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

Amazon reveals first color Kindle, new Kindle Scribe, and more

aboutamazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 683 posts

Re: Amazon reveals first color Kindle, new Kindle Scribe, and more

#511

Post by cowsandmilk »

mcmcmc wrote: post #249
thimabi wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make an interesting point. Maybe facilitating the usage of sideloaded books is not among Amazon’s priorities. Yet I don’t know how much of that comes from malice rather than simply negligence or lack of interest.

It’s directly against their priority of influencing you to only purchase ebooks through their monopoly. Whether anti-competitive, anti-user practices are malicious or just a consequence of capitalism run wild, I don’t think there’s much of a difference

Most likely, it is something they don’t test because it isn’t officially supported.

Re: Amazon reveals first color Kindle, new Kindle Scribe, and more

#512

Post by dfc »

al_borland wrote: post #246
pfooti wrote: post #179

I have a pretty old paperwhite. When it started deleting books i had side-loaded via calibre, I decided to get a kobo. I have a libra color, and I have to say: price notwithstanding, it's a great device. I don't have a lot of experience with more recent devices, but compared to my 2nd gen paperwhite, it is _amazing_. Color is good enough to read comic books on it, the google drive integration means it's not too hard…

I switched from a Kindle to a Kobo (monochrome), and simply having the book cover as the lock screen makes me like it so much more. I always paid to not have ads on the Kindle, but it would show a bunch of generic images. The book cover is the obvious choice. Kobo gets it. The reading experience is a little more bare bones, but good enough, and still offers things a physical book does not.

I've been a kindle user for so long I'm embarrassed to admit I don't have any concept of what it is like to get ebooks outside of the Amazon ecosystem. Was the change easy to make? Do you feel like you have access to as much content as you did with a kindle?

Re: Amazon reveals first color Kindle, new Kindle Scribe, and more

#513

Post by culopatin »

kaonwarb wrote: post #251
al_borland wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched from a Kindle to a Kobo (monochrome), and simply having the book cover as the lock screen makes me like it so much more. I always paid to not have ads on the Kindle, but it would show a bunch of generic images. The book cover is the obvious choice. Kobo gets it. The reading experience is a little more bare bones, but good enough, and still offers things a physical book does not.

Just FYI, this is now a Kindle option too. https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=23435466011

Hasn’t this been the case for a few years now?

Re: Amazon reveals first color Kindle, new Kindle Scribe, and more

#514

Post by eloisant »

op00to wrote: post #474
hi_hi wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, you have to pay to not have ads on a Kindle? When did that start being a thing? I've been using a kindle for about 14 years, my current one is a few years old. I've been thinking about upgrading, but it works perfectly fine, and I've never had it display ads, and haven't had to pay anything for that "privilege". It sounds like this will be my last Kindle device if I now have to pay extra for no ads, on a device…

I asked Amazon via chat to remove the adds because I was SCANDALIZED, just utterly SCANDALIZED to see romance novels on ads on the lock screen. They removed the ads for free. ;)

Congrats, you made a big fuss to save $20

Re: Amazon reveals first color Kindle, new Kindle Scribe, and more

#515

Post by AlanYx »

infotainment wrote: post #357
TechDebtDevin wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boox is dodgy, but everyone I know that has one loves them. I wouldn't expect any Chinese company to respect GPLs. Although, I've seen people on Reddit say they can have QA issues, and if you receive that unit you're likely SOL, this is the only reason that I've been hesitant to spend money on one. I've also been eyeing this new company, daylight, that has a 60hz refresh rate with what I think is E-Ink[0]. Their webs…

Daylight is a reflective LCD, like what you’d find on the classic Game Boy. I find their marketing of it as “e-paper” to be highly misleading.

It's RLCD but with a twist. It has microperforations, so they can put the backlight behind the screen without making it transreflective. I agree the terminology is misleading though.

Re: Amazon reveals first color Kindle, new Kindle Scribe, and more

#516

Post by bluGill »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #390
eproxus wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, once you want to flip page you’ll try to press the touch screen and nothing will happen since you haven’t turned on the device with the power button (you don’t want the touch screen active always since it will drain the battery). I guess they could add some indication on the screen it’s in ”sleep” mode though, like a frame or icon somewhere…

Honestly, I think they should optimize the time it takes a powered off device to boot up and turn the page after the user presses a button[0]. Sure, those readers tend to be full-blown Linux computers with nontrivial boot time, but approximately none of the features this stack provides are needed for simply turning the page. I'm sure I'm underestimating the complexities of the problem, but the first idea that pops in…

The obvious things is a tiny RTOS with enough of an ereader buffer to keep 5 screens (random number - maybe even the full boot). press the button the RTOS boots and flips the page almost instantly, then it boot linux in a VM to add more screens to the buffer, and/or take over the screen. Linux would have to be aware it is running in an RTOS like that so it can take over where you left off in the boot.

