I own a Kindle Paperwhite (last gen, relative to this new one) and a Kobo Clara BW (purchase in the last 6 months). IMO, the Kindle is the premium e-reader when it comes to look and feel. It's just a fantastic experience. The issue is Amazon and how even if you want to put your own purchased ebooks on it, you have it send it through their servers. That tied with a few other privacy issues over the years led me to also get a Kobo.
The Kobo can run in a fully offline mode (called "side-load mode" or something like that) and I can transfer my ebooks directly via USB. I use the Kobo most of the time now since most of my reading lately has been independently published ebooks, but I still use the Kindle for books I purchase via Amazon directly.
With all that said, I personally think the Kindle Paperwhite is already the perfect size. It fits snuggly in my back pocket and strikes the perfect balance between screen size being large, but not too large to hold for my average male hands. I'd be a bit concerned about the size increase for my personal use case, but Amazon does a great job with the Kindle in general so I'd like to see some reviews.
As for the new Colorsoft, I'd really like to see some reviews. The color Kobos that came out earlier this year got some mixed reviews for colors, but I'm not sure if that's just the nature of color e-ink or not.
> The issue is Amazon and how even if you want to put your own purchased ebooks on it, you have it send it through their servers.
You can sideload your books over USB too, using Calibre for instance.
I own a few Kindle models and a Kobo Forma as well. The Kindles do have some quirks and bugs (e.g., disappearing books, issues with sideloaded fonts…). But my Kobo Forma’s battery completely died after a couple years of usage, and the device became completely unreliable. After that experience, I’ve resigned myself to live with the Kindle’s problems.
My Kindle had this "bug" where my side loaded books randomly disappear. As a workaround, I have to keep it in flight mode at all times. Not a big issue since that’s what I would do anyway, but in case my Kindle would break, I wouldn’t think long to buy an alternative
This happend to my kindle to! After keeping in in flight mode for years I put it online again in order to buy a few new books from the kindle store, poof suddenly my entire library of side loaded books was gone, with progress and everything. I could see random metadata files related to the books on the drive, be books was gone. Super annoying as many of the books I didn't have locally anymore and to loose the "archivement" of finished books sucks big time.
I can see this may be implemented by amazon to counter piracy, but alot of these books was perfectly legal.
So the result of this is that I will never put my kindle online again and just stop buying from the Kindle store.
Keep mine in Aeroplane mode. Download books I buy on Amazon directly from amazon and drop them into calibre. Amazon doesn't get to touch my Kindle ever.
Thinking hard if I ever want to get another Kindle when Amazon can just screw around with what I put on my Kindle ...
Same, though I don't think it is going to help Amazon the way they hope it does. I moved books over to my kindle and had it nuke my humble bundle collections when I added a purchase from Amazon. I've not connect it again until I figure out how to backup and restore MY metadata.
This actually happened to me after connecting to wi-fi but there is a workaround that I found:
Convert your book to .azw3 in Calibre
Instead of sending it to the device in Calibre, locate the azw3 file (Right click -> Open book folder).
Copy the file to your Kindle, but not to the "documents" folder (where Calibre usually puts it) but rather into Downloads->Items
This folder is where books go when you buy them from Amazon or receive them after using the Send to Kindle feature. I have only tried this with azw3 so far but it might also work with .mobi format.
i'm not really sure what benefit you think they're gaining by breaking the less convenient, less user-friendly way to sideload books.
They're perfectly happy to let you email books to the kindle that you bought at other stores (or stole), as well as sync your progress with those books, backup those books to their servers, and generally have the full reading experience with all the benefits of the kindle ecosystem even if you didn't buy the book through kindle. If they didn't want to encourage the use of third-party files, surely they'd make it more difficult than a bug that randomly deletes books off some people's kindles sometimes.
The benefit (or potential gain) is that some people will just buy the book from the Kindle store to avoid the pain. I've seen that happen first-hand to my wife.
Also by emailing books or loading through their servers, they can still track and get that sweet sweet data/metadata that Amazon thrives on. When you sideload, you don't even have to connect it to the internet, which makes analytics more challenging.
You make an interesting point. Maybe facilitating the usage of sideloaded books is not among Amazon’s priorities. Yet I don’t know how much of that comes from malice rather than simply negligence or lack of interest.
It’s directly against their priority of influencing you to only purchase ebooks through their monopoly. Whether anti-competitive, anti-user practices are malicious or just a consequence of capitalism run wild, I don’t think there’s much of a difference
Out of all the devices where having a physical airplane mode switch would be nice, I'd put the kindle pretty high up. Kinda sucks having a battery that lasts ~45 days in airplane mode, and like a week and a half when I forget to turn it off.
Since the kindles with 3G have disappeared, the need for airplane mode for actual airplane use is a lot less though. Where I am most airlines permit WiFi use and even offer it themselves in flight. Only mobile network connections still have to be switched off.
Airplane mode is mostly a power-saving feature, because WiFi drains the battery pretty hard. As others said, leaving wifi on will kill your kindle in a week or so, whereas it can go on for months without it.
Physical switch is less prone to the whims of a capricious, resume-driven product owner who thinks their users may just want to get rid of airplane mode. Most are diving into firmware.
I recently picked up a refurbed Kobo Forma, and I absolutely love the device -- with the caveat that, like you mentioned, the battery has been completely unreliable.
Multiple times I have picked up the device to find it completely dead, while it was at full battery less than a day ago. I haven't quite narrowed down the cause yet -- since I did install KOReader and Nickel right after getting the device, it's not running stock software, so I'm not certain if the issue is hardware or software related.
It definitely seems to be doing something in sleep mode that's draining the battery, even with wifi turned off. This really shouldn't be the case -- I'd expect close to 0 power being used when not actively refreshing a page. I've recently turned to mitigating the issue by setting the device to turn off completely after an hour... which is not ideal, but having to wait for the thing to boot up is definitely preferable to waiting for it to charge.
It's annoying because otherwise this thing is pretty close to perfect for me -- the form factor is excellent, extremely lightweight, and I can connect to my Calibre-web server and download any ebook I have on demand. I'd seriously consider buying an extra one to crack open and install my own battery if I knew that would fix the issue.
Edit: Lastly, I have a sneaking suspicion that "refurbished" does not mean "replaced with a new battery", which, honestly, should probably be illegal to advertise a device that way vs "used".
My biggest problem with the Forma is that, even when completely turned off, the battery dies and refuses to charge for days on end. One day, the device says it is charged to 100%; the following day, it dies without an apparent reason. I’ve calibrated the battery many times, but the issue remains. I agree that if it didn’t happen, the device would be excellent.
> But my Kobo Forma’s battery completely died after a couple years of usage, and the device became completely unreliable. After that experience, I’ve resigned myself to live with the Kindle’s problems.
Sorry, you're absolutely right. The overhead of it was more than I cared to do (needing to use Calibre instead of a drag and drop of a file), especially since Amazon would then report my newly loaded books back to themselves. That's the part that I really didn't like.
Shame to hear about your Kobo's battery. FWIW, they have great repairability (in newer models at least). That said, the Kindle's battery does smash the Kobo's in my experience as well.
You can drag-drop the file from the file explorer, at least on my Kindle (2022). I think the OP mentioned Calibre because sometimes you need to convert the file for Kindle if you have a bespoke format.
