Amazon reveals first color Kindle, new Kindle Scribe, and more • Hacker News Board

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

#641

Post by RMPR » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 8:11 PM UTC

jdlyga wrote: post #561

I've tried out all the e-ink note taking devices (Kindle Scribe, Boox Go 10.3, Remarkable 2, and Remarkable Paper Pro). The Kindle Scribe can't really compete with the others right now since the software is so limited. I'd only get it if you were a huge Kindle user that very occasionally wanted to take some notes. Otherwise, the Remarkable 2 or Remarkable Paper Pro are your best bets. Those are absolutely excellent p…

> Otherwise, the Remarkable 2 or Remarkable Paper Pro are your best bets. Those are absolutely excellent products that don't overwhelm you with distractions.

You need a word of caution here. These devices are very good for writing but absolutely suck at rendering ebooks. I was on the market for a new e-reader/writer ultimately decided to go for the Boox Note Air 3 (no backlight on the Go was a deal breaker) and I think remarkable really dropped the ball by releasing the Paper Pro with a pen that needs a battery. Coming from years of using a Kobo Ellipsa, this was a huge deal breaker. The Remarkable 2 is a bit old and underpowered not to mention the limited amount of storage space.

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

#642

Post by notatoad » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 8:18 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #635

notatoad wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i'm not really sure what benefit you think they're gaining by breaking the less convenient, less user-friendly way to sideload books. They're perfectly happy to let you email books to the kindle that you bought at other stores (or stole), as well as sync your progress with those books, backup those books to their servers, and generally have the full reading experience with all the benefits of the kindle ecosystem eve…

The benefit (or potential gain) is that some people will just buy the book from the Kindle store to avoid the pain. I've seen that happen first-hand to my wife. Also by emailing books or loading through their servers, they can still track and get that sweet sweet data/metadata that Amazon thrives on. When you sideload, you don't even have to connect it to the internet, which makes analytics more challenging.

okay, but this all still seems like a needlessly complicated conspiracy theory.

if they want people to buy books from their store, why do they make it so easy to not buy books from their store?

bugs happen. not every bug is part of jeff bezos' nefarious plan.

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

#643

Post by IPTN » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 8:26 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #632

IPTN wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For exporting a library of books you already own/read there aren't going to be many titles that have any improvements in KFX that you would care about. It certainly doesn't hurt to just try it and see what if any of the titles in the library have issues with being deDRMd. I second buying from Google Play. Outside of a period of time last year where they had a bug that prevented exporting many titles in their catalog…

Everybody has different things they care about when it comes to typography and layout. For me, the kerning, hyphenation, and spacing improvements in KFX are pretty big. I also like that I can choose justified or ragged right. https://www.reddit.com/r/kindle/comments/viqxjj/heres_the_fo...

Maybe I'm missing something, but those all sound like things that are display layer and shouldn't be dependent on KFX to be able to accomplish. I do know that that you can run preprocessing on epubs to adjust some of the layouting to your preference. The rest should just be determined by the reader application you are using and any shortfall in customization of those aspects would be addressed by improvements to that application.

Regardless, my point was that: A - most of the books already in the library were likely enjoyed/acquired without knowledge of hypothetical improvements from Amazon rolling out a new ebook format and DRM scheme. And B - even if there is some magic that Amazon had to include in KFX to support the improvements you listed and can't be reproduced without them; I personally would not consider those or most any improvements to be worth losing ownership of books that I purchase. The most valuable part of an ebook is the text and ownership of a copy of that is what I'm paying for. It is fairly easy for me to be principaled on only buying ebooks that I know I can own a copy of due to the diverse distribution that exists for most titles. Even when I had an Oasis, I didn't purchase anything through Amazon and loaded all my books over USB.

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

#644

Post by lagrange77 » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 8:45 PM UTC

hydrolox wrote: post #619

lagrange77 wrote: post #475

I have recently bought a Scribe 1st Gen, when it was on sale. Rooting it was a hassle, but it was worth it. The excellent hardware (display, enclosure) combined with Koreader makes it really joyful to read technical books and documents, especially when combined with Calibre. As one of those books was about Lisp, i also installed Kterm, tmux, the joe editor and tinysheme, which served as a decent Scheme Playground/IDE…

is it possible to root still? I'm guessing no

The jailbreak i used is working up to FW v5.16.2, which was obsolete at the time i bought the device (approx. 2 months ago). However i was lucky, since my device came with that very FW version.

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

#645

Post by akvadrako » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 8:55 PM UTC

IPTN wrote: post #636

akvadrako wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It definitely does not support Pocketbook Cloud; it just isn't an option. I have a pocketbook account and can use it for the app on phones. Maybe it's a regional thing.

