Amazon Kindle (ebook thingy)

Yeah, I could definitely see this coming in handy--there are many occasions when I'll be working on something and I need a certain book; it would be awesome to be able to get it right away. But I'm not gonna pay four hundred dollars for it. I mean, it's a book! I'll just go out and buy it if I really need it.

But I'm not gonna pay four hundred dollars for it. I mean, it's a book! I'll just go out and buy it if I really need it.

-- G00blar, Monday, November 19, 2007 11:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

I don't think their initial target market is ILX. I'm sure if I'll ever take a business trip again I'll see some guys with these on the plane.

http://www.smallsurfaces.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/segway.jpg

I saw somebody recently using one of those professionally recently, in an airport or a big store, I think.

nice to see the whole internet thinks this kindle thing sucks :D

Yeah - everyone who hasn't actually used one.

^^^ he made it, kids

(which I mentioned at the top of the thread)

what, you want a medal?

Sheesh. Jerk.

sorry :( i guess you don't need any more hassle :(

wow what a dick!

that's what all my ladies say

I'd love to talk about cool lesser-known features and correct some assumptions and misconceptions about the device, but we've been specifically instructed not to do so. So for now, I'll just let it go... Sorry about the jerk comment...

The quotes in The Guardian article are kind of funny...

Amazon's chief executive Jeff Bezos... "Books have stubbornly resisted digitisation. I think there's a very good reason for that, and that is the book is so highly evolved and so suited to its task that it's very hard to displace."

Philip Makinson, of Greenwich Consulting... "Do not get me wrong, it's a very nice bit of kit but what need is it fulfilling? Books are quite portable, cheap and universally available already."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/nov/20/amazon.news?gusrc=rss&feed=10

Why the fuck would anyone pay £195 for this? Reading it is never going to be as comfortable an experience as reading a book, so much isn't going to be easily or legally available and, y'know, it costs more than an iPod and not much less than an iPhone on contract. Not saying they do the same thing, but yeah, perspective.

i feel sorry for that schwantz guy now :(

only possible appeal of this (or any equivalent) is not having to lift boxes and boxes of books when moving.

but when i fall asleep reading and the book inevitably falls off/behind the bed, i would be pretty mad if that book cost $200

I'd love to get one but the $400 is pretty steep.

I thought last night about all the Library of America editions I could line a shelf with using the same $400.

I'd rather add another $100 and get every Dalkey Archive book ever.

only possible appeal of this (or any equivalent) is not having to lift boxes and boxes of books when moving
I'm paying my movers way less than this costs.

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/11/19/the-future-of-reading

Oh, I guess you only get 100 books from them for that price nowadays.

i would miss different-sized books and cover art and the like

It's interesting - my co-worker and I both worked at ReplayTV together back at the beginning of the PVR, and he pointed out how similar the two products are in some ways:

Both products are/were not available in retail stores, so nobody could really try them out before buying.

Both products were greeted with similar "why would I need this?" reactions from many people. For ReplayTV, he remembered how people said stuff like "I already HAVE a VCR that I never use - why would I want this thing?"

And on the good side, most people who used ReplayTV (or TiVo, or other PVR) for a while couldn't imagine life without one after using it.

Time will tell if the Kindle has a similar effect on customers (and, to be fair, ReplayTV did not end up being very successful, although the PVR has become almost ubiquitous), but it faces some of the same challenges.

schwantz, did you work at lab126 in the a9 office on hamilton? i was there for a while. congrats on the launch.

so every book ever is available for this thing ?

I'm still a bit underawed by the grey lcd looking screen, is it even back lit?

this is a pda with less functionality

it looks nasty, and it sounds like a disaster from the planning 'how do we DRM it' PoV

I don't think the reaction has been so much "why would I need this" but "I'd like this, but not a DRM-crippled $10-a-pop no-hyphenating 1980s-looking one". Sorry to rag on yr work though, congrats on shipping.

Kindle Availability
Due to heavy customer demand, Kindle is temporarily sold out. Because we ship Kindles on a first-come, first-served basis, please ORDER NOW to reserve your place in line. See availability messaging above for estimated in-stock date.

ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW ORDER NOW

(much as i like Caecila)

Caecilia

I'm still a bit underawed by the grey lcd looking screen, is it even back lit?

It's electronic paper! No backlight necessary.

(regardless of the look and functionality of the rest of the device I think that's a huge UI win)

Anyone who compares to the iPod is a retard.

When iPods came out, you could immediately fill them with content you'd already purchased or stolen. With Kindle, I have to...re-buy all my books if I want to read them on the kindle? That's a massive barrier to entry given the cost of a Kindle.

The Kindle is beyond ugly. I want something more cuddly to take to bed or the shitter when I read. And I want color. If having paper-like display screens is so great, then why don't we have them on our computers?

I'm waiting for tablet Mac.

If having paper-like display screens is so great, then why don't we have them on our computers?

New technology, black and white only... so far. But it'll happen.

i'd quite like to see this screen to see how it's different.. is it just thinner?