Whenever I’ve converted books to mobi in Calibre it seems they fall back to a slightly worse experience - using “location” markers instead of real page numbers as official Kindle books display, cover art is tricky to get working on the lock screen, etc.
Is this a poor Calibre configuration or are there real limitations to reading books side-loaded on Kindles?
It’s been a few years since I’ve had to do this, but I think that (at least back then) Calibre defaulted to MOBI for the conversion. However, you could manually select KF8 (AZW3), which is essentially EPUB with a different file extension.
You can find Calibre plugins to convert the books to KFX, Amazon’s native format. There’s also a plugin to recover actual page numbers rather than loc markers in the books. It’s not very intuitive, but it’s doable given the options Amazon gives us.
Why do you need a few Kindles and also a Kobo? Are you keeping them in different places and don't move them? I only have the first Paperwhite which I carry along, it's 11 years old already and it still does the job. The battery keeps up and I was probably lucky to not have noticed any hiccups.
I read several types of books, multiple hours per day: reflowable fiction books, PDFs, books generated from my Markdown notes… I’ve got a Paperwhite, a Scribe and a Kobo Forma, but I’m still searching for the perfect e-reader.
The Paperwhite is too small for PDFs, but great for fiction and portability. The Scribe is excellent for PDFs, but it makes my books disappear sometimes, and it does not work well with sideloaded fonts. The Forma is a middle ground in terms of portability, but its battery died after a couple years and nowadays I only use it near a power outlet.
I use a combination of a Kindle Paperwhite Signature for novels and mainstream books. THen I use a Remarkable Tablet for PDFs, research papers, my own notes, etc.
I find it to be a good combination. Like you said, the paperwhite is amazing for laying in bed at night (really like the backlight) or on the couch or traveling to read. But it is too small for PDFs or serious notetaking. The Remarkable is perfect for those things. The remarkable also gives you full control over your files to do whatever you want. You can connect it to Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc and/or just manage files directly on device (plug it in via usb-c and it shows up as a USB mass storage device).
The two tools compliment themselves nicely. Just my 2 cents.
Similar 2-device story here.
Love my Kindle Oasis for reading books, and rely on my reMarkable 2 tablet for writing / notes -- driven by a hyperpaper-based daily planner (its navigable pdfs are a game-changer).
My wife is a pretty voracious reader and has 3 active Kindles that I believe are mostly segregated out by genre/collection. I wouldn't be surprised if this is as much for convenience as anything else, I don't use it much but Amazon's library management and navigation on the Kindles has never impressed me.
She's also one of those folks who sideloads with Calibre as well as purchasing through Amazon.
I think you just naturally end up with that because the things appear indestructible. The first ever kindle I bought (dunno how long ago, it was before paperwhite, so more than 11 years) still works without issue. Even retains all the music I put on it 14 years ago when it was still an experimental feature.
I think the only thing that has been discontinued is the free 3G internet all over the world that they apparently figured was too expensive.
I _loved_ my Kindle Voyage for its adjusting backlight and glass display.
I wish it were less destructible! I upgraded to a Paperwhite (2021) when the Voyage's power button broke. Water resistance is nice, but having to get the "signature" edition for a light sensor and an easily scratched plastic display is quite disappointing.
I decided to ditch their devices because of the support I got — or lack thereof. First they refused to talk to me, because, for privacy reasons, my device was unregistered. I ended up registering it, and even so they offered just a 10% discount on the purchase of a new device.
Sadly, Amazon’s support is not far behind, considering its inability to fix certain persistent Kindle bugs. But I’ve never seen the hardware itself fail.
If it makes any difference (although I fully agree it does not excuse past bad behavior), for the current gen devices, Kobo has partnered with iFixit to offer user serviceable parts and guides, including replacing batteries [0]. Although iFixit has had partnerships in the past that have fizzled, as long as user-repair is pretty easy, things like batteries are probably generic enough that they can be sourced even if Kobo doesn't end up sticking with it. If the screen fails though, then yeah, you'd better hope they have committed to maintaining stock of OEM parts, which, even with an iFixit partnership, is in no way guaranteed.
That’s news to me, thanks for the information! I’ve considered replacing my Kobo’s battery, but the issue seems firmware-related, so I never thought it was worth the hassle.
> IMO, the Kindle is the premium e-reader when it comes to look and feel. It's just a fantastic experience.
Interestingly, I switched from Kindle to Kobo because it was lacking various basic features that made it not feel premium.
* Kobo epubs can show "pages in chapter" progress so I know how much longer there is until a nice stopping point, while Kindle only shows "minutes left in chapter" which is functionally useless.
* Kobo had blue light blocking night shift before Kindle Paperwhite (I think both have it now?)
* Kobo had a convenient feature where you slide your finger along the side of the screen to change brightness, instead of having to go into multiple menus to do this.
It's possible these things have been remedied, but especially the chapter progress thing put such a bad taste in my mouth that I never wanted to touch Kindle again.
> Kindle only shows "minutes left in chapter" which is functionally useless
The kindle recomputes your reading pace as you go, so unless you prefer to do that math in your head and track your own pages-per-minute moving average, I don't see how it's functionally useless
I always find Kindle's "minutes left" too low for some reason, so I have to ignore it. I'd find it simpler - and easier to make progress - if it just showed pages read/remaining within the chapter. Absent that, I am often having to go through the distraction of using the overview feature to figure out where I am in the chapter.
> The issue is Amazon and how even if you want to put your own purchased ebooks on it, you have it send it through their servers.
I managed to jailbreak my "Kindle Oasis 3" and install KOreader [1] and Syncthing on it (the process of achieving this, as described on mobileread.com/forums was quite horrible by the way.)
Very happy with the result though, books are just synced automatically with my Macbook via Syncthing.
Hopefully somehow a similar setup will be possible with the new Kindles, if they can also be jailbroken.
PS. The Kindle Oasis 3 is still great in 2024, it even automatically adjusts brightness with its light sensor.
> you have [to] send [books] through [Amazon's] servers.
No, you can sideload books using USB mass storage. It's pretty easy. Kindle Paperwhite is still a great experience even without using the Amazon book ecosystem.
You are correct, you can sideload, but as soon as you open them in your Kindle, they get an Amazon-DRM; so you can't read the very same files on another e-reader. And - as soon as you go online with your Kindle - said DRM is checked and all non Amazon books deleted. At least, that was the case 10 years ago: I still own a Paperwhite 1st Gen which is now basically defunct.
I switched to a Poke 5P (Onyx) and was surprised at the tons of features. No ads, no DRM and reads basically all formats. Win.
I downloaded all my Amazon-bought books, so I can still read them on PC, but otherwise I'm done with their product.
It sounds like you are trying to move DRM'd books you bought from Amazon to another Kindle, which is indeed not possible – that is the purpose of DRM. You'd need to strip the DRM for that to work.
But as other commenters noted, if you sideload ebooks which do not already have DRM on them, the Kindle will certainly not add any sort of DRM to the files. This is true both if you sideload via USB or even if you use the "email to Kindle" feature.
I've literally never run into the problems you are describing. It might be true (it seems implausible but I don't know), but it is not a significant factor in day to day ergonomics.
