Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

I, Claudius and Claudius the God on sale today.

I sent my Kobo Aura back because it became unresponsive after an hour, still waiting for the refund. In the meantime I managed to get a 7th gen kindle touch for £40. Once you put it in aeroplane mode and disable the spam nonsense it really is a nice reader, the touch software is far more receptive and quicker than the kobo set-up. I get the feeling I will be very impressed with a Paperwhite when I finally get one. It is a tough game trying to get one cheap on e-bay though.

it still feels kind of quaintly lo-fi but i'm pretty pleased with mine, already adjusted to the weirdness of reading on a screen, except for maybe missing a bit of the big-picture feel of being able to scan through a book. sideloading and networking stuff have been simple; i'm sending shit to mine all the time just to wean myself from reading pointless junk on the web, and actually paying attention to it when i do read it.

The lo-fi thing seems to make it more pleasant, the same as, um, a certain message board. Constraining yourself to just what is on your Kindle helps too. Finally got used to not being able to scan a couple years back when the searching improved, as well as the menu-izing of the TOC, advancing or retreating by chapter, and being able to preview what you would advance to.

I had been obsessively bidding for Kindle Paperwhites on e-bay for months now and managed to finally bag one for £46 on saturday. It is the best e-reader I have ever bought and the light is beautiful. One of great things about the Kindle touch interface is the way it seems to be able to discern the difference between you wiping dust off the screen and turning the page. On Nook and Kobo devices it always turns forwards or backwards when you wipe a speck.
I can't believe I got this one so cheap, sooner or later I wasn't going get ripped off on ebay for once. I don't really see how an e-reader could be any better than a paperwhite, that voyager thing seems like overpriced overkill to me.

(The trick with the kobo is to swipe vertically downwards. Or just put it to sleep and do it)

It took me a while to learn to use the switch on the Kobo, but I wasn't aware of the downwards motion trick. But it makes sense as the upwards motion sometimes turns the brightness up, but not always.

i've read that the screen redraws on the voyager are better - seem pretty clunky on a paperwhite

screen redraws better. typesetting still shit.

x
I always assumed I completely lacked that level of tech discernment myself J, although I appear to be applying it myself to earlier models of e-readers I bought last year. But right now this little fucker I got off e-bay at bargain price seems like a Rolls Royce engine. This thing of wanting the next best thing is very pervasive though.

redraws are pretty in your face! and always a big computer UI sticking point, since no one can ever make a device/machine/OS/app that manages to stay spiff and flash once the passage of time makes the features creep and the computer struggle with what used to be speedy tasks

in that sense it's surprising that they wouldn't make the redraws slicker from the start, i doubt this thing can have much in the way of software development planned, so they could've made it permanently fancy and perpetually young

somehow i didn't even know the paperwhite existed. i've been using the original kindle for years, and thought the only other option was the retine-burning kindle fire so never bothered looking to upgrade. ordering the paperwhite right now though - slightly worried the lack of side buttons will bug me, but can't justify paying an extra £60 just for that. did the lack of buttons annoy anyone on here who was used to the orig kindle? and does this kindle come with a case? (the amazon blurb is vague about if it comes with it or not). but yeah, thanks xelab, you just made my reading time a whole lot better!

no case

never had any buttons, so don't miss em - takes only the lightest touch, it's like living in a spacecloud

i read in bed mostly so i'm trying to imagine the motion of moving my thumb an inch and wondering precisely how much it'll bother me. a whole lot less than £60 i'm guessing. currently trying to buy a used one from ebay/gumtree, but one says that it can't be registered with amazon for some reason. wonder if it's robbed? might give that a miss as i like being able to email files to my current one.

does anyone else get annoyed slightly a the paperwhite's top bar getting in the way of the page turning zone.

now my ad is for an NBC TELEVISION EVENT tonite abt the crucifixion

this is an ereader you chodes

it is for books

not THAT book

lol mine too, & it's a very corny ad too

THE BIBLE CONTINUES

also for real is there a way to change the lock screen?

There must be some way in which you can root these ad-infested devices. I wouldn't put up with it myself, they sound intolerable.

eh mostly i turn my screen off when i'm done with it, the ads only come up if you leave it running too long unattended - good incentive to stay focused in public!!

of course you can always pay but

Believe me I know where you are coming from. I have struck quite lucky on e-bay so far and when I have got defective shit I have managed to get a refund quite fast, but if things were slightly tighter - waiting for the refund could have been more uncomfortable from my current shit creek vantage.

