51–60 of 226 posts
I hear the complaints about Kindle but... How are we supposed to do? In three "taps" I buy a book and 10s later I start reading it. Legally. The device just works. The alternatives? Libraries here (France) have a very limited offer of ebooks. Even for ebooks in English. I owned a Kobo circa 2013 and it was awful. I tried friend's devices more recently, and it's not the UX I expect from a "book". A simple comparison;…
I hear the complaints about Kindle but... How are we supposed to do? In three "taps" I buy a book and 10s later I start reading it. Legally. The device just works. The alternatives? Libraries here (France) have a very limited offer of ebooks. Even for ebooks in English. I owned a Kobo circa 2013 and it was awful. I tried friend's devices more recently, and it's not the UX I expect from a "book". A simple comparison;…
> Even pirating is less convenient I stopped reading ebooks and actually moved to physical books, but from what I remember pirated books were super convenient. I had this giant library of tons and tons of scifi/fantasy books I once randomly copied from someone and it didn't even take that much storage space. It lasted me my childhood and I've only managed to read a small fraction of it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (2) The ability to transfer books from your computer to your Kindle using a USB cable is not affected. Well, it kinda is. If you can no longer download the books you paid for, you can't upload them over USB. That's what that feature on their website was meant for, in fact. Of course you can still upload non-Amazon content yes. Which is probably what I'll end up doing. I won't buy books on Amazon anymore if I can't…
You can still download books you paid a license to Amazon for, you just have to use a Wi-Fi or 4G LTE-enabled Kindle to do it.
I hear the complaints about Kindle but... How are we supposed to do? In three "taps" I buy a book and 10s later I start reading it. Legally. The device just works. The alternatives? Libraries here (France) have a very limited offer of ebooks. Even for ebooks in English. I owned a Kobo circa 2013 and it was awful. I tried friend's devices more recently, and it's not the UX I expect from a "book". A simple comparison;…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (2) The ability to transfer books from your computer to your Kindle using a USB cable is not affected. Well, it kinda is. If you can no longer download the books you paid for, you can't upload them over USB. That's what that feature on their website was meant for, in fact. Of course you can still upload non-Amazon content yes. Which is probably what I'll end up doing. I won't buy books on Amazon anymore if I can't…
You can still download books you paid a license to Amazon for, you just have to use a Wi-Fi or 4G LTE-enabled Kindle to do it.
(The models that don't support Wi-fi at all originally had cellular service for wirelessly downloading books, but that was sunset a few years ago. So there will be literally no way to copy new books to those devices anymore.)
There have been several threads about this on HN over the past few days and months. Just to avoid the confusion that seems to follow these, a few notes: (1) This is the "Download and Transfer" option where Amazon allowed users to select books they had purchased a license to and download them from the Amazon website. (2) The ability to transfer books from your computer to your Kindle using a USB cable is not affected.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Even pirating is less convenient I stopped reading ebooks and actually moved to physical books, but from what I remember pirated books were super convenient. I had this giant library of tons and tons of scifi/fantasy books I once randomly copied from someone and it didn't even take that much storage space. It lasted me my childhood and I've only managed to read a small fraction of it.
Sci Fi more than a decade old is the golden zone for piracy. Everything else is harder. Contemporary books, very hard.
[0] KindleUnpacker follows in the IMO utterly bizarre tradition in the epub tool writing scene of making it obvious how to run a really bad Tk UI wrapper and hiding the actual command-line tool in lib/. And of wanting an output directory instead of a filename. And of leaving a whole pile of unnecessary temporary files around. And of forcing you to look through the temporary crap to even find the output. Oh well; the actual output is excellent.
I hear the complaints about Kindle but... How are we supposed to do? In three "taps" I buy a book and 10s later I start reading it. Legally. The device just works. The alternatives? Libraries here (France) have a very limited offer of ebooks. Even for ebooks in English. I owned a Kobo circa 2013 and it was awful. I tried friend's devices more recently, and it's not the UX I expect from a "book". A simple comparison;…
What exactly is the UX you want from an eReader? I find Kindles and Kobos are pretty similar. So I'm curious what exactly was better about Amazon. I personally find Amazon has worse text options, font sizing, line spacing etc. I have purchased eBooks that were just bad OCRs, some publishers just don't care. Kobo will also price match with Amazon, you get credit back and an extra 10% too.
What options does Kobo have for text that you think Kindle is missing?
I use my Kobo for comics and buy those through them (specifically got one with a large screen since Amazon didn't have a similar device), but I don't know if I'd switch to Kobo for novels. I'd rather buy from Kobo and sideload to my Kindle.