Text crispness, page turning speed, battery life, physical dimensions are all much bigger factors in an ereader IMO.
What you wrote is completely untrue. I have myriad of books on my Kindle which are not on Amazon, and they are not deleted. Neither does anything weird happen to them.
So, I tested this. You are all partially correct - it's not the Kindle putting the DRM on the files, they already have them when you download them. That said, the DRM code IS matched to the serial number of your Kindle device, so my previous -admittedly not properly tested - assumptions still stand.
I then went to investigate, how all this is done and found this:
I get my books from different sources than Amazon. I can transfer these to my Kindle by e-mail or Calibre, without any issue. And they stay there on the Kindle and work fine. I also sync these books from my computer to other devices, Android and iOS, and they work fine also.
Use EPUB file format and your books will work on all devices, including Kindle.
Another fully-offline, sideload-only, airplane-mode-forever ebooker here. Plus I didn't even buy it in the first place - a relation had one they said they never looked at, so I asked if I could take it off their hands.
Had a funny experience once with a fellow (who was in his third year of computer science at a reputable university), where we just so happened to get on to the topic of ebooks. I told him how I operate my little machine, which I'd only started using. He was shocked, and stated clearly that he thinks it's unethical towards authors to use a "jailbroken" device like that and not get books through the Amazon store...
As someone who has self-published a book on the Amazon Kindle store once, Amazon's cut is something like 70% + bandwidth fees (author only gets maybe ~25–28% of the selling price).
I had the exact opposite experience. My kindle battery went wonky after a few years, but my kobo has gone on for a lot longer with no issues. It's made me a little wary of buying a kindle again. Aside, or on top of, not wanting to support Amazon.
I did not. It was a couple years old, and I wanted to get a bigger screen. As to not liking Amazon, they are anti-union, should be broken up, and their main stockholder is a money hoarding ghoul.
Where do you buy DRM Free books from? (I assume that's a requirement for the device to be fully offline, right?) Do you run everything through that DRM-stripper Calibre plugin?
It's usually a small marketplace like Leanpub. Tilted Windmill Press (Michael W Lucas) [0] is another one I've done a good bit of purchasing from in the last six months or so.
Some of the books on the Kobo store are also sold with DRM. They only mention it in small print under eBook Details at the bottom of the page, e.g. Download options: EPUB 3 (Adobe DRM)
My favorite device right now is a boox Go6, smallish, cheap, android. I don't use many apps on it other than the reader but threw a copy of Kiwix on there, and use it as a writing deck using a bluetooth keyboard, hits a lot of semi-offline use cases for me.
Yet Amazon has been consistently increasing the size of the Paperwhite models over time, each one a bit larger than the previous one. They remain portable, but no longer fit into one’s pockets, for instance.
The lack of physical page turn buttons is a dealbreaker for me. I switched, begrudgingly at first from my oasis to a kobo libre colour and it’s much better. If you stick koreader on it you can even start a Linux shell from the ui which amuses me :)
I've got the same generation PW and have it jailbroken running KOReader. I've considered trying other readers out, not because of issues but rather shiny new thing reasons. But at least when it comes to KOReader, it seems like the PW are the best if you can jailbreak the version you're on.
(I want / need it to run KOReader because I wrote a small Lua plugin for it that syncs reading stats (words per minute, minutes read per year, etc) to a centralized server.)
Yeah I got the Signature Edition of the Paperwhite 11 with their black leather cover, and it's just brilliant. It was a huge step up from the 10 that went before it in every regard.
The resolution and size just nails it, and my favourite feature is the warm backlighting for reading at night. Battery lasts forever, and I can just put it on my Samsung phone stand for wireless charging once in a blue moon - not once have I run out of battery.
I fall asleep so easily to this, currently on the Eisenhorn 40k Omnibus book - and a 184 week reading streak.
I used to be excited about new Kindle releases, have had one since the mammoth DXG - but no more, I'm good now with this, so don't see myself forking out $400 AUD for the new one (with a leather cover).
Also bought one (also a SE) for my son, with a different colour magnetic leather cover. :-)
Really? I had to make an account to "activate" my Kobo, but it wouldn't let me make one because I already had an old account with one of their partner websites, whose auth servers were malfunctioning, so it took like two hours to be able to "activate" the device.
You can bypass it, but I forget the details(I just did it a year or so ago with my newest Kobo). A web search should get you there though. The mobile read forums are usually the place where trustworthy details are found.
I am running a kindle voyage (2014). It is the perfect size for male jeans pocket carry, PPI is above 300 and battery works.
Most important! The yoga cover is great for laying on either side, so I can toss and turn in bed and keep reading. Literally no e-reader I have seen since has a symmetrical stand-cover that can be used sideways both ways.
As for Kobo, I just looked the other day and saw they have some great prices for e-readers that have similar features, plus they advertise being completely repairable! And you're not in the Amazon ecosystem. My only gripe years ago was the don't rendering on side loaded books wasn't as good as Amazon, and that Calibre couldn't De-DRM Kobo books as well as Amazon. I think the game has changed a bit, though, and I haven't tested anything in a while.
If Kobo books are crackable, my next e-reader will likely take me away from Amazon. I want that USB-C in my life.
"The Colorsoft is based on E Ink’s Kaleido technology but uses an entirely new display stack for Kindles, all the way back to a newly designed oxide backplane that makes it easier for E Ink panel’s tiny bits of ink to move around quickly. The E Ink world has been working on similar tech for a while, and Amazon thinks it’s the key to making color work well. The Colorsoft has new LED pixels, and a new way of shining light through them individually to enhance colors. It’s also brighter than ever, to help the whole thing feel more vivid. Some of this tech also helped the new Paperwhite turn pages faster and easier, but it was designed to make Colorsoft work."
"...Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition packs a suite of innovations that make every hue and shade pop.
Those include custom formulated coatings between the display layers to enhance the color, a light guide with micro-deflectors to minimize stray light, and an ultra-thin coating in the display stack to improve optical performance. We built the display on an oxide backplane for sharper contrast, faster page turns, and better image quality."
That's really cool. I have a Boox device with a Kaleido 3 display and the colours are really muted. And the display is much much darker than a regular BW display. I use it as an info display so I can quickly see the weather forecast and when the next subway leaves.
I'm also impressed by the improvements to Gallery 3 displays used in the latests reMarkable. Gallery 3 has typically had much better colours, contrast and brightness when compared to Kaleido 3. Now I'm very curious for the reviews.
I'm a happy owner of the latest rm pro, but I was curious about the boox. You're actually saying the boox is even more muted and darker?
In the rm pro the colors are still what I consider to be pretty muted. I had a laugh of what "red" looks like then I tried it. I don't care too much about it, for the purpose it's a great addition, but it's also darker than the rm2, which instead turned out to bother me a lot.
I can use the rm2 everywhere, but the rm3 is only saved, in my eyes, by some amount of backlight, which brings it closer, but still not exacly equal to the rm2. And by the way the rm2 is also, by far, not "white". If I consider rm2 to be some shade of ivory, the rm3 is downright gray.
Grayscale rendering on the rm2 display is also better. I do notice the dithering on the rm pro, and there's some color fringing in the ghosting.
