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

521–530 of 683 posts

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

#521

Post by dfc »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #449
atulatul wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just checked kobo sites due to original comment. The catalog may be smaller but now they (India store) have comparable book prices to kindle. The last time (many years back) I checked, books were not available in India. I had first edition terrible keyboard kindle and have a paperwhite. It seems libra colour is still not available in India.

> first edition terrible keyboard kindle That's still my favourite ever Kindle, simply for the side buttons for next/previous page. Touch interface is so much more inconvenient in comparison, for the main purpose of reading and navigating through books.

I got the kindle oasis because of the next/prev page buttons. I don't know why they discontinued it.

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

#522

Post by jorvi »

dlevine wrote: post #274
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.

There are a bunch of comments about how this is the default experience now. It's only the default experience if you buy the ads-free version. Since I don't want to pay extra to disable the ads, the trick I figured out is to buy the Kindle for Kids. It comes with a cover, no ads, and a 2 year warranty. You can turn off the kids stuff with one switch, and then it's just a normal Kindle. If you buy it on Black Friday or…

Kindle for Kids is not available outside the US afaik. At least not in a lot of European countries.

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

#523

Post by eloisant »

n4r9 wrote: post #507
gizmo wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about as ingenious as littering to save yourself a 20 second walk to a trash can.

I disagree. It's exploiting a weakness in customer service provision in order to work around built-in UX degradation. Not many people would think of it.

It's not a weakness, it's Amazon's strategy to be generous in customer support to ensure loyal customers.

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

#524

Post by TZubiri »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #346
Funes- wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the joke, but color has been present in books (manuscripts, before the invention of the printing press, even) basically since their inception, many centuries ago, so just adding color wouldn't make these devices more similar to screens as much as it would make them more akin to... well, books. Just look at these marvels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminated_manuscript .

Here's a book a little closer in time to the invention of books: https://cdn.britannica.com/25/83825-050-F8826674/Anubis-Egyp...

100% not a book as it's not movable.

Might be a scroll or a codex, but it might even be on a wall.

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

#525

Post by atombender »

Kudos wrote: post #496
atombender wrote: post #495

The one improvement I want from an ebook reader is better typography. On current devices (especially Kindle, but from what I've seen of screenshots online, also other readers), the font selection is extremely limited and the rendering is atrocious. Nobody seems to have spent any time on kerning, word breaking, or anything else relating to typography and layout. Even after 20+ years of ebooks, they still don't have th…

For font selection, you can drag and drop your own onto a Kobo.

That's good to know. However, as long as the rendering looks like this [1], that's not enough.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F5...

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

#526

Post by grujicd »

lencastre wrote: post #369
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.

Both Kindle PW 10 and 11 gen support showing the cover. Personally I actually don’t like to see the cover of the books. Nobody’s business to see what I’m reading.

I'm keeping cover because it helps me remember the title of the book! Otherwise I typically buy book after seeing recommendation on goodreads or elsewhere, start reading and when someone asks me the name of the book or the author - I have no idea! Cover helps with that.

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

#527

Post by WillAdams »

atombender wrote: post #495

The one improvement I want from an ebook reader is better typography. On current devices (especially Kindle, but from what I've seen of screenshots online, also other readers), the font selection is extremely limited and the rendering is atrocious. Nobody seems to have spent any time on kerning, word breaking, or anything else relating to typography and layout. Even after 20+ years of ebooks, they still don't have th…

It's a tough problem to solve and the computation of it all is sufficiently expensive that doing it on a battery-powered device is a significant drain.

A further difficulty is the file formats being used --- ages ago, I tried to argue for an ebook format which specifically noted markup and content as being decorative or semantic and looking over the specification I don't see that that was ever really worked up.

That said, a further difficulty is even if a feature is in the spec, it's not certain if the various hardware and readers would actually be implemented.

One back-burner project I've had for a while is to take a publication, make it into an ePub, then use the ePub as the source for a nicely typeset version (or more likely, series of versions) --- gotta finish a bunch of other projects first.

FWIW, it seems to me that a lot of the effort into nice typography/appearance is going into the "coffee table" sort of books which these days are stand-alone apps such as:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-elements-by-theodore-gray/...

and it seems to me that there is a lot of potential for such documents which is as-of-yet only poorly explored --- some examples which seem to be reaching towards this:

- Bembo's Zoo --- this used to be a Flash-based website which was delightful: https://jilltxt.net/bembos-zoo/ --- it really needs to be brought back

- Euclid’s Elements Joyce's Java Version --- https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm... --- I refer to and link to this version by preference

- Motion Mountain: The free physics textbook --- https://www.motionmountain.net/ --- if this would read well in a PDF viewer on the Kindle Colorsoft, I'd get one --- as it is, I've been reading through it on my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360, and it's done a lot to help my understanding of physics

- various CD-ROMs and other multimedia efforts --- "The Manhole" became Myst which became a franchise unto itself, Broderbund's "Living Books" are now a popular line of apps, the Voyager series which was _amazing_ and I'd dearly love to see revisited https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1995/01/02/t...

- Leonardo da Vinci CD-ROM which was a wonderful interface for exploring the "Codex Leicester" --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci_(video_game)

I'd be very interested in other texts which explore this space and which have the potential for nice typography.

That said, I am fine with just reading ebooks on my Kindle w/ flush-left, ragged-right and having the ability to report the (apparently inevitable) typo.

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

#528

Post by mtalantikite »

Latty wrote: post #201
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've got a Boox Note 3 and love it for what it is (my hardware has been fine), but I'd find it very hard to recommend generally. Boox are dodgy at best (GPL violations, random connections to china, etc...), you start with an already old version of Android and if lucky you might get another major version, they aren't cheap, Android stuff is mostly not designed for black-and-white/low refresh rate and some apps have un…

I got a Boox Go 7 as my first ereader a few months back and I feel the same way. I like it for my own use, which is mainly loading foreign language books in from Calibre into KO Reader, but I'd never recommend it to someone unless they were pretty technical.

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

#529

Post by fullstop »

dfc wrote: post #521
sundarurfriend wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> first edition terrible keyboard kindle That's still my favourite ever Kindle, simply for the side buttons for next/previous page. Touch interface is so much more inconvenient in comparison, for the main purpose of reading and navigating through books.

I got the kindle oasis because of the next/prev page buttons. I don't know why they discontinued it.

YES, I love the physical buttons. I have mine rotated so that the buttons are at the bottom, and it works well. The weight is distributed more evenly this way as well.

Did they actually announce that the Oasis was discontinued or did they just stop making them?

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

#530

Post by andai »

jjice wrote: post #2

I own a Kindle Paperwhite (last gen, relative to this new one) and a Kobo Clara BW (purchase in the last 6 months). IMO, the Kindle is the premium e-reader when it comes to look and feel. It's just a fantastic experience. The issue is Amazon and how even if you want to put your own purchased ebooks on it, you have it send it through their servers. That tied with a few other privacy issues over the years led me to als…

>The Kobo can run in a fully offline mode

Really? I had to make an account to "activate" my Kobo, but it wouldn't let me make one because I already had an old account with one of their partner websites, whose auth servers were malfunctioning, so it took like two hours to be able to "activate" the device.

Is there a way to bypass that?

Post reply on HN