One thing that that is sacrosanct to me is that I don't have any details/accounts on portable devices. So anything I read is from torrent sites or is purchased online & uploaded to the kindle app on the pc and then I use calibre to break the drm and make it "portable".

I know how I operate is morally suspect, but I would do it a million times rather than have some worthless piece of shit blasting me with adverts as punishment for being poor.

i wonder if there is a way to fool it into only showing me 'cool' ads, i have never seen a 'cool' one

or porn

you can get rid of the ads by paying Amazon like $15. apparently kindles are "ad supported" to keep the initial cost down, but i don't know how forthright they are about that at time of purchase cuz i got mine as a gift.

i should really just pay the damn money though because my kindle is wonky and will wake itself up to show ads in the middle of the night while I'm charging it. i'll look over and it'll be glowing away to no one, wasting power.

yeah mine does that - even when the screen has been turned off, occasionally it will just… glow more, like something is happening

It's watching you...

I have an old-school kindle and was thinking about upgrading, one thing I'm not clear on re: the paperwhite is page turning. On my current kindle there are two buttons on the left for page forward/page back, and two buttons on the right for page forward/page back, so I'm not restricted in my movements based on the hand I'm holding the book with. The paperwhite doesn't have any visible buttons so I can't tell if you can navigate left handed and right handed or not. Can anyone with a paperwhite explain?

http://media.wiley.com/Lux/75/366175.image0.jpg

Not great for right-handed page-back, but how often do you use page back, I guess.

i think you can swipe as well as tap, so that the swipe maybe lets you indicate a direction contrary to the region you're swiping in? but it may be you need to swipe more centrally to get that to work.

I got a Voyage, and it has page turn "buttons," but I find myself touching the screen instead, because the IFSR buttons just don't have a great tactile feel.

It's less wanting right handed page backward and more wanting left handed page forward so I can page forward regardless of the hand I'm using. I'm being really picky here but swiping seems like it might be a bit disruptive, would prefer to keep my hands in one place.

Are there brick and mortar places that have Voyage demo units?

You can page-forward with your left hand by just tapping a little further away from the left edge of the screen. Works fine for me.

but that's such a long stretch!!! i want to move nothing on any of my body!! not even eyeballs!!!

How'd you ever read print books?

why did you come into a thread about kindles, what do you think we were going to discuss?

i was a bit concerned about upgrading from the orig kindle to paperwhite because of the lack of page-turn buttons but it's really not an issue. almost preferable and less clunky to just touch the screen, and you can swipe to go back if you need to. i wouldn't pay the extra amount for the voyager, it doesn't seem worth it (having said that, i've not tried out a voyager but i'm p much blown away but how much i love this paperwhite). also, do like xelab and go for ebay/gumtree, got mine for £75 plus snazzy red cover, and even a lemon shortbread biscuit because the guy had made a batch that morning. whole experience is up there in my top 5 things of the year

Honestly the Voyager is not worth the extra dough. It has sharper edges and lower battery life (smaller battery makes it thin). The screen is higher red, but that doesn't really make reading any better. It was a cool
engineering exercise, but not really a better product.

doesn't it, like, donk

tactile-ishly?

It's got haptic clicks (and believe me - they worked hard on it!), but those things never feel quite right. I just find myself using the touchscreen to turn pages anyway.

do people really hate buttons as much as tech companies think they do? i'm still devastated that apple discontinued the ipod classic.

I'm hapticus autisticus

i feared having a touchscreen only kobo would mean fingerprints galore. but it's fine.

the one thing i do hate is accidental touches and the way you've no real idea which direction the pages were turned in. do i need to go backwards or forwards to get where i was?

Buttons are a huge PITA to design, mechanically. Usually we burnt through a couple of sets of hard tools (very expensive) on each product, trying to get the buttons to feel right.

do people really hate buttons as much as tech companies think they do? i'm still devastated that apple discontinued the ipod classic.

― musically,

it's easier and cheaper to manufacture products without buttons and less breakable things they have to give refunds on

And it makes localization easier...

Paperwhite is on sale today and tomorrow for $99...$20 off. Think I will go for it!

probably something to do with the imminent kobo glo hd launch

I was lucky as hell to get a barely used one on ebay for £46 ($67.51). It was a hell of a bargain, it is the pinnacle of e-readers and I doubt I will use anything else for a long time. All this bollocks about making them more high-res or more thinner or waterproof etc is missing the point imo.

more bloops