I use a Boox Note Air Plus 2, a colleague uses a Boox Note Air 3. My device is black and white, hers is in colour. The black and white device is excellent, I cannot remember the last time I turned on the backlight. The color device is so dark that it is unusable without the back light in normal office conditions. I have not seen it outdoors, however.
If that matches my experience, outdoors helps a bit, but not much. Overall you get better contrast and brightness, but the fact that the background is "gray" and not white becomes even more obvious.
That being said the rm3 is usable without backlight indoors if the place is decently lit (for example, in most offices), but requires some backlight otherwise. The rm2 is usable also in poorly lit conditions.
I also have the Note Air 2, and really don't feel a need for color at this point. It's my go-to e-reader, I have a little remote and a stand for it so I can just kick back in a chair or in bed and read. I couldn't be happier with it, the battery life is still amazing even after a LOT of use too.
If I need color for some reason I have a phone, tablet, laptop etc that do the job better than e-ink presently can.
It's great for page flips, turning the backlight on and off, opening the top menu. Sadly it doesn't work for turning power off and on, but I suspect that can be fixed.
No update to the Oasis; I guess when I refresh I'll get a Boox or other Android-based device with page turn buttons and run the kindle app on it.
I have a first generation Kindle Oasis, which is a great device, in no small part because of its asymmetric design and page turn buttons. The newer Oasis (still last refreshed in 2022) have better lighting (temperature adjustable) and inverse text mode, which are both nice but have not been enough to get me to upgrade. It lacks the battery cover of the original oasis, which while kind of a pain was nice because it gave a very natural way to hold the device.
I'm sad to see that the Oasis line is not mentioned here. I have little to no interest in using my kindle as a writing device, and honestly would prefer that the touchscreen was as little used as possible -- an unresponsive or slow screen is the worst case for a touchscreen, since the feedback loop is terrible.
I don't know if they'll have an OS update to go along with this. I have found successive updates to be worse and worse -- my pages are all crammed with ads (not actual ads since I paid to have them removed, but "recommended books") and large page covers. I can barely fit five titles from my library on a screen; I would much prefer to have just the title/author/progress and fit twenty on a page.
The integration with the Amazon ecosystem is probably the best selling point, but until somebody shuts down Libby I've switched my habits to be almost entirely rent-based rather than buying books.
You should check out the PocketBook Era. It's what I moved to from the Kindle Oasis and I've really enjoyed it. The device isn't as svelte as the Oasis since it isn't subsidized by Amazon, but has an assymetric design and even more physical buttons which you can fully customize the control scheme. Also like the Oasis it gets amazing battery life with it's light weight OS compared to the Android based e-readers.
The PocketBook cloud is just as seamless as the syncing with Amazon if that is something you use. Only time I notice problems is during the weekly maintenance window which just looks like an outage. It has bidirectional sync for your progress as well as syncing new books and has a web interface and a phone app. Also offers the same email endpoint service as Kindle and you can set up Adobe DRM to use with library borrowing as well as other places that distribute ascm. The builtin store probably doesn't have the same availability of titles as Amazon but I haven't used it since I manage my library with Calibre and buy my books from various stores.
Best of all is the customizability. Don't want to use their store or cloud? You can turn off (really just not setup and hide) all the features and integrations individualy to make it an "offline" reader but still bring it online for things like Wikipedia lookup and web searches. You don't even need an account to set it up. You can also load additional dictionaries, fonts, and even applications on it. It has a healthy if small development scene.
There is a new color version but if you don't read things that require color I would get the original; Based on reviews it has the the same downside as Kobo and others that use the Kalaido screen where it's relatively dimmer in ambient light compared to the B/W one and so needs a higher average backlight level to compensate.
Overall I've been really happy with my switch and can't see myself going back to Kindle.
I have a significant library with Amazon -- does this have any support for Kindle books? The Android-based ones let you run a Kindle app, which, while not ideal, at least lets me access the library.
I've considered doing a sweep to download all of my kindle books and de-DRM them so that I have an archive, but this is a tortuous process if your library has over a thousand titles, as mine does.
Not seemlessly because Amazon has their store locked down to Kindle. But you can export all your books from the Amazon web interface or use the desktop Kindle app to download them all. You would then use Calibre with a couple plugins to deDRM them. At that point you have plain ebook files in Amazon's format to do what you want with. Calibre can convert them to any one of the open ebook formats (I personally prefer epub) and sync them to your device(s)). Those ebooks are treated like any others and fully supported by PocketBook cloud if you use it. The convenience of Amazon's store for Kindle is nice, but it's also how they lock you in to their ecosystem and devices so you keep only buying/paying for a subscription with them.
The process is really not bad at all if you use the desktop Kindle app to download your library before importing to Calibre. Each step is fully automated with the only manual parts being setting it up and doing each step in sequence for the whole library but not each individual book.
Amazon's latest file format (KFX, I think) hasn't been cracked. You can't reliably strip DRM from new Amazon books. The tools work on some of the books some of the time, but you can't rely on it working.
The workarounds mostly involve getting Amazon to give you the book in an older format, but then you lose the typography improvements that KFX gets you.
Apple's DRM format (Fairplay?) has never been cracked but I believe Adobe's has. Buying from the Google store of Kobo store is probably the best bet.
The book DRM problem requires a legislative solution.
For exporting a library of books you already own/read there aren't going to be many titles that have any improvements in KFX that you would care about. It certainly doesn't hurt to just try it and see what if any of the titles in the library have issues with being deDRMd.
I second buying from Google Play. Outside of a period of time last year where they had a bug that prevented exporting many titles in their catalog (some error in their backend service), I have never had an issue with purchases from there. I will happily continue getting my books from sources that allow true ownership after purchase regardless of any touted benefits Amazon adds to future DRM schemes, just need the words on the page.
Maybe I'm missing something, but those all sound like things that are display layer and shouldn't be dependent on KFX to be able to accomplish. I do know that that you can run preprocessing on epubs to adjust some of the layouting to your preference. The rest should just be determined by the reader application you are using and any shortfall in customization of those aspects would be addressed by improvements to that application.
Regardless, my point was that: A - most of the books already in the library were likely enjoyed/acquired without knowledge of hypothetical improvements from Amazon rolling out a new ebook format and DRM scheme. And B - even if there is some magic that Amazon had to include in KFX to support the improvements you listed and can't be reproduced without them; I personally would not consider those or most any improvements to be worth losing ownership of books that I purchase.
The most valuable part of an ebook is the text and ownership of a copy of that is what I'm paying for. It is fairly easy for me to be principaled on only buying ebooks that I know I can own a copy of due to the diverse distribution that exists for most titles. Even when I had an Oasis, I didn't purchase anything through Amazon and loaded all my books over USB.
I haven't been able to find any sort of option to export from the web interface, and poking around at it with dev tools I don't see a non-trivial way to grab whole books. Am I missing something obvious?
The last time I looked into it, you had to have a valid target device or client registered to your account, typically a kindle reader. Then an option to download for transfer with usb would show kn the menu for entries in your library. It will download a kindle format ebook (there are multiple generations and even a new format) that is compatible with that device that and is also DRMd using that devices serial as a key.
So no, I wouldn't say you missed anything obvious, which is a feature not a bug as far as Amazon is concerned.
