171–180 of 192 posts
My biggest gripe with Voyage is the silly restriction to 4GB and no SD card in order to make PDF viewing far less likely. A lot of scientific papers are available in PDF only as well as older books and magazines and they are considerably larger than Kindle's own format yet preserving layout nicely, so they are my preferred media. I don't care about uneven lighting (yellow-blue cast across the screen) as I turn the li…
>and white light is the worst for reading in bed. It’s proven to keep you awake. This is not a great argument. First, because the Kindle allows you to dim the screen, and in fact, does so automatically in dark rooms. Pulling my Voyage out and comparing it to my screen with Flux, anecdotally, it looks to be producing less light than my laptop does. And what are the alternatives? Not lighting the kindle display, and ha…
It's not the luminance of the light that's a problem, it's the colour. White light contains a lot of blue, which is associated with melatonin suppression that in turn throws out sleeping patterns[1]. This problem remains even with very dim light sources. The alternative therefore is to use LEDs with a lower colour temperature[2], producing the kind of orange light associated with flames and traditional incandescent l…
I had been planning to launch a big, public campaign about Kindle typography to try and get Amazon to change her ways. But I came to the conclusion: why bother? This is precisely the feeling I had right before I resigned from my position at Amazon. Though I worked at a subsidiary, not Amazon proper, the culture at Amazon everywhere can be absurdly stubborn. In the presence of a bad team, the "leadership principles" c…
I agree with this post, but not with regards to the Kindle, but more Amazon as an entity. Also, perfect timing to read this article, after just purchasing a Kindle Paperwhite and having it for a few weeks now. As a casual reader, I find the Kindle Paperwhite as the perfect medium for my reading needs. I can hold it in one hand, I can read it any time of the day with adjustable brightness, and the e-ink is very clear…
Kobo has already had those features for years now.
As it happens, I didn't buy my Kobo Aura H2O for that reason. I bought it for the microSD card slot, the frontlight, the ability to move documents to and from the device on my own terms, and the ability to read EPUBs without a pass through Calibre first. The water resistance is a nice plus.
I'm all for making the Kobo the best reading device ever, but so far, after the first 40 books, I haven't been able to come up with anything I might want to change about the hardware.
The Kobo in-device bookstore and computer sync software, on the other hand, could use some more work. Fortunately for me, I don't ever have to use either of those things to enjoy the full use of my hardware device.
Even if Amazon has 70% of the market share, they can't afford to ignore features that their remaining competitors have.
To be fair, I find it much easier to fall asleep after using my Kindle Paperwhite than I do with an iPad. But, virtually every aspect of the Kindle ecosystem user experience is an experience in mediocrity. In some respects, I feel like the company is like what you'd get if you crossed the worst aspects of Microsoft and Google. (And apologies to my friends who work at Amazon, but let's be honest: you're all going to q…
While there are plenty of mediocre aspects of the Kindle ecosystem, there are plenty of excellent ones as well. For example: 1. Return policy. Amazon has the best ebook return policy in the business. It seems essentially the same as their physical book policy. The last time I checked, Google Play was next-best (7 days no-questions-asked, regardless of jurisdiction) and everyone else grudgingly had a return policy whe…
I have a Paperwhite and I couldn't be happier with it. It's the best manga reading device I own and it does a pretty good job with PDFs.
After having owned three kindles, I have switched to a kobo about a year ago. The kobo has many of its own problems, but it gets the reading experience right: it uses (very un-aggressive) hyphenation, and the lock screen displays the book cover. I miss going on Amazon, clicking some button, and immediately start reading a new book. Now that's a multi step process that involves a computer and a DRM removal tool. But t…
So is it reasonably easy for one to step out of the walled garden? I've considered buying one (Kobo) but I've read comments saying it constantly wants to connect to wifi (after a factory reset which sometimes is required because of buggy firmware) and transfering files without using the desktop software is nearly impossible. I just want to read PDFs, text files, possibly HTML with some light CSS. I'd like sync to tak…
My biggest gripe with Voyage is the silly restriction to 4GB and no SD card in order to make PDF viewing far less likely. A lot of scientific papers are available in PDF only as well as older books and magazines and they are considerably larger than Kindle's own format yet preserving layout nicely, so they are my preferred media. I don't care about uneven lighting (yellow-blue cast across the screen) as I turn the li…
I actually couldn't fit my whole Kindle (not sideloaded) collection on it at the same time, even discounting cookbooks, comics, and other heavy-graphics things, which was a problem because the category feature at the time only supported on-device books.
I don't mind the justification as a general rule, and actually find extreme hyphenization (which was their route on the iOS apps) much more distracting.
My only real problems have been:
* The haptic feedback can't be made prominent enough to be obvious through the first-party leather cover.
* The tap zone for switching percentage/page number/etc has no visual affordance and I find it pretty non-obvious to reliably find.
* The automatic lighting is way more sensitive to what's over my shoulder than the ambient light, so goes very dark if the room is softly lit from behind the Kindle (or very bright if there's a light in my background).
* The font size isn't consistent between books even if I don't use publisher font. I assume that's because the markup of the books has some influence on the font size and doesn't always use "default."
* I'd prefer a first-party book spine case over a notepad style case--that said, the origami stand has been extremely useful for reading while eating.
Other than those niggles, it's been great, and certainly has been a more enjoyable device to use than any of my past Kindles.
I really pity the author. He's lost the ability to enjoy a book and throws a fit when typesetting is flawed. A sure path to disappointment and unhappiness is to demand only "the best" in everything. He should just learn to read his books as they are.
Have you used a Kindle? It's not small nitpicking, sometimes they layouts it makes are laughably bad and hard to read. Basic stuff that anyone who has read a book would notice at some point and it hasn't been fixed in YEARS.
I've started seriously contemplating going entirely to scanned, pirated PDFs and simply mailing the author a check the retail cost of the book. I'd love for technical books to start rendering PDFs for multiple common ereader screen sizes. Journal articles are too much to hope for.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you used a Kindle? It's not small nitpicking, sometimes they layouts it makes are laughably bad and hard to read. Basic stuff that anyone who has read a book would notice at some point and it hasn't been fixed in YEARS.
Novels on Kindle are bad enough in this regard, but they are head and shoulders better than anything resembling a textbook--particularly if the textbook has anything like mathematics or code in it. I've started seriously contemplating going entirely to scanned, pirated PDFs and simply mailing the author a check the retail cost of the book. I'd love for technical books to start rendering PDFs for multiple common eread…
Google Play Books supports having both EPUB and PDF for the same document, and, I believe, chooses between them based on screen size or other platform features. I don't think it supports having prerendered pages for different layouts yet, but certainly the "buy a title, which might have multiple formats for different devices" thing is already established there, so its not a big jump to see it being done with more specificity.
I like the Voyage alright, but I want the ability to turn the light ALL the way off, not just to a minimum. I still have one and use it, they just really need improve on these things so it feels less like just another screen, and more like a book.