Re: Amazon reveals first color Kindle, new Kindle Scribe, and more

#517

Post by ableal »

boznz wrote: post #315
thimabi wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Calibre is able to integrate with the “Send to Kindle” email interface as well, so you can have the best of both worlds :)

Sigh.. "Send to Kobo" would be nice to have

Try this: https://send.djazz.se/

Minimal work if you configure the site as the homepage in the Kobo web browser.

Re: Amazon reveals first color Kindle, new Kindle Scribe, and more

#518

Post by AlanYx »

thimabi wrote: post #173
gamblor956 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Color e-ink (both versions) isn't yet fast enough to be used for writing. Boox and Remarkable had to do a lot of hacky things to make the experiences usable on their color e-ink devices. (Boox currently uses the older color technology, Remarkable uses the newer one.)

That makes sense. Another comment pointed out that even the resolution of colored content (150 ppi) is half that of black-and-white content (300 ppi). Trying to take notes with bad refresh rates and lower resolution would not make for a good experience.

It's only Kaleido that halves the resolution of colored content. The RM Pro is Gallery 3 and offers full-resolution color.

Re: Amazon reveals first color Kindle, new Kindle Scribe, and more

#519

Post by HansardExpert »

dfc wrote: post #512
al_borland wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched from a Kindle to a Kobo (monochrome), and simply having the book cover as the lock screen makes me like it so much more. I always paid to not have ads on the Kindle, but it would show a bunch of generic images. The book cover is the obvious choice. Kobo gets it. The reading experience is a little more bare bones, but good enough, and still offers things a physical book does not.

I've been a kindle user for so long I'm embarrassed to admit I don't have any concept of what it is like to get ebooks outside of the Amazon ecosystem. Was the change easy to make? Do you feel like you have access to as much content as you did with a kindle?

Yes completely.

I have both an old Kindle Paperwhite 2nd Gen I think and a Kobo Clara.

The kindle 'lives' in the car and the Kobo at home so I always have something to read.

I use Calibre to sync to both.

Rather than directly accessing Amazon from the Kindle I download bought books to my PC then strip the DRM - so I can read the same book on both the Clara and Kindle.

See: https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools

I'd say that the initial awkwardness is from deliberately not connecting the Kobo or Kindle to the internet to stop them from 'phoning home' when you set them up. The Kindle is easy - just don't connect it, the Kobo seems to insist but there's a simple step-by-step to bypass the enforced sign up on the Clara I use.

See: https://yingtongli.me/blog/2018/07/30/kobo-rego.html - basically SQL commands.

and you can get firmware updates for the Kobo devices via

https://pgaskin.net/KoboStuff/kobofirmware.html

and they are easy to apply - drag / drop.

I don't get books from Kobo's site as it used to be hard if not impossible to strip the DRM from them - which meant I couldn't read them on my Kindle.

Hope that helps.

Re: Amazon reveals first color Kindle, new Kindle Scribe, and more

#520

Post by mdorazio »

dfc wrote: post #512
al_borland wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched from a Kindle to a Kobo (monochrome), and simply having the book cover as the lock screen makes me like it so much more. I always paid to not have ads on the Kindle, but it would show a bunch of generic images. The book cover is the obvious choice. Kobo gets it. The reading experience is a little more bare bones, but good enough, and still offers things a physical book does not.

I've been a kindle user for so long I'm embarrassed to admit I don't have any concept of what it is like to get ebooks outside of the Amazon ecosystem. Was the change easy to make? Do you feel like you have access to as much content as you did with a kindle?

I use a Boox reader, but pretty close to the same experience. For me, I either buy the book from one of the many places that lets you download epub, or buy it on the Kindle store and download it from Libgen. It's really a non-issue. I've only run into one or two books I wasn't able to get an epub of, and those I ended up reading on the Kindle cloud reader on my laptop.
Post reply on HN