I bought a Pocketbook Verse Pro last year and it's okay, but has some issues.
There is no PB Cloud support but it uses Dropbox, however that means no syncing progress like with kindle.
It takes a few seconds to start since it's Android and fully turns off.
And highlighting is very clunky.
The software situation with that company is pretty sketchy. From their website both mine and yours are listed as the same OS but seem totally different.
Dropbox syncing is seperate from PocketBook Cloud even though the device calls it Dropbox PocketBook. Your device seems to have gotten all the same recent FW updates as mine on a similar timeframe, so as far as I can tell from release notes and the User Manuals they are running the same firmware and support the same features. Not sure why you have the impression it is running Android, but hopefully you don't have some knockoff?
You do have to setup and login to a PocketBook account to use the cloud synchronization. I have not tried the Dropbox integration, but it only supports a synchronized file folder.
In the user manual for the Verse Pro[1], the setup for PB Cloud starts on page 79 and isn't grouped with the Dropbox sync or email endpoint earlier on in the manual.
The only controversy related to PB Software that I am aware of is that it used to be even more open with a published SDK. It was many years ago that they stopped actively maintaining tne SDK. That doesn't seem to have stopped people from continuing to develop for PB devices, and as far as I'm aware PB have not done anything to prevent this or lock down their devices beyond not continuing public development of the SDK. Certainly theur current lineup of devices allow you to run 3rd party applications and are simple to get root shell access on.
I got that manual from the US support page. What region are you in and have you tried installing the US firmware? Search for"Verse Pro" on the US support page[1] after the device list populates.
I also would have been disappointed with my Era if it didn't have PocketBook Cloud syncronization as advertised since it is functionality I care about. That being said, if it is something locked out of your region you could always install Koreader and setup sync through that.
I'm not trying to solve the issue, just warning people pocketbook is not that good.
The manual on my device also mentions the cloud, but it is just wrong. I think they have regional partners with ebook stores that customize it.
Though I think you are right it isn't Android and I misremembered. I thought thats why it has a dual core cpu and make wonder why it's so slow after boot until it's ready to turn pages.
I can't speak to how their distribution is resulting in selling devices that don't have advertised features enabled. It is weird they would allow this while keeping their branding and same device name (maybe they are working around some trade restrictions?) So that is not good, but I don't know how widespread that issue is. And as I pointed out in my response before the edit, this seems straightforward to resolve if you buy from somewhere that has this issue.
Not to belabor the point, but in my original post I mentioned how PocketBook devices are specifically not Android as an advantage in terms of battery life.
I suspect that what you are experiencing with regards to it being "slow" to resume an in progress book and allow navigation may be due to your settings. The PocketBook has a sleep mode that allows quick resume for reading. How long after it goes to sleep before it powers all the way down is fully configurable from disabling it to waiting your choice of many options between 10 minutes and 48 hours. IMO the cold boot time is acceptable and I did not notice a difference from my 1st Gen Oasis. The power loss if you fully disable its auto power off is still great, although I haven't used it that way much beyond when I first got mine so I don't have a comparison to my Oasis.
That being said, I don't have the same model as you so maybe there is a significant difference between them in performance, but it would be easy enough to check independent reviews if I was trying to decide between them.
Doesn't seem like there's an official announcement since any news articles about it describe it as a "quietly discontinuing" [0]
I'm in the U.S. and a search for "oasis" has nothing but eye drops in its top results. You have to scroll down to find a listing for the "International Version — Kindle Oasis", selling at just $135 [1], but which Amazon refuses to ship if your address is in the U.S.
As with all previous kindles, the only official bit is the removal from the store. There hasn't been a case (so far) of a kindle that was removed from the store and then a later model being released.
I have the first Oasis as well. Prior to that I'd pretty much bough every single kindle refresh. Since then I haven't. I'm in the same boat: give me physical buttons.
First I waited for Kindle Voyage refresh, then started thinking about Oasis, but waited for it to have a normal charging port (USB-C) and now the last reader with physical buttons disappears :(
Oh well, at least my Voyage still works and fits in most pockets (and has cool origami cover), the only downside is that if not in airplane mode, it uses up battery in 2-3 days. In airplane mode I can read 2-3 weeks.
The Voyage was a neat device, though its haptic buttons pale in comparison to real buttons. There are a lot of options outside of the Kindle, but if you want to stay in the Amazon ecosystem, you might be in for rough times.
>honestly would prefer that the touchscreen was as little used as possible -- an unresponsive or slow screen is the worst case for a touchscreen, since the feedback loop is terrible.
I agree in principle (slow feedback is the bane of my existence) but I had one of those 10 inch Kindle DX without touch, and it was a pretty bad experience compared to the Paperwhite.
Physical buttons (and possibly the orientation sensor?) were definitely nice to have though.
If you only wanna read normal books, I agree. But I read RSS feeds, mangas and books all on my Boox tablet. Only made possible due to being able to install android apps for RSS and mangas.
I'm in the same situation. I've read some workflows you can do but I really like to just pop open einkbro with my royalroad follow list as the homepage instead of having to run a browser extension to calibre rube goldberg machine every single time a new chapter is released.
I don't love boox but mine hasn't died yet and it's decently competent at my use case.
Can confirm. I own a Poke 5P and the ghosting is really more obvious until you've fiddled with the settings enough - and I do mean fiddle here. Might take a while.
Other than that I'm a real fan: latest update delivered dark mode (black background, white text) and like I said above: no ads, no Amazon-DRM, all formats, cloud storage (if you want to), TTS, annotations that are really comfortable to handle, bluetooth.
I am very, very, very sad to hear this. This does match with my experience of fiddling with various Kindle competitors over the years (nook, kobo), but between generally faster processors and the increasing bloat of kindle OS, I thought maybe the gap would be narrower.
I was hoping they'd revive the Oasis. That form factor is _perfect_ IMO. Scribe is too big for a replacement. I settled for a Libra 2 which is similar to the Oasis but I feel it's a bit sluggish when it comes to chapter turns, highlights and page turns w/ images but I don't have something in the Kindle line-up to compare it to now.
I love the oasis. Specifically the fact that it’s made out aluminum and is water proof. My daughter is an extraordinary reader since a very young age, long before her motor skills have matured, and ended up with my oasis. She does all the things a young kid does like smear food all over it and drop it all the time. I can just wash it off in the sink once a day and we are all good. If it had been less sturdy and not waterproof there’s no way she could have used it.
Finally the physical page turn buttons are great as well as the bevel on the back for holding it with one hand.
If not traveling, getting to read an open paperback, two pages side by side, on Kindle Scribe is super enjoyable, then turn it to portrait to read white papers or textbooks.
Yep. Same. Buttons are a must have for me, along with the waterproofing. It was (is) the perfect device aside from going through three of them (replaced via warranty) due to the waterproofing not being as advertised. I am happy I saved the advertisements of folks using in in baths.
Both are features that complement each other. If I can’t read in the rain I don’t want it. This means disabling the touch screen and using the physical buttons to page turn, otherwise you are using hacks like putting it inside a plastic baggie. Haptic buttons would be fine as well, and likely solve some of the waterproof issues along with an update to USB-C charging.
Pondering having someone mule me the last of the Oasis International editions available for sale for when my current Oasis finally dies. I really don’t want to go back to the dark ages of touchscreen only.
