Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

http://oink.cd/

I'll probably always buy books, just because I need to have the physical objects for things I really care about. But I think I'll eventually buy something like the Kindle for books I want to read but don't care about owning, archived blog posts, magazines, and newspapers. Like Nathalie, though, I'm scaling back physical media purchases. I think I'm done with CDs. I rarely buy DVDs; Netflix, YouTube, and video podcasts have taken place of that for me. (I never really bought many DVDs in the first place though.) For radio, I'm onto podcasts. So, I'm looking at pretty much all digital media with the exception of books I really care about in the near future. Which doesn't really bother me. Books take up enough space; it'll be nice to have everything else up in the cloud and on my harddrive.

lol @ Mr. Que

how fuckin hard is it to fabricate some contact lenses with the capability to watch a movie or surf the internet

They've been selling amazing goggles with the ability to do so in in-flight magazines and at the sharper image (rip) for years. I'm sure they're greeeeeat.

Inflight magazines : grownups :: back of comic books : children

In that case, I would rather be a child forever

Totally OT:

yeah dvds, etc. have very few characteristics that lend themselves to becoming fetish objects. books and records have a lot of them. xp yeah cover design is one example

I've been thinking that an aspect here where CDs and DVDs (and cassettes and VHSes) failed objectwise is that most of the packaging of e.g. two CD albums is interchangable: It's just inlays, swap their inlays + media -- and wherein is the identity of the original package you bought? Yes of course it is silly, but this is probably the reason my digipak CDs feel more "objectish" and um fondlable than my jewelcase ones to me. (Another way of saying the same: because of availability of spare parts they are somewhat more robust twds damage and destruction, hence less precioussss.)

More on topic: I'm generally very pro the idea of electronic stuff on rectangular screens replacing oldschool content carriage, but find myself feeling that actual books have this thing where you can just flip it open at random, seeing what's there, think "oh I wonder what's just a few pages before this" etc, just using your fingers! Similar "analog" functionality may just conceivably be convincingly implemented in elec devices, but I think we're very far away from that still.

mh, it is all about really wanting to believe.

this thing where you can just flip it open at random, seeing what's there, think "oh I wonder what's just a few pages before this" etc, just using your fingers!

Uh, you can do this on a kindle, also with just your fingers. Maybe next year you'll be able to do the same with just your voice.

it's a lot slower and clunkier though

no papercuts though

I like to think that the idea of the physical book outlasting the CD or vinyl is correct. But why do I like to think that? Not sure. I used to rep for physical music media - cover pictures, inlay books, lyric sheets - but now I'm happy with the digital shit, no booklets, no lyrics (they'll be on the internet), a 150*150px cover gif. Now I've just been gifted a sony reader and I like it - especially as it can read any rtf ro txt file, hello project gutenberg and 30,000 free books - but it has its deficiencies. Searching and backtracking is definitely harder. OTOH they seem like relatively easy difficulties to overcome. Could realtime fulltext search be a killer app?

Kindle has "realtime fulltext search" (fully indexed searching, device-wide).

Searching and backtracking is definitely harder.

Than in physical books???

said it before and i'll say it again: the future of ebooks is in a tablet that is either unfoldable or digital paper and is NOT ebook specific, but plays comics/games/movies/mp3s and I'm looking forward to Nintendo making it in the next ten years or so.
I'll early adopt on the kindle the minute they do comix, tho

out of curiosity: how many of you are actually on the Kindle or some other e-reader? it seems like most of ilx isn't. (I don't own one.) also, how many of you are also mostly digital for music? (and if so, do you buy mp3s, stream, etc.?)

for people who like reading web content offline & own an iPhone:

http://www.instapaper.com/

seriously.

the book in it's current format has been around for what, a thousand years? because it's such a ridic convenient format (in most cases). i seriously doubt it's gonna start disappearing in any significant way anytime soon. it's gonna be GREAT for college/high school students (no way can anyone convince me that a physical book is better for hauling round all your textbook stuff), and it may even increase what ppl read: if i had a kindle or equivalent device i think i'd def read more, esp in the instance of travelling and that kind of thing, but i wouldn't buy any less physical books (even tho i rotate out all my paperback fiction).

omar, i don't think you have much to worry about, honestly.

I don't think because it has been around for yonks means it'll stay for another thousand years.

when they make one of these with a screen that's as comfortable to look at for hours as a bit of paper i'm in!

Started reading on my Kindle last night and I have to say it's so comfortable! Didn't actually expect it THAT comfortable tbh. Only say it doesn't put the pages on it. hah. I have this habit of checking how many pages a book has, that way I know how far I am. BUt then I noticed that there's a percentage in the left corner. Cool. :-) My husband laughed.

Kindle has "realtime fulltext search" (fully indexed searching, device-wide).

oh yeah, forgot it has a keyboard. e-reader doesn't.