I got that manual from the US support page. What region are you in and have you tried installing the US firmware? Search for"Verse Pro" on the US support page[1] after the device list populates. I also would have been disappointed with my Era if it didn't have PocketBook Cloud syncronization as advertised since it is functionality I care about. That being said, if it is something locked out of your region you could a…

I'm not trying to solve the issue, just warning people pocketbook is not that good.

The manual on my device also mentions the cloud, but it is just wrong. I think they have regional partners with ebook stores that customize it.

Though I think you are right it isn't Android and I misremembered. I thought thats why it has a dual core cpu and make wonder why it's so slow after boot until it's ready to turn pages.

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

#646

Post by IPTN » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 9:08 PM UTC

akvadrako wrote: post #645

IPTN wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got that manual from the US support page. What region are you in and have you tried installing the US firmware? Search for"Verse Pro" on the US support page[1] after the device list populates. I also would have been disappointed with my Era if it didn't have PocketBook Cloud syncronization as advertised since it is functionality I care about. That being said, if it is something locked out of your region you could a…

I'm not trying to solve the issue, just warning people pocketbook is not that good. The manual on my device also mentions the cloud, but it is just wrong. I think they have regional partners with ebook stores that customize it. Though I think you are right it isn't Android and I misremembered. I thought thats why it has a dual core cpu and make wonder why it's so slow after boot until it's ready to turn pages.

> I'm not trying to solve the issue, just warning people pocketbook is not that good.

You're entitled to your opinion, but it seems easily solvable based on a 3 second Google search: https://old.reddit.com/r/ereader/comments/1dvwnb8/pocketbook...

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

#647

Post by dfc » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 9:21 PM UTC

fullstop wrote: post #529

dfc wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It sounds like they did both:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/16/24272009/amazon-disconti...

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

#648

Post by foxyv » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 9:21 PM UTC

Rebelgecko wrote: post #166

jemmyw wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, the lagginess of kindles drove me to distraction and I was actually reading less because of it. I bought a colour Kobo. Super responsive by comparison. The colour isn't wonderful, I like that it's there. Also, physical buttons! Such things are only available on the most expensive Kindle, I didn't realize how much I'd missed them.

I don't think any Kindles still have physical buttons. Kind of a bummer because buttons make it much easier to change the page while holding the Kindle with 1 hand

The Oasis has them: https://a.co/d/i5Pdmj7

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

#649

Post by IPTN » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 9:41 PM UTC

akvadrako wrote: post #645

IPTN wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got that manual from the US support page. What region are you in and have you tried installing the US firmware? Search for"Verse Pro" on the US support page[1] after the device list populates. I also would have been disappointed with my Era if it didn't have PocketBook Cloud syncronization as advertised since it is functionality I care about. That being said, if it is something locked out of your region you could a…

I'm not trying to solve the issue, just warning people pocketbook is not that good. The manual on my device also mentions the cloud, but it is just wrong. I think they have regional partners with ebook stores that customize it. Though I think you are right it isn't Android and I misremembered. I thought thats why it has a dual core cpu and make wonder why it's so slow after boot until it's ready to turn pages.

In response to your edit.

I can't speak to how their distribution is resulting in selling devices that don't have advertised features enabled. It is weird they would allow this while keeping their branding and same device name (maybe they are working around some trade restrictions?) So that is not good, but I don't know how widespread that issue is. And as I pointed out in my response before the edit, this seems straightforward to resolve if you buy from somewhere that has this issue.

Not to belabor the point, but in my original post I mentioned how PocketBook devices are specifically not Android as an advantage in terms of battery life.

I suspect that what you are experiencing with regards to it being "slow" to resume an in progress book and allow navigation may be due to your settings. The PocketBook has a sleep mode that allows quick resume for reading. How long after it goes to sleep before it powers all the way down is fully configurable from disabling it to waiting your choice of many options between 10 minutes and 48 hours. IMO the cold boot time is acceptable and I did not notice a difference from my 1st Gen Oasis. The power loss if you fully disable its auto power off is still great, although I haven't used it that way much beyond when I first got mine so I don't have a comparison to my Oasis.

That being said, I don't have the same model as you so maybe there is a significant difference between them in performance, but it would be easy enough to check independent reviews if I was trying to decide between them.

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

#650

Post by fullstop » Thu, Oct 17, 2024, 9:54 PM UTC

dfc wrote: post #647

fullstop wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It sounds like they did both: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/16/24272009/amazon-disconti...

Well, that is a shame. I hope that my Oasis lasts forever!