It's not just the physical buttons alone, but the overall design with a fairly large area on one side to easily grip it with one hand (while still having your thumb over the page flip button).
I really wish UX designers for handheld devices optimized for, you know, ergonomics of actually holding it, rather than just trying to minimize the physical size.
I love mine, and somewhat dread the day when it dies. I've decided I'll probably switch to onyx boox of the same form factor when it dies. I've got the big one from them, which I use for sheet music, and it works nicely. Runs Android too, so you can install the Kindle app and read your old library
Came here just to say this. I've owned an Oasis since 2018 and recently bought the first Scribe model when it went on sale, and naively thought "at this price and 6 years later, it must be a better overall experience" — even as I knew its main selling point was having a writeable interface.
I did know of its drawbacks beforehand — e.g. no physical buttons, not waterproof. The page-turning response/refresh time is noticeably better, but I'm left feeling pretty meh by the overall experience. I haven't had much need to scribble notes so as of now, the Scribe is basically an iPad-sized device with the limited feature set of the Paperwhite.
The size is good for textbook-type material, but not enough to make me pick it over an iPad if I'm traveling. The Oasis is small enough that I can carry it in a coat pocket.
But the buttons really are the killer feature. Being able to disable the touchscreen — especially when I'm anywhere where moisture is an issue (at the beach or gym) — easily makes the Oasis worth bringing even if I could read on my phone. I would have easily gone for a new version of the Oasis but I guess consumers haven't shown enough interest in paying extra for a button interface.
The Kobo Libra 2 and Libra Color look to have a similar form factor to the Oasis. At least having a chunky area on one side with buttons that give a good spot to hold it.
We had books, but then we thought, what about screens.
Then we had screens but we thought, what if screens were more like books.
Then we had book screens and we thought, what if the screens we made to look like books were more like screens.
Similarly, I saw someome on social media yesterday post about buying "Monopoly Go" boardgame at the store. The box says "Based on the popular mobile game".
The joke was the same, we had a board game, then we made a mobile video game based on the board game, now they are selling a board game based on the video game that was based on the board game.
I get the joke, but color has been present in books (manuscripts, before the invention of the printing press, even) basically since their inception, many centuries ago, so just adding color wouldn't make these devices more similar to screens as much as it would make them more akin to... well, books. Just look at these marvels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminated_manuscript.
> I get the joke, but color has been present in books (...)
That's like saying confortable cars have been present since their inception, and then present as a example a royal coach.
True, you technically had colors in books. Just like you had books with hardbacks with gold inlays. The fact is that the bulk of the books being published were not color books because that costs a premium to make and moreso to buy. Hence the default stabilized in softcover books with B/W print on flimsy paper.
With e-readers you do not get higher production costs, and you can just download your books and benefit from that. Some ebooks even ship with high resolution images where you can zoom in all you want or need.
Where exactly in parent's post are cave paintings mentioned, instead of explicitly just books and screens, whose specific relationship is what the tongue-in-cheek comment is about? Your post makes no sense, other than trying to be a "gotcha!" one and failing at it.
Oh my bad, definitely movable then, thought it was a wall.
According to wikipedia:
"The codex (pl.: codices /ˈkoʊdɪsiːz/)[1] was the historical ancestor format of the modern book. Technically the vast majority of modern books use the codex format of a stack of pages bound at one edge, along the side of the text. But the term "codex" is now reserved for older manuscript books, which mostly used sheets of vellum, parchment, or papyrus, rather than paper.[2]
"
I would say a codex is a book yes, you are right there. The defining characteristic for me is the binding method, the flippable pages and the bookiness factor of the book.
That said, unbound scrolls that are scrolled into scrolls of scroll are definitely scrolls and not books.
> The portability of a Paperwhite combined with the note-taking ability of a Scribe… there’s probably a market for that.
There are already erasable notebooks that allow you to scan your notes and send the document to a storage of your choosing. Even BIC sells one of them.
Reading code and documentation with an eink screen is tantalising. I have no interest in lugging around tomes and tomes of manuals anymore. When I was in uni and school I'd regularly lug around 15kg+ of textbooks. I love buying physical books but the freedom and flexibility of having ink-like screens is still a bonus.
Especially for things like reading contracts which I find miserable on a screen
Honestly, my only use-cases for a color eBook reader are comic books and House of Leaves. And I'm not sure if a 7" screen is really big enough for comic books (pretty sure on my Nexus 7 it was better to read comic books half a page at a time in landscape mode than a whole page in portrait).
Sorry but this is a bad take. The active light on "screens" is stimulating, causes eye strain and keeps you awake. The two technologies are not the same.
This again! Kindles have lights, too. On my old Paperwhite, the light could not be turned off. Although it could be dimmed, my iPad's backlight can be adjusted to be much dimmer than the Paperwhite's is capable of.
The Kindle's light is much more diffuse than the iPad's though, much closer to just having a reading light on, which you'd need anyway for a physical book.
The Kindle's light comes from a ring of linear LEDs that goes through a plastic sheet called a diffuser -- same as the light from an iPad. In the iPad the diffuser is behind the image whereas in the Kindle, it is in front of it, but why is that better or "more diffuse"?
>much closer to just having a reading light on
First of all, that contradicts the evidence from my eyes, but second of all, even if it were true, you'd have to persuade me that reading an old-fashion paper book with a reading light is any better at helping me get to sleep at night than reading from an iPad. I'm not buying that one either mainly because a reading light is going to throw more light onto the ceiling, where of course it gets reflected down again, and neuroscientists know (and the Scandinavian tradition "knew" in practice decades ago) that light from the top of the field of vision is more disruptive to sleep than light coming straight into the eye or from the sides or bottom of the visual field.
The eReader manufacturers have done a great job of marketing the alleged benefits of their front lights, even though they’re simple LEDs like everything else. I look for any actual studies on the subject every couple of years and come up empty.
(I do prefer an eReader over a tablet, but I don’t think the light is magically better.)
Everybody knows that the modern scholar obtains information from the world through papers, either from google scholar or from the latest libgen domain.
It's mind boggling to me that they wouldn't offer a color version of the Oasis, which is the obvious choice for any real Kindle enthusiast (metal, physical buttons, waterproof, amber light). Not sure who would even buy this color Kindle they came out with.
In fairness, the Colorsoft is waterproof and has the amber light as well. I have grown to enjoy the asymmetric design of my Oasis, though. It's comfortable to hold in a way the new one (and the standard ones) just doesn't seem to be...
has an og paperwhite owner, i later switched to a tablet, due to the colours and performance. but if they release a new scribe using a colour eink screen, it would be an instant sell for me.
remarkable pro is well and good but its price does not justify its utility imho.
What's the deal with ereaders and their seeming disdain for sane battery life measurements?
Amazon boasts "up to 8 weeks on a single charge" in all their selling points, then, in the fine print states "A single charge lasts up to eight (8) weeks, based on a half hour of reading per day with wireless off and the light setting at 13".
So, it has 28 hours of actual use time, got it. Why not just say that?
Having a few eink readers/tablets, I can say that I almost never care about battery life. You end up charging them once a week or two anyway. I never look at battery stats for them because it almost never ends up important in practice. I don't even look at the battery stat when deciding which to buy or when I recommend one to a friend.
