The Kindle is fine, but could’ve been much more • Hacker News Board

I take my Kindle when I go backpacking. I like that it's light, sturdy, waterproof,and lasts many days without needing to be recharged. It doesn't compete with my phone. It competes with lugging a bunch of paperback books in my backpack, and it's so much better.

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

#44

Post by anon4242 » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 1:00 AM UTC

graaben wrote: post #40

I got my Kindle in 2012 and it still runs like a brand new device. I think Amazon's issue will eventually be that, unlike the iPhone, no one needs to upgrade their kindle more than once per decade or so. Of course if the newer models had dramatically better features or apps I would be tempted to upgrade.

I also got my Kindle around then and have never felt the need to upgrade. It works like a charm and I can read for weeks without recharging. I have hundreds of books on it and have never needed to remove any for lack of space.

The only thing that tempts me to upgrade is the new water-proof version so I finally can comfortably read while in the bath...

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

#45

Post by m463 » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 1:10 AM UTC

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”.

Unfortunately it's all about the e-ink.

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

#46

Post by jaak » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 1:29 AM UTC

hombre_fatal wrote: post #26

liability wrote: post #25

The demise of TTS was truly unfortunate. I got a 'Kindle Paperwhite' a few years back but I still primarily use my 'Kindle Keyboard' because it has TTS and the paperwhite doesn't. From what I understand, the publishing industry is to blame, thanks to their fear of cannibalizing audiobook sales. I will never forgive them for this.

Why assume everyone knows an acronym instead of spending the extra 1000ms to type it out once for us?

I'm going to have to call you out on this. You can't criticize a person for not taking the time to type out text-to-speech and then yourself use "1000ms" - because if I Google "1000ms" it returns 2236.94 Miles per hour!

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

#47

Post by jshaqaw » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 2:17 AM UTC

The Kindle isn’t perfect but it is a useful device which doesn’t feed the dopamine craving destruction of my attention span like my iOS devices. In many ways I’m grateful it is just reserved for the slow reading of real books and nothing else.

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

#48

Post by falcolas » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 4:02 AM UTC

mcherm wrote: post #18

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.

So, just to render a mobi file, a HTML / CSS (2.0) renderer is needed. So, minus JavaScript and some particularly fancy CSS, the Kindle is already most of the way there.

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

#49

Post by notus » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 6:26 AM UTC

danso wrote: post #24

mcherm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What examples are you thinking? Are you talking about Chrome and Webkit, and that these would be trivial for a Kindle to adopt? The Kindle Oasis is the highest spec Kindle, and it tops out at 512MB RAM. I see that Firefox 70.0 has 512MB for its minimum requirements, but how performant is that kind of computer on today's web?

With the example of Firefox, you wouldn't use Firefox, you would use Gecko which is going to have much lower requirements. There are usually ports for embedded systems that have even less requirements as well (WPE for Webkit for example)

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

#50

Post by techer » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 6:29 AM UTC

lukifer wrote: post #32

jhbadger wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

TIL, thanks!

If you change the ePub extension to png you just email it to your kindle address..it will be in your doc section.