Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

I like that they brought back physical buttons, but why would anyone pay $200 more than for a kindle paperwhite?

why would anyone pay $200 more

they're playing up the "thinnest, lightest ever" aspect, no doubt in homage to Apple. next up: the Kindle wristwatch

are left handed people SOL?

I assume you can just change the screen orientation in order to use it with your left hand

but the embossed logo on the leather cover will be upside down 8(

people on the tube will point and laugh

They will mostly point and laugh because you paid $300 for an e-reader

They will be too busy sneaking an admiring glance at the 300ppi screen to laugh. "Wow! I have never seen such well defined e-ink text before"

it has a mechanism that automatically changes the button directions when you rotate it and switch hands.

i love the idea of buttons but i just got a paperwhite in the last year and i really have no reason to upgrade. and i thought $200 for the voyage was too much, this is even more ott.

I have an old Nook with two sets of buttons so no gyroscopic bullshit needed. Still works great.

i think the airport fried my old kindle bc after i landed it had these streaks on the screen and online ppl say sometimes powerful electronics/magnetics or whatever effects can do that. so i got the paperwhite and it is so gorgeous. i really love it. it's light, v easy to read, touch screen, you can push on a word and it brings up a dictionary definition. you can click a footnote and it gives you the footnote in a pop up window instead of scrolling back and forth. v. pleased w/ it almost grateful that the tsa forced me to upgrade.

Everyone seems to fall in love with the paperwhite at first contact, it does deserve that love though - absolutely.

anyone use the 'send to kindle' add-on for firefox? mine has become inoperable in the past few days, with no indication as to why.

― j., Thursday, March 17, 2016 2:03 PM (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it works again!!

what is with this update this is gross dnw

What happened

AUGH

there are all kinds of cosmetic changes, UI elements moved, the homepage contents listing had its font changed and it's all smaller and busy now

do these people even use the things they fiddle with before they foist them upon us

I'm still on 5.7.3. What am I missing?

there is a snazzy new homescreen, if you are willing to have buy recommendations put on it (if not, same old thing w/ adjusted appearance)

everything is thinner (lines, fonts, etc.) and the buttons and such are smaller (beyond the point of casual accurate buttonpushing)

for some reason collection views now default to showing you 'all' rather than 'downloaded', despite there being more things in 'downloaded' than in 'all' - and if you don't make the switch the only other way to find something now being shown in 'all' is to search for it

Yuck. Is there a screenshot online anywhere?

Have they changed the actual fonts for reading? Am kind of loving reading with the weirdo dyslexic font.

If this is the update from months ago, I don't mind it.

it may be that, i was notified of one that never seemed to come. i now have a dyslexic font i didn't have before.

I just want a baseline of mere competence for the books that get advertised on the sleep screen (of my paperwhite). Without exception they are the shittiest imaginable self published ebooks, many of which have grammatical or spelling errors in their promo blurb and some of which even have misspellings in their cover graphics! Seeing them makes me super depressed about, like, the debasement of writing etc. books are supposed to be my safe zone of craftsmanship.

I don't like the most recent update. I have the hardest time just finding books that I know are on my device.

The most recent update looks nice I think but it seems to have broken my battery use - which now drains even when I'm not using the thing

This is why mine has been in aeroplane mode since I bought it. I don't want any meddlesome interaction with Amazon at all, especially when I like it the way it is.

i think what they changed was, in going from options 'all' and 'cloud' to 'all' and 'downloaded', they stopped counting files loaded on manually as part of 'all'. also by default 'all' now covers undownloaded (or since locally deleted) cloud files, so what's called 'downloaded' is more accurately 'all the contents of the kindle'.

boo

question about a thing not new to this update, i think:

when you read a formatted (usual kindle file) book that has page sizing issues (e.g. set as poetry), a scroll/zoom option will pop up in the middle of the screen on page turn taps, so that you have to turn-tap repeatedly to get it to turn and ignore the scroll/zoom buttons. is there a setting to turn that off, or at least a way to use it to avoid that behavior? so that it's just clear and easy page turns from here til eternity?

argh i mean it's really annoying to move the orientation setting multiple levels in, so that it's harder to get to than the font

I just want a baseline of mere competence for the books that get advertised on the sleep screen (of my paperwhite). Without exception they are the shittiest imaginable self published ebooks, many of which have grammatical or spelling errors in their promo blurb and some of which even have misspellings in their cover graphics! Seeing them makes me super depressed about, like, the debasement of writing etc. books are supposed to be my safe zone of craftsmanship.

I'm glad it's not just me, I thought the ads were targeted/personalized somehow and I was deeply and profoundly insulted by what they thought I was interested in

Can't you put these ad infested kindles into permanent airplane mode and use the kindle app on your pc to purchase and move ebooks onto it? There is a nice free program called calibre that helps you do this.

I think then I would just be stuck with whatever the current shitty ad is?

I side load almost everything using calibre btw

one of the sync menu items i was used to seeing seems to have vanished at least some of the time, after the update i mentioned above, so i was surprised today to find that in the brightness item (sun) on the main menu bar, you can switch to airplane mode as well as do a sync

grumble

btw verso is having one of their $1 ebook sales today

they stamp your name and email in the file before they release it to you!

their kindle files are quite large tho, must be fulla crud

they come with a publisher's font by default, i wonder if that's it

Yeah, that makes sense.

Have we remarked yet on when the interesting, aesthetically pleasing cover art available at time of purchase gets replaced by clip-art or movie tie-in?

my paperwhite kindle suddenly started turning pages with a small lag - any experience with that?

Are you in a different temperature environment? Page turn times are temp-dependent.

why, does that effect the impedance of the screen for touch-sensitivity purposes or something

Never knew about that temperature sensitivity thing but I can believe. Usually I attribute any slowness to
1) Bad wifi and syncing thereover
2) Too much stuff on Kindle, so not enough free space for swapping leading to thrashing
3) Random system stuff happening in the background

Wonder if there is a recommended ratio for 2?

E-ink is literally particles suspended in syrup, so it takes longer to move the particles when it's cold...

that's disgusting

Cancel my subscription immediately

I dont have any temperature changes in my house and thought that the strnegth of teh wifi signal wouldnt matter once the book is stored on the kindle.
Now it kinda feels like an old iphone struggling with a new iOS.

I had the slowness problem a few weeks ago and it seemed to be tied to a specific book rather than the device - once I'd deleted it, then restarted, it went back to normal. Obvs that doesn't solve the problem of finishing the book, but I'm pretty sure your device is still okay.

ok thanks - just 5% left on a LeCarré book

if it's a post-74 le carre that could be the source of the problem, hey yo

nope - 'Small Town in Germany'