The problem is defining "use time". With eInk readers, the only time it needs to be actually awake is when refreshing the screen, and then it goes back to sleep immediately after. So depending on your reading speed, one hour of active reading time - which is what the users themselves would normally think as "use time" - can vary a lot in how much power actually gets used.
That said, I do think they should just give the number in terms of page refreshes and let the users figure it out from there.
TBF phones and computers also take "evocative" numbers on their marketing material.
The "Up to 33 hours of video playback" for the iPhone Pro Max[0] for instance is an absolutely insane use case (nobody's letting their phone passively play local videos for a day and a half), and gives little insight into how long it can stay in sheer standby, do video meetings or handle slack.
> "A single charge lasts up to eight (8) weeks, based on a half hour of reading per day with wireless off and the light setting at 13".
> So, it has 28 hours of actual use time, got it.
Reminds me of when Quorn sold 3 sausage rolls but labelled them as 12, arguing that if you cut each one in 4 you get 12. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42251481
But also because it is not really 28 hours of battery life. If you just let it sit without touching it, the battery lasts for several weeks, if not longer.
It's a hard class of devices to give any sort of reasonable battery life length.
Regardless, the battery on these devices even back in 2012 was already good enough.
The color model is uncharacteristically expensive for Kindle at $280, more than the color Kobos which are $220 for the same 7" size (which also has physical buttons and stylus support) or just $150 for the smaller 6" size. Kindles are usually the cheaper option, at the expense of being less amenable to sideloading and jailbreaking than Kobos are.
This article really buries the lead. It talks about updating monochrome kindles, when they just released their first color Kindle (not counting the Fire). I had to look elsewhere to confirm this was indeed a brand new line of products, and others give it top billing.
> In addition to the monochrome e-readers, Amazon introduced its first color e-reader today. The new Kindle Colorsoft, covered in more detail here, looks almost identical to the new Paperwhite and launches on October 30 for $279.99.
All their splash art shows comics. That makes sense, inasmuch as comics are a primary reason you'd want color in a book. But it still strikes me as a bizarre choice, since Amazon is only offering colors in their tiny form factor. They also make a larger device, and if you want color, you can't have it.
Comics are unreadable on a 7" kindle's tiny screen anyway. What's up with the marketing?
Yeah, black friday is near. I am thinking older models will be given higher discount via their deal site woot.com. And latest model on Amazon with 20-50 dollars off depending on original price.
> being less amenable to sideloading and jailbreaking than Kobos are.
jailbreaking sure but what is the issue with sideloading on kindles? You can either email them which is very practical for third party services that support it (I have a digital magazine subscription that supports this for example) or just drag and drop via USB or a manager like calibre.
I have never had any issues getting documents on the Kindle.
I have recently bought a Scribe 1st Gen, when it was on sale.
Rooting it was a hassle, but it was worth it.
The excellent hardware (display, enclosure) combined with Koreader makes it really joyful to read technical books and documents, especially when combined with Calibre.
As one of those books was about Lisp, i also installed Kterm, tmux, the joe editor and tinysheme, which served as a decent Scheme Playground/IDE while i was on vacation!
The jailbreak i used is working up to FW v5.16.2, which was obsolete at the time i bought the device (approx. 2 months ago). However i was lucky, since my device came with that very FW version.
The new Kindle paper white may finally get me to upgrade … but also maybe not.
I have a 10+ year old Kindle Paperwhite (I think first gen). I use it daily and it’s still just nearly a perfect device. It’s withstood rough treatment, battery life is still ~2 books long, and it has never been made obsolete by a software update.
No other electronic device I’ve ever bought has had this kind of longevity and it’s not even close.
Cool to think that if I do upgrade now that $159 will probably get me to 2035.
Thinner, waterproof, usbc much faster charging, and I think the screen isn't as brittle. I bought the new one on a whim when it was on hella sale and I really like it.
The new Kindle Scribe looks kinda lame compared to the new reMarkable Pro, though significantly cheaper. Maybe the colored ePaper isn't that great, but at least you get some color for highlighting, which is probably a non-insignificant use of these types of devices.
Either way, sad there's no Oasis refresh. I'm not super attached to the physical buttons, but I'd prefer it to not. Oh well.
I had an original Scribe and while the writing experience was superb, I felt like the software experience was minimal and over the year or so I had it, it didn't really get enhanced any. My review of it was: It's just like paper, only more expensive.
It seemed like if you wanted a large ebook reader AND occasional note taking, it's probably great. For my use, I would have been just as happy with just a spiral notebook, probably happier. I used it every day for work notes and todos.
I sold it on ebay and got an Boox Note Air3, similar cost, and the writing experience is not nearly as good as the Scribe, but it is a much more capable device with many more features in the notebook. However, I've fallen out of the habit of using it, I think just because the writing experience isn't as good.
This is similar to me with my reMarkable 2. The writing experience is strictly worse than even cheap notebook and dramatically worse than a nice one with a nice mechanical pencil + lead.
Anyone with some critical experience also with the ipad pro pen?
I'd really like some comments there. There's a lot that goes into writing and drawing, and all the online reviews I've seen seem just to praise it.
I used most digital writing devices starting from wacom tables (first intuos series), to laptops with foldable screens and currently using the rm2/rm3.
I agree that nothing still has the precision of a real pen or pencil. I can lazily fill and shade even with a micron fineliner when I want, and simply can't replicate the same precision with anything else I tried. I could buy a lifetime supply of the best pens and paper with the cost of the rm3.
Writing is mostly fine, but when drawing I notice immediately the precision just isn't there. But still, at least on the rm (both 2 and pro), the digitizer is well calibrated, and the feel is good, the pen is actually like a pen and not the sucky abomination what wacom like to call "pens" or the tiny unusable styluses of the samsung "note" or lenovo yoga series. The show distance between tip and display is very good, and even though it seems ridicolous, the slighltly shorter one on the rm3 makes a difference. The rm2 is still requires a bit too much pressure for my taste (I have a light touch being used to mechanical pencils, fineliners and tech drawing); the rm3 seems slightly improved.
I can still tell instantly that lines are occasionally wobbly due to the digitizer's grid and pen position.
That being said I got the rm2 at some point, and it's the first e-notebook I actually stuck with because it's effectively "endless paper" and has reached the "good enough" feeling for me. I used to have tons of sheets of paper with notes, now I have somewhat less ;).
I have bad hand writing and over scratch paper with pencils... I greatly prefer the e-tablets for writing, so ymmv. I'm 47. I just did 6 months of college classes out of the blue, I did about 50/50 paper/tablet so this is based on about 100 hour recent testing. I had to practice a lot of mec pencil and paper as that's how our exams were.
I had exactly the other response when compared to my current scribe. I'm not sure they are trying to compete with remarkable on the design front, or that they should.
Remarkable, as a newer, smaller company, needs to seriously differentiate itself. Amazon can play it safer.
Having said that, I think the white bezel and introducing a professional looking colour to the Scribe, is so much better looking than my current Gen 1.
I normally wouldn't care, I didn't feel my scribe was ugly, until I saw the new one. I'm half considering passing mine to my mother, and buying the new version.
