The Kindle Index • Hacker News Board

Re: The Kindle Index

#71

Post by bambax » Thu, Apr 19, 2012, 7:49 AM UTC

why-el wrote: post #61

bambax wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely! The Kindle is a wonderful device that is already very good and doesn't improve enough to justify upgrading all the time like Apple devices. And it's very cheap, which makes selling old ones not very appealing. I own a Kindle 3 (with a keyboard) and couldn't live without it. Even if I eventually buy a newer one I will keep that one to leave at home for example, or give to my kids. But sell it? Never. This…

Off topic question, but you seem like a long time Kindle user, did you ever have screen problems with it? Mine is just two months old, and its screen half-froze and I can only read half of the documents. I googled this around and it looks like its a frequent hardware problem people face.

Never had a problem with mine, and I don't treat it with special care. YMMV, I guess... ;-)

Re: The Kindle Index

#72

Post by gala8y » Thu, Apr 19, 2012, 11:10 AM UTC

dkarl wrote: post #70

personlurking wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, the trend in calling regular books "dead tree books" and in leaving out the "e" in e-books. I have my own ideas as to why this is happening though I fear they would derail the conversation on the article at hand, thus I'll just leave it as food for thought.

I agree "dead tree" is a little bit derogatory, and unjustifiably so. Until e-books are strictly superior, until they are as good as physical books in every important way, we should respect what we've got. I think my primary motivation for putting down dead tree books is that the e-books I've bought and haven't read are invisible. They don't sit on my bookshelves openly shaming me for not reading them :-O

I really like being surrounded by books I haven't read. Books I've read - I put them aside. Put some around and think of it as of an invitation.

In Lem's Solaris they have paper books even on space station. (Love Tarkovsky's movie.)

Re: The Kindle Index

#73

Post by smackfu » Thu, Apr 19, 2012, 12:50 PM UTC

tomkarlo wrote: post #33

Unless I'm totally mis-understanding their data gathering, this post seems completely wrongheaded (or at the least, willfully ignorant and self-serving.) They're indexing the popularity of e-readers in different MSAs by looking at how many are for sale on secondary markets, as a % of what's for sale on the secondary markets in that city. This seems like a really poor proxy for how popular e-readers are in those locat…

Not to mention that the big price drops for e-readers were just this Christmas season. I personally bought two $89 Kindles as gifts for relatives, and I'm sure tons of others were sold at that price, and they wouldn't be reflected in these stats at all.

Re: The Kindle Index

#74

Post by lmm » Thu, Apr 19, 2012, 1:09 PM UTC

corin_ wrote: post #22

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last seventy or so books that I read on my iPad, from novels to textbooks, weren't too bad.

I've never had a problem reading text on my blackberry, or even books on my iPad - but since I got a Kindle I do far, far prefer it to the iPad. Maybe that's largely a personal opinion or maybe most people would agree with me, but either way my point is - yeah, it's not "too bad", and is perfectly fine, but it doesn't mean it's not significantly worse.

YMMV, but I found reading books on my transformer a lot more comfortable after I switched the kindle app over to white-on-black rather than black-on-white. It was enough that I almost gave up on my actual kindle for a while.

Re: The Kindle Index

#75

Post by vbock » Sun, Apr 22, 2012, 7:59 PM UTC

I just think it's a bit bizarre to use sales of dedicated reading technology as a proxy for books read. As has been pointed out here, there's a lot of not-so-dedicated tech that can read e-books. Plus, you know, there are books. Major metro areas still support great independent book stores. Places out in the hinterlands don't, which means that downloadability is a bigger factor.

Anyway, seems to me that if we really cared about literacy, we'd want a random sample of peeps asked how many books they read last month, not what hardware/software they have on which books might potentially be read!