Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

They're probably thinking they can't get sued for violating the patent on rectangular devices with screens.

It's a sort of protective rim over where you insert extra memory cards, too

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/technology/personaltech/the-fire-aside-amazons-lower-priced-kindles-also-shine.html?_r=2&ref=technology

http://electronicbook-readers.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Kindle-Fire.jpg

^^ pictures of people who have figured out how to smug

ceos without ties

The built-in Web browser is supposed to accelerate delivery of Web pages by handing off some of the processing tasks to Amazon’s own online computers.
In practice, it’s not clear what all of that gains you: nytimes.com takes 10 seconds to load, eBay.com takes 17 seconds, Amazon.com takes 8 seconds. The iPad took about half as long each time.

New Apple Lust Objects for 2010 and onward

Kindle Fire ;)

― schwantz, Thursday, October 27, 2011 5:58 PM

it’s not clear what all of that gains you

a cheaper Kindle, probably

Only recently realised that more than half the people I see reading on trains and trams are reading Kindles or tablets, probably because most of our book shops died.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7rAwluPfa8

http://www.swissarmylibrarian.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/kindleburning.jpg

THATS what it should have looked like

p sure it does when u turn it on

i have been very happy with my not-on-fire, keyboard-having kindle.

The annoying white-black-white flash when turning an E Ink page now occurs only once every six page turns.

did not know this! i understand amazon downplaying it though, sort of like how nintendo never mentioned the lack of motion blur when the gameboy pocket was released.

how long does it flash? does it get annoying?

Nah. Impact of brief black flash on screen is equivalent to brief flash you get when turning the page of a book. I stopped noticing it really quickly, and even forget there's a flash at all now.

i feel like it might be weird to NOT have that flash now!

the new e-ink kindles look amazing BUT... i really really would miss the hardware page-turning buttons. i don't want to accidentally turn the page every time my finger grazes the screen, or get it all greasy from poking at it. something very satisfying about the page-turn buttons!

Me too. Thinking of a Nook for that reason.

they still make like three kindles with the page-turn buttons, only one is touch

ie the kindle touch is the only kindle without the hardware buttons

ya but it seems like touch-only is the wave of the fyootch tho right?

not if people keep buying the other ones. i think touch is a pretty dumb/inessential feature for an e-reader personally, doesn't really add anything other than amazon getting to say they have a touch-screen e-reader.

ya me too. dont get it. would much prefer a better controller arrow-key thing.

http://theadhocproject.blogspot.com/2009/02/wordological-wordism-fyootch.html

fight the fyootching

u know the kindle fire seems like a desirable object, until i remember that i don't wanna read entire books on a LCD screen, and that i dont like watching movies on small screens (even ipads). and the magazine function seems a little pointless, considering how cramped the layouts look at 7".

so what is the good of this thing?

(there are prob people who do do those things. and if i liked those things, it woudl be tempting.)

(so never mind.)

i think mainly that it's relatively cheap and that it comes from a company that people trust.

since my laptop screen is crapping out i wouldn't mind having an auxiliary way to watch tv/movies but it seems like with the fire you are pretty limited in where you can source those from (ie just from amazon). if someone gave me one i'd probably be psyched but i doubt i'll buy one.

My problem with the regular kindle's is the control/navigation nub. Fat broken thumbs make them a pain - the touch screen would be very helpful for me. But, no page turn buttons make it annoying too.

kindle's? kindles.

kindlez

lolz's.

n/a from what i've read the kindle will be able to load movies/tv/music not (just) through the amazon cloud but also plugging in to pc or by wifi. it's not that clear how you will be able to load it but you can. i'm thinking of getting one but not giving amazon a dime after i buy the device. should be possible. at such a low price it seems like it could be fun for games, streaming music, watching tv in bed.

dont give those bastards a DIME

i predict you will give them a dime

btw, if you check out an overdrive library ebook file and the time runs out but you are - I don't know - out of the country or in a cave, somewhere that your 3G doesn't connect properly (like, if you have it turned off), those files don't self-destruct or anything. And the library thinks it has them back. Will I eventually get hit with a whopping ebook fine? Time will tell.

http://bookshelfporn.com/

While I certainly appreciate the "book porn" aspect of that blog, I have striven mightily over the past four decades to keep my library within modest bounds, knowing that objects can multiply to the point where they dominate your life - even objects which are loved for their intellectual beauty more than their physical existance. As a result, although I've owned well over 10,000 books, I have retained only about 500 and could probably reduce that to ~350 at a pinch.

Yowza. I have no idea how many books we own. I'm going to count them when I get home.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/the-perilous-art-of-giving-books/

I tried downloading that Project Gutenberg catalog http://www.freekindlebooks.org/MagicCatalog/magiccatalog.html onto my Kindle and when I access it it seems to freeze the whole thing :(

i haven't used it in a while but it has worked fine on mine many times before - do you have one of the newest kindles?

yeah, a new Kindle Touch. I've hardly used it yet so maybe I just did something wrong or maybe it wasn't fully downloaded?

Reading has nothing to do with machinery. If you own an e-reader, you might as well get an artificial heart implanted.
<img>http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/JARVIK_7_artificial_heart.jpg<;/img>

A book is a sacred object, a totem - an e-reader is plastic sold at a loss.

Well done for reading this thread on the paper version of ILX