Color e-ink (both versions) isn't yet fast enough to be used for writing. Boox and Remarkable had to do a lot of hacky things to make the experiences usable on their color e-ink devices. (Boox currently uses the older color technology, Remarkable uses the newer one.)
That makes sense. Another comment pointed out that even the resolution of colored content (150 ppi) is half that of black-and-white content (300 ppi). Trying to take notes with bad refresh rates and lower resolution would not make for a good experience.
Though, the RM Pro has 229 ppi vs. the 300ppi for the scribe. So for black and white text, the scribe still has a small edge. But it would of course be cool, if the scribe eventually gets color at 300ppi.
In practice the resolution doesn't make a huge difference. (I've got both 300ppi and 207ppi BW e-ink devices and the antialiasing/gamma strategy makes more of a difference than the resolution.)
But a bigger difference is that Gallery 3 uses CMYW pigments; there's no black pigment, rather the microcapsules themselves are tinted black on one end, so the black ultimately ends up a little impure. Also there are only 4 shades of grey for antialiasing rather than 16.
The Scribe is neat, but it's too small (same goes for the Remarkable devices).
It wish it was A4/Letter size to read PDFs at full size. There are a few devices like that out there (I've heard the Fujitsu Quaderno is nice), but none of them can be used with books purchased at Amazon.
And yes, I know about Calibre and the DeDRM tools. They don't work on KFX files and the workarounds degrade the book (you lose typography improvements that are only in KFX).
I'm also disappointed by the Oasis being discontinued. I wanted to trade mine in for a USB-C version.
I am so excited for this. I've run into so many books where color would make it ten times better. Also, the Comixology subscription will be so much more valuable with this device. The only thing I have a wish for is that the device is more responsive than the original Kindle. There is nothing more frustrating than tapping a touch screen and waiting 5 seconds for it to respond.
I don’t know if you’ve used a recent paperwhite but they’ve gotten very responsive.
I have the newest paperwhite (prior to the one announced here) and it is incredibly fast and zippy compared to the kindles of old. And they claim the new one is even 25% faster.
I too have the previous generation Paperwhite and it's a laggy piece of junk. About the only thing it's even remotely zippy at is flicking through pages rapidly when I accidentally brush my wet hand against the stupid touchscreen while I'm in the bath.
I don't think any Kindles still have physical buttons. Kind of a bummer because buttons make it much easier to change the page while holding the Kindle with 1 hand
My partner has a Kobo and I'm seriously considering one. My Kindle has done more for my sleep than any other device. I get sleepy reading it, unlike my phone or tablet. I really wish I could my content on either device.
> Also, physical buttons! Such things are only available on the most expensive Kindle
Or the old ones you can get for $10 on eBay :) I use exclusively old models that have physical buttons for Kindles because they're just insanely cheap and still perfectly reliable (the battery too) even a decade later.
Unfortunately I've found the screens on the older ones to be quite fragile (at least the 4th gen)
I went through a phase of buying used 4th gen ones off ebay so that I could have physical buttons to turn the page, but within a couple of months they would always end up up with cracked screens
They would be stored in my bag next to my laptop (and in a case) but at some point I would end up pulling it out to read and find a cracked screen
I think I went through 4 of them before I called it quits, my current paperwhite is still going strong (just no buttons sadly)
My kindle paperwhite is my favorite tech that I own. It has changed by life significantly for the better and allowed me to cut down the time I waste on doom-scrolling social media. I find a book on shadow libraries, convert them into epub format and then send them over to my kindle via USB. Calibre helps in all this. I have read close to a hundred book now--all for no dime.
- the authors are unfairly compensated by amazon and the public libraries due to publisher issues with ebooks already. OP is hardly contributing to this disparity.
- I choose to purchase expensive copies of books I love - but the digital copy is the one I read.
The fact that the situation for authors is already poor hardly makes it better to opt not to compensate them. If you or the OP feel that you’re only playing a small part, that’s between you and your conscience.
And sure, if you’re buying some copy of the book and downloading a convenient second copy, that’s totally different. I was responding to the OP being pleased about not having spent anything at all (except on the kindle itself presumably).
Note that purchasing on Amazon and compensating the author are actually separate categories - if you mail the author the RRP in cash, then they get far more than they would have if you'd bought off Amazon.
In fact, if everyone used a shadow library but mailed the author cash, then Amazon would go bankrupt but the authors would be fine (and wouldn't need to use Amazon in the first place).
I think Amazon would be fine because of the money it makes on other products, but I agree paying the author directly is a more principled approach than just paying nobody.
Worth noting though that it’s not just Amazon and the author in the picture - you would be stiffing the publishers in this scenario, and they paid to get the book printed (and edited, and designed, and shipped to physical stores, and maybe some publicity, and probably gave the author an advance).
You might think “who cares?”, but if the author didn’t (traditionally) sell any of the books they published then they wouldn’t ever get another publishing deal, so you’re harming their career. They could self-publish, sure, but worth keeping in mind the author doesn’t necessarily want that, because of the benefits publishers bring (if they didn’t bring any benefits, people wouldn’t use them - they’re not idiots).
It’s very complicated, and I would argue that people using shadow libraries “for authors’ benefit” ought to be speaking to more authors about whether they want that kind of help. But I agree your plan is much more honest than paying nobody, even if it has some potentially negative effects at scale without more coordinated action.
I was thinking about this recently when a friend group argued that someone getting out of paying hospital bills is unethical since doctors are just as much victims of America's bad healthcare system as patients (due to exploitative pay structures I guess). To me this feels like some kind of victim blaming. The writer isn't getting paid (much), the reader is paying too much to a stranger, yet somehow the reader is the bad guy if they opt out of the process.
I get that the idea is "if everyone opted out the writer would get nothing instead of peanuts!" Or maybe the company shafting the writer would go under and direct sales would happen instead?
The difference is that a reader isn’t in any way a victim. They’re choosing to read a book. And if they don’t pay, the writer will often simply be paid less, to the tune of the royalties on that one book. So, yes, that is stiffing someone.
If everyone opted out you could force major change, sure, but in that case you shouldn’t be reading the book. That’s a true boycott. Reading without paying isn’t principled - it’s just cheap. And if you don’t actually organise it achieves nothing - except stiffing the author.
Yeah, there are a lot of things in our political and economic system that are oriented towards making victim blaming, or blaming individuals for systemic problems, the easiest and most natural line of thinking.
I don't know about the commenter above, but most writers I read have been dead for at least a hundred years. Should I purchase their e-book online for $850 each or should I get it from a shadow library?
You should also try using Libby / Overdrive to see if your local library has the book. I've borrowed 20+ books this year and it's pretty seamless and easy!
I loved my kindle paperwhite so much. I have a case on it all the time, there is not a single scratch on my kindle. One day, out of the blue, the touch screen stopped working. it is unresponsive to any touch, I've soft reset it, hard reset it, googled everything. Apparently its a common thing in amazon forum, and of course what does amazon support say? just buy a new one. At this point my kindle is only 2.5 years old and I'm pissed.
I've bought an ipad since and just read book from my ipad. at least my old ipad doesn't break even after 8 years
The thing is that the iPad screen truly doesn’t compare to e-ink in reading black-and-white books. If the e-ink screen is made properly, with high resolution and