I've seen a Motorola F3, and it did make me go "woah!". I thought it was a fake at first, the screen looked just like some paper or card that someone had drawn on. That only has a 7-segment type display, don't know what the resolution on the Kindle is like.

the e-paper on the kindle will be fine. i've seen other hardware with the same and it's nice. will be good for novels and a lot of straight text books. the stuff around it (hardware feel, 'product model') on the kindle seems like a giant fail though.

ledge, that was my phone up until about a week ago. It was pretty groovy, although text messaging got to be a pain.

One last shill post: Computerworld article

Can I just say that the frickin' name is possibly the goofiest thing about this?

otm. I keep thiking there is something related to this guy
http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/F/htmlF/fugitivethe/fugitiveIMAGE/fugitivethe.jpg

Or these two, although it's even more of a stretch:
http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/4/48/250px-KendallsGtHits.jpg

Would you use twigs or newspaper as kindle to light a bunch of these on fire?

"Kindle! We'll Turn Paper Books Into Kindling"

I think the wii has shown a goofy name is fine

my kingdom for a modern Mini

yeah, just those two (same deal at Argos). they had Black Friday deals on the crazy expensive ones and the clara h2o thing (recycled plastic, waterproof, more money) but i think the vanilla claras have been replaced by those (although they have a refurbished one)

the nia has arrived (argos do overnight delivery to a checkpoint 10 minutes away. first time i've used one. it's just a kiosk inside a sainsburys local and you enter your order number and name but it seems to rely on a staff member noticing you hanging around)

the plastic feels a bit more plasticky and the on/off/sleep button is inset a lot more than my clara, to the point where you need to use a fingernail and which makes it easy to turn it off when you want sleep. new firmware as well by the look, and the fonts seem to start a lot smaller than mine. lower resolution is noticeable if you're used to the hd clara but doesn't look too bad (it's worse whilst changing pages, but then it settles and looks no worse than some books i have)

the bit i do like is that the logo on the front is now embossed and not printed (i had to go over mine with a sharpee because it was a bit too white)

was £70 on offer, down from £90. my clara was also 20 quid off the original price when i bought it, £80 i think, but they went up and then got replaced by the recycled plastic / audiobook thing. the nia's not great but i'm not sure i'd pay the extra £60 to get the clara e2

(looks like the other non-kindle alternatives could be the newer nooks and the pocketbook range. only links to the nook i can find go to amazon that just seems to show me random stuff.)

I've ordered a nia, the £60 saving (compared to the clara) was an offer I couldn't refuse. I'm not sure what our previous models are - touch or aura I guess - I got two new for £100 after they'd been superseded by the clara. what I like about them, just aesthetically not functionally, is that the screen is not inset, the whole front is a single smooth surface.

I was reading a book and as soon as I got to the acknowledgements, Kindle popped up the "rate this book! Read this next!" thing. I was so mad.

gah. bought actual official penguin classic version of Notre-Dame de Paris and it's full of typesetting badness. have seen the following several times:

‘some speech’, and then,’ some more speech’

where the third apostrophe is also the wrong shape, a 9 rather than a 6.

épice appears as ¿pice in the footnotes

and generally the footnotes are per-page, and each has its own entry in the toc, meaning the toc is 18 pages long and, of course, the ebook pages aren't the same as the original's so the numbers are pointless. the footnote markers are also superscript leading to a bigger line gap on the lines where they appear.

(all of this fixable locally but annoying)

> I've ordered a nia
> ledge

how are you finding it?

It's my wife's, I haven't used it myself but she's perfectly happy with it. I'll try and have a go with it later.

https://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2022/03/22/how-collections-work-after-latest-kindle-update/

Anyone had any luck trying KOReader on the Kindle?

reading Jennifer Saint's Ariadne. but they've hard-coded the font (Sabon LT) and it's very spindly especially on a backlit screen. but i have an editor, i can change that...

20 different 'txt' styles and it's specified in every single one. the C in CSS is for cascading. also fixed the first-line-indent which was way too low. and added a margin before the sections. does nobody ever read these things?

(what's bigger than a paragraph? new paragraphs are indented by a character or two but there's no gap above them. but once in a while, one a major change of subject, there'll be a one-line gap and the next paragraph will be hard to the left. is there a name for this? section?)

CARELLA: What made you cnoindente your mind?
PATRICIA: I cnoindented my mind, that’s right.

took me a while to work out what was happening here. i wonder if the original kindle version was correct?

noindent whoever came up with that find & replace.

it's that time again...

just went to download recent purchases and it's forcing me to upgrade Kindle for PC version, which means more reading around on how to break the d r m. only out £1.99 of this doesn't work but it's annoying.

new plugin needs new calibre...

Crosspost with backward steps I guess but it’s bananas that you can find the kindle edition of a book in the Amazon app & it says “This app does not support purchasing. Books purchased through Amazon are available in the kindle app.” & the kindle app itself has the same message. My gut response is always fuck you then, if I’m doing any extra steps it’ll be to get it on l1bg3n

I was happy to find that Zlibrary is still going, though I had to install Tor to access it. Probably the closest I've ever got to using "dark web"!

Wins I think it’s because Amazon doesn’t want Apple to take a cut of every book purchase, so you have to use the Amazon website to buy ebooks.

Confirming my gut response tbh, if the two omnipresent dystopian tech giants can’t come to slight compromise in the name of usability fuck em

it's the payments thing, but also that apple has their own competing book store