My eyes get easily distracted while reading paper books.I get distracted by the shadows that are created by the curve of the pages in the center fold or if the print is slightly skewed. This is pretty much why I don't read.

Nath, I was also surprised how comfortable the e-ink is to read, even in low light. Upping the font size a notch makes it easier for me to read on the bus w/o motion sickness too.

makes it easier for me to read on the bus w/o motion sickness too.

Really???!?!? Add this to my list of reasons why I want an ebook reader REALLY BAD NOW.

i'm almost totally digital when it comes to music, and almost always prefer reading on paper, even when it comes to online articles for school...i don't look at CDs as collection objects though, for one thing the format doesn't change your listening experience the way it does for reading, and for another thing cds can become unreadable after about a decade and will probably give way to other technology soon anyway.

Jenny, it would still hit me occasionally during the summer, if the sun was flashing off the lake or car windows while we were moving, but yeah - for me, less nausea has been the very best unexpected benefit.

Search function is great, especially if you have some film and music books on there, you can get all sorts of information. Non-random access, manually moving back-and-forth is not great when you don't know exactly what you are looking for, starting judiciously using the highlight feature on potentially useful information to combat this. Graphics that don't scale and are too tiny to read not great either. I'm talking about 6-inch original Kindle, bigger, newer model has better graphics- if the book has been prepared appropriately. Moral of the story: great for biographies if you don't care about the photos, not great for certain other types of reference books, but maybe will be soon or is already on bigger Kindle.

I actually had a broken Kindle for a few weeks and took a book out of the library that I was in the middle of but, since I do most of my reading during my commute it was actually easier to wait for the replacement than to carry the thing around.

And yeah, I might not buy as many brick and mortar books as I did a few years ago, but I had already stopped buying lots of books in the past three years because of space and time constraints, with the two-guitar attack of the Kindle plus library books I have tons to read that doesn't take up a permanent place in my apartment. Tend to only buy reference books or stuff that's not available any other way. And once and a while the impulse buy, but much more infrequently.

Besides the convenience of the e-readers, the most appealing aspect for me is the idea of being able to increase the font size. I really hate paper books with the small font you find all too often in the classics. I think I'd end up reading a lot more and longer since you can make the type pretty big, so it should be easier on the eyes. I usually have to stop reading these days not because I want to do something else, but because of eye strain. Yet, I'm still reluctant to take the plunge (though this thread and thinking about it the last couple of days has almost convinced me).

How does the integrated dictionary work with Kindle? Can you just highlight words and bring up a definition? Is it smooth? And does this work for books in languages other than English, or only for English books?

Very simple: just click on a line and it looks up every word on that line. There is a default dictionary but you can put other dictionaries on there, presumably in a foreign language, although I haven't tried it.

You can also use the dictionary by just searching on a word you want to look up.

You just position the cursor in front of the word (using the little stick control) and the definition appears automatically at the bottom of the screen. It seems to have at least basic French and Spanish dictionaries, but I haven't really put it to the test (cooking terms and the slang from The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao mainly).

xpost

Hm, maybe I should think about upgrading one day.

Blerghn can't seem to delete certain bookmarks.

man, i bet this is one of those technologies where some of us hold out for years and then eventually come to see it as a necessary addition to our lives. like mp3 players.

doubt it

i don't have an mp3 player ; )

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Finding-the-Kindle-a-Poor/8808/

When Syracuse employees first heard that Kindles would have a read-aloud feature, "We thought, yay, this is going to be great" for disabled readers, said Eve Hill, senior vice president at the university's Burton Blatt Institute, which advocates for people with disabilities. But staffers soon realized the device's menu options were not spoken aloud. "If you're blind, you won't be able to turn it on," Ms. Hill said.

LOL

haaaaaaa

"We thought, yay, this is going to be a paperweight"

Looked at a couple of ebooks recently -- full of stuff like this:

[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

Useful.

Bght Open (Agassi's autobiography). Yeehah!

Still loving my Kindle app for my iPhone. I'm almost on my fourth book!

Ever.

Been downloading books like crazy (from Vuze). FOR FREE. WEEHAAAA!

do i want one of these?

no?

no

ok, two gentlemen i trust

chomping at the bit waiting for an affordable bare-bones e-book reader and god knows apple aren't gonna be the ones to produce it. how long was it between the release of the ipod and the glut of £25 (but perfectly usable) mp3 players?

also wonder how the tendency toward having one all-consuming product (phone, mp3 player, camera, video camera, etc) will effect this? i'd say the next gen of products need a bigger screen and more suitable battery life.

there seemed a time when e-book readers seemed real unnecessary and doomed to failure because of this, but i guess this disproves it. (apologies i couldn't find a non-dickish news source).

and im still amazed/frustrated there isn't a homebrew pdf reader for the DS. though i think there are programs for reading doc files, which could be handy for reading website articles and non-picture ebooks