.
> Last time I was at Everest Base Camp nearly everyone had an e-ink kindle that's not surprising. it's the most popular e-reader. anyway, base camp is not the top of the mountain :) where they downloading e-books with the device 2g connection from there? > The long battery life and light weight are ideal for long isolated stretches in the Himalayas. modern e-readers last weeks on battery and weight less than 200 gram…
Yes. The nearest village (30 min walk) had cell towers when I was last there 7 years ago. I recall having surprisingly fantastic cell service in the entire Khumbu region.
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>>I don't even see what the Kobo value prop is. It is not amazon encumbered. That is a huge value to many
I had three readers from Sony (until they exited the business) and one from B&N (until they exited the business), because I didn't want to deal with conversion. Of these still in the business, Amazon looks the least-like to exit soon, and now there's no need to deal with conversion. As most of the books I read are out of copyright anyway, I'm not "encumbering" myself with Amazon in any way, except for buying hardware…
There is still a need to deal with conversion, but it happens on Amazon servers. Which is convenient, but gives no control over the results (and someone mentioned in another comment that it doesn't even preserve the cover image).
The Kindle itself does not natively support ePub. MOBI is being retired to favour AZW3, and Microsoft is moving to ePub.
On a side-note: I'm surprised devices like Kindle survive where superior ones like those from Sony perish simply because of the software walled garden. Not a good outlook for humanity.
So far the kindle oasis is the best ereader in term of hardware and ergonomy I've used and that's comparing to a kobo sage I also have and to all the ereaders I've had over the years (never had sony but I used to purposefully avoid amazon)
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That's not Kindle's only disadvantage. Kobo had distinct features I wanted that no Kindle offered at the time I last purchased. Like a screen big enough to comfortably read PDFs. 10.3" on Kobo Elipsa vs 7" on Kindle. IMHO that makes the Kindle only really useful for fiction. There's also Pocket support for reading offline web articles. Overdrive support so I can borrow books from my local library for free. Free Dropb…
Libraries are very important, and Kindle supports borrowing from them (for free): https://help.overdrive.com/en-us/0431.html
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The Palm Pilot 1000 was launched in 1996, the Rocket, 2 years later in 1998.
I can remember reading Project Gutenberg books on a Psion Series 3[1] in the early 90s but not sure exactly when that was, '92 maybe. I'll bet someone must have tried something similar, earlier, using one of the little Tandy portables. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Series_3
The form factor was of the Psion great and I even ended up getting the Sony Clié NX73V more or less because of that years later... Aside from the 227g weight, it was an amazing device for ebooks with an amazing 320x480 resolution...
It's funny, I use a 6" e-ink Tolino (Shine 2HD, if I recall right) for ebooks these days, but the far lower resolution LCD displays never bothered me back then... My phone today has a considerably better and larger display (Samsung AMOLED) compared to then, and yet I would prefer not to read on that; I wonder why...
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My biggest issue is Kobo doesn't actually support epub, or at least the modern incarnation. Their reader software is woefully out of date and has terrible epub handling, so to get the features you expect you're back to the Calibre->reader loop you're on with kindle, only instead of converting to AZW3 or KFX you're converting to KePub, Kobo's homegrown version of epub they did instead. You can fix that by installing K…
Kobos do support modern epubs, but for some inexplicable reason, they use their old epub2 renderer licensed from Adobe for all .epub files. You can just rename .epub files to .kepub and force Kobos to use the modern reader code. This gets you a lot better formatting. The catch is that location bookmarking becomes imprecise if you do this rather than use kepubify. It's super weird that they don't just offer the option…
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That's not Kindle's only disadvantage. Kobo had distinct features I wanted that no Kindle offered at the time I last purchased. Like a screen big enough to comfortably read PDFs. 10.3" on Kobo Elipsa vs 7" on Kindle. IMHO that makes the Kindle only really useful for fiction. There's also Pocket support for reading offline web articles. Overdrive support so I can borrow books from my local library for free. Free Dropb…
How does the screen on the Elipsa compare to the old Kindle DX screens? I'm babying my pair of old DXs, and it would be nice to have a replacements.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/oct/12/p...
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2.4Ghz covers more area.
Yeah, and because of that it quickly becomes useless in an apartment building surrounded by a few hundred 2.4GHz access points.
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The Kindle is inexpensive, has great support, has a huge library (open to non-US people with non-US credit cards), and you could just email a MOBI to it (which is great if the Kindle owner is your parent). It's only disadvantage was that it did not support ePub and so one had to go through Calibre. Now that Kindle is supporting ePUB and no Calibre-tion is needed, I don't even see what the Kobo value prop is.
That's not Kindle's only disadvantage. Kobo had distinct features I wanted that no Kindle offered at the time I last purchased. Like a screen big enough to comfortably read PDFs. 10.3" on Kobo Elipsa vs 7" on Kindle. IMHO that makes the Kindle only really useful for fiction. There's also Pocket support for reading offline web articles. Overdrive support so I can borrow books from my local library for free. Free Dropb…
For PDFs and non-fiction manuals and guides I highly prefer a proper powerful tablet with a color screen. E-readers just don't have the power, refresh rate or UX to handle browsing around in 300 page books with pictures.