Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

I think it is healthy to draw a line between the two, the simplicity of e-ink is everything that is beautiful about it.

it's funny, the first few days i thought there was something… trying… about making out what was on the screen. now it seems fine. probably been damaged in some way by my encounter with technology but oh well.

oh man, thanks for reminding me of libgen, I used it years ago but forgot. I bought paperbacks of John Barth's The Floating Opera/The End of The World and a couple of Joan Didion books this week and discovered I just can't do paper books anymore. They're awkward and feel funny and I can't read them in bed in a pitch-black room.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/books/review/Schuessler-t.html?pagewanted=all

But today, Brown is perhaps best remembered for THE READIES (Rice University, various formats and prices), a 1930 manifesto blending the fervor of the Futurists with the playfulness of Jules Verne. “The written word hasn’t kept up with the age,” Brown declared in the first line. “The movies have outmaneuvered it. We have the talkies, but as yet no Readies.” Enough with the tyranny of paper and ink! “Writing has been bottled up in books since the start,” Brown wrote. “It is time to pull out the stopper” and begin “a bloody revolution of the word.”

Brown’s weapon of choice was not ideological but mechanical. “To continue reading at today’s speed, I must have a machine,” he wrote. “A simple reading machine which I can carry or move around, attach to any old electric light plug and read hundred-thousand-word novels in 10 minutes if I want to, and I want to.” The machine he described, in which a ribbon of miniaturized text would scroll behind a magnifying glass at a speed controlled by the reader, sounds a lot like microfilm, then in development. But its truest inspirations, Saper argues, lay in the ticker-tape machine and in modernist experiments like Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons,” which Brown first read as a young man while working as a stock trader and hanging out with poets. In 1931, after word of his machine spread, he published “Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine,” an anthology of experimental texts sent to him by Stein, Marinetti, Pound and others.

Reading Brown’s manifesto, it’s hard not to recognize uncanny preludes to today’s claims that digitization will establish a new utopia of cheap books, downloadable from even the most obscure library while you’re waiting for the bus. (“The Readies” itself, previously available only to those who could afford one of the 150 original copies, was reissued last year by Rice University Press, which is now entirely a digital print-on-demand operation.) The machine, Brown argued, would allow readers to adjust the type size, avoid paper cuts and save trees, all while hastening the day when words could be “recorded directly on the palpitating ether.”

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3046678/the-kindle-finally-gets-typography-that-doesnt-suck

hmph

Just a quick note if you don't see the improved layout engine when you update the app. Amazon needs to reprocess each book in their Kindle catalog to support the feature. They're currently working through an extensive backlog, so if you don't see any improvement, re-download your book, or try again later. Some of the books updated so far can be found here.

fat chance they're getting to a fly-by-night ocr scan of a 500-year-old book any time soon

the weird thing is they could just put a hyphenation dictionary on the device, rather than re-do each book.

why wouldn't they?

well i can imagine that if the page layout engine had to do a lookup in the hyphenation dictionary for every single line ... maybe expensive in terms of CPU/battery? especially if the Kindle can't keep the dictionary in RAM all the time.

Thoughts on Voyage anyone? It's expensive, but I spend most of my life reading, often in the dark, and I have a ton of books left to read on my account. Plus I have shitty vision and I actually find Kindles easier to read than some books. So...

That new Bookerly font is actually harder to read than Caecilia, I think.

I really like the Voyage. Screen was a lot better than my v1 Paperwhite, the battery life seems fine too. I wish it had real buttons instead of the haptic things, but that's all.

I managed to get a near brand new, blocked Paperwhite for £40 that the seller claims is from unclaimed lost property. It cant be registered with amazon but you can load books via the usb. I will probably cop some bad karma for this but times are hard.

Forgot to pack my kindle charger for the long hols. Any tips on where I could find a compatible cable? Might have to rely on small electronic shops and gas stations since I won't be in big cities

are u in the US? walgreens should carry micro usb cable accessories

see that's the thing about books, they don't need chargers

yeah it's just a micro usb so it's easy to find

see that's the thing about books, they don't need chargers

OTOH you could also forget to pack your books.

Yeah it's just standard micro-USB. Same as most Android phones.

refresh rate on books is shit

True story: I don't own a Kindle or anything like one and today I forgot to pack my book. :(

a decent smartphone will make a usable ereader.

"License limit exceeded"
Fuck you Amazon

???

Couldn't you just delete off one of your many devices?

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/what-the-google-books-victory-means-for-readers-and-libraries/411910/

i accidentally purchased a kindle daily deal today (clicking to get rid of cover preview on a laggy mobile device, the picture disappeared and the buy button was directly underneath...). ebooks are one-click purchases by default (is there any way to turn this off?) and it downloaded immediately.

what are my chances of getting a refund? (ok, was £1, but it's more the flaw in the system that i don't like)

you'll get a refund if you go through the live chat thing and explain especially since it's a flaw or a sneaky button placement - I don't use amazon any more but signed up for a free trial of audible ages ago and only realised later that I hadn't managed to cancel it properly and they refunded the couple of months' worth of fee I'd paid obviously they'd be able to see on the account that I hadn't used it

a google search for 'kindle refund' pointed me to amazon help page

basically, go to Manage Your Content and Devices and there's a 'return for refund' option which'll let you specify 'accidental purchase' as a reason...

luckily it didn't even download to my device as the default device is an old pc. (i've never had an actual kindle, i use a kobo mini)

(but what's to stop you downloading, removing the drm, saving under a different name then claiming a refund?)

I suspect nothing, as long as you don't do it lots of times.

Amazon doesn't worry about the ethically challenged and tech savvy. Impulse purchases are their profit center, so they provide immediate automated refunds for butt-purchases, so as to not deter impulse buys.

I accidentally hit the "purchase" button on the website a few months ago in the hazy hours around bedtime, didn't realize it for weeks 'til I recharged the Kindle and looked for a legit purchase, and then immediately rescinded the order. Worked a charm.

Its probably part of the corporate ethos. IIRC, their policy with regard to third-party suppliers is the customer is always right, which has probably screwed over plenty a shipper, but what are you to do if you're a bookshop barely making ends.

> Amazon doesn't worry about the ethically challenged and tech savvy.

hurray.

they probably, unless they are dumb, have alerts set up that'd flag people returning things too often.

my problem would be finding the time to read the downloaded books - the digital backlog, of actual purchases let alone gutenberg downloads, is about 20 books at this point.

Yeah, I can't remember a single instance of an interaction with Amazon customer service where they didn't give me everything I asked for. And I have to do it very often as part of my job. They'll refund you pretty much no matter what.

My son accidentally purchased a series that was available to watch for free on our Prime account and they were all FUCK YOU PAY ME when I attempted to get a refund.

Ive had several ebooks refunded. I think as long as you do it within 1 week you are fine.

I do buy the odd book, but mostly fuck 'em. Perma aeroplane mode, torrent sites, bookz - go fuck yourselves Amazon.

Kindle daily deal (and the monthly equiv) often throws up good cheap stuff, hence the backlog. You'll have to wade through piles of chick-lit to find it though.

Top 50 eBooks (https://store.kobobooks.com/en-us/ebooks/top)

Our most popular and trending eBooks, updated hourly

1 Lost Girls, A fast paced, gripping thriller novel
2 The Missing Husband
3 Little Girl Gone: A gripping, twisty psychological thriller
4 The Universe versus Alex Woods
5 Gone (FBI Profiler 5)
...

do i detect a trend?

There's a factory somewhere churning out these 99p thrillers. They've have started putting "a gripping x" description in the titles of ebooks.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Best-Sellers-Kindle-Store-eBooks/zgbs/digital-text/341689031/

The Girl With No Past: A gripping psychological thriller [Kindle Edition] Kathryn Croft (Author)
Lost Girls: A fast paced, gripping thriller novel (Detective Kim Stone crime thriller series Book 3) [Kindle Edition] Angela Marsons (Author)#
DEAD WRONG a gripping detective thriller full of suspense [Kindle Edition] HELEN H. DURRANT (Author)
DEAD SILENT a gripping detective thriller full of suspense [Kindle Edition] HELEN H. DURRANT (Author)
Girl Number One: A Gripping Psychological Thriller [Kindle Edition] Jane Holland (Author)

This has been the ad on my Kindle all week:

http://i.imgur.com/6VjF0iK.jpg

xp - everyone thinks they can get rich writing niche erotica or thrillers on Kindle, with the right phrases in the title and description. The curse of Twilight.

Airplane mode, and this shit never appears.

Y'all are way more sensitive than me about an ad that you see for 1.5 seconds before swiping to unlock.

it's not cool man

I wanted a fancy Voyager, but the $99 Paperwhite is getting hard to resist.

wonder how long it takes to crank out one of the thrillers? how long are they, 150 pages?

welp it only took me nigh on a year to figure out that text highlighting WILL cross page boundaries if you move your finger to the right place

: /

Wait!

I was wondering about getting a Kindle for my girlfriend, but have never looked into them before at all. How does the basic one stack up against the Paperwhite and the Voyager in the real world? I'm not too familiar with what the spec. differences really mean.

I also ended up looking at the Fire line-up, as she does watch a lot of netflix and online tv/movie streaming via an old laptop at the moment. How annoying is the Amazon-ness on those - do they forever bombard you with ads and hamper using non-Amazon related features? The prices are very keen - I can't see any alternative tablets under £200, let alone £100...

I upgraded from 2010 gen Kindle Basic to 2014 Kindle Paperwhite (periodically on sale for $99), and while I could live without the fluorescent whitening agents they use on the e-ink display, the higher resolution screen is nice and the backlight is invaluable. It gets most use while I'm out of town, and I read most of a 300 page book under moonlight on a beach last week.

There's a next step up (Kindle Voyage) which is just gilding the lily, AFAICT.