Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Not buying another Kindle

androidauthority.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 288 posts

Re: Not buying another Kindle

#251

Post by frm88 »

two_cents wrote: post #73

> We are still dealing with a home screen that prioritizes advertisements and promoted recommendations over your actual library. Navigating a large collection of books remains a chore, with sluggish animations and a lack of robust folder management that has been a standard feature on rival devices for years. Such claims make me think that this article is biased. There are two tabs on main Kindle screen - Home and Lib…

BOOX devices have their own issues...

This is such a non-issue. Whether my device phones home to the US or to China makes no difference at all to me (as a on US / China citizen). Boox devices do not serve any kinds of ads, are fully Android, you can customize your starting screen however you like, read every format (including amazon. kwx), have great battery life and I own what I put on them and nobody bricks them for whatever reason. Even better: I can buy wherever I want from* and download directly from the store to the device.

*Edit: except amazon, of course

Re: Not buying another Kindle

#252

Post by frm88 »

marak830 wrote: post #231

Slightly off topic, but I was discussing with my wife getting a kindle for my son (8) recently. Any recommendations for alternatives? I have no problem using calibre to convert the books, and manually transfer from my PC. It just needs to read books.

Depending on how old your son is and or how much you want to invest:

https://www.xteink.com/products/xteink-x4

https://www.boox.com/

Re: Not buying another Kindle

#253

Post by broken-kebab »

stevekemp wrote: post #21
johngossman wrote: post #8

I can understand why one would want to move from Kindle to another device, but this article starts by complaining that support is being dropped for devices from before 2013. I can even understand being upset by this, but I have absolutely no faith that whatever other device I switch to will still be supported in 10+ years. Could be. But I sure wouldn't count on it.

I feel the same way. To be honest I'm on my third kindle, their life-span seems to be about five years for me. I don't love having to replace them, but paying €120 every five years is probably worth it. I mean that's €2/month, and I have a huge library of books which I load via calibre. I read daily, on the bus to work, at home in bed, and while there are "more free" ereaders I've become accustomed to the kindle and…

Let me ask to what exactly have you been accustomed? Reading as such doesn't seem to be different on pretty much any e-reader.

Re: Not buying another Kindle

#254

Post by tiagod »

nickvec wrote: post #150

Besides portability, what other benefits are there to using e-books? I vastly prefer having a physical copy of a book, mainly because I’d rather not look at a screen while reading (unless necessary.) Plus, I love lending out books to friends, and I feel like it’s a much bigger pain to do so virtually (unless they’re tech savvy!)

For me the:

- Built-in dictionary - Being able to read anywhere, even when light is not available (on a taxi, for example) - Can fit it in my pocket - Less annoying to read while lying down in bed, and the page is automatically marked when I fall asleep - Adjustable typeface and font size

Re: Not buying another Kindle

#255

Post by johanyc »

Insanity wrote: post #4

The devices were supported for more than a decade. Sure, this forced deprecation isn’t great but it’s still had a longer lifetime than many other devices. I’ll happily keep reading on my kindle, it’s the most ergonomic way of reading for me especially when traveling. I get that there are other options like Kobo, but I don’t see it as significantly better than the Kindles. And I like the fact that I can also use the i…

There wouldn't be so much backlash if they didn't end downloading ebook support from the website.

Re: Not buying another Kindle

#256

Post by amanaplanacanal »

razorbeamz wrote: post #235
WorldMaker wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said, anecdotally I've already done it. Amazon only just enabled the PC "Send to Kindle" to support ePub directly instead of the old silly work around of rename the .epub to .kfx (and no other change). They've been very bad at keeping their list of formats up to date in their own documentation. Some of that perhaps because they don't want it to be so obvious and it is intentional obfuscation (to keep people usin…

I was curious and just tested this with directly putting an ePub on my Kindle and it did not work. I also tried renaming the ePub to a .kfx and it still did not work.

I have also been unable to make this work. I don't know what WorldMaker is doing differently.

Re: Not buying another Kindle

#257

Post by chocochunks »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #256
razorbeamz wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious and just tested this with directly putting an ePub on my Kindle and it did not work. I also tried renaming the ePub to a .kfx and it still did not work.

I have also been unable to make this work. I don't know what WorldMaker is doing differently.

Having Calibre auto-convert it and not realize I guess.

Re: Not buying another Kindle

#259

Post by chocochunks »

WorldMaker wrote: post #154
chocochunks wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure about that? Even Amazon's own sales page state: "Kindle Format 8 (AZW3), Kindle (AZW), TXT, PDF, unprotected MOBI, PRC natively; PDF, DOCX, DOC, HTML, EPUB, TXT, RTF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP through conversion; Audible audio format (AAX). Learn more about supported file types for personal documents." implying that ePub only works through conversion. They don't support DRMed ePubs through conversion either so…

As I said, anecdotally I've already done it. Amazon only just enabled the PC "Send to Kindle" to support ePub directly instead of the old silly work around of rename the .epub to .kfx (and no other change). They've been very bad at keeping their list of formats up to date in their own documentation. Some of that perhaps because they don't want it to be so obvious and it is intentional obfuscation (to keep people usin…

TXT and PDF are on both sides because Amazon will convert them to the appropriate Amazon format if you use send to kindle. TXT has always been natively supported on Kindle. As fair as Amazon is concerned, KFX is an internal format only for their use so there's no need to list it. When Amazon added ePub conversion officially KFX had already existed for over half a decade.

Your anecdote also seems to be the only instance of it working natively. Keep in mind Calibre will autoconvert for you.

Re: Not buying another Kindle

#260

Post by alfiedotwtf »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #23
johngossman wrote: post #8

I can understand why one would want to move from Kindle to another device, but this article starts by complaining that support is being dropped for devices from before 2013. I can even understand being upset by this, but I have absolutely no faith that whatever other device I switch to will still be supported in 10+ years. Could be. But I sure wouldn't count on it.

What's also not mentioned is that the discontinued devices don't support KFX. KFX is the modern kindle format, AZW meanwhile is heavily PDF-based. KFX was designed ground-up by Amazon, supports every modern feature they could think of, and presumably couldn't be backported to 2013 and earlier Kindles; AZW meanwhile was basically a wrapper around a subset of PDF. KFX is a complete redo, notable enough it's what "Enhan…

Unfortunately I’ve found the majority of “authors” on Amazon these days for new books are just AI slop. And I think it’s only going to get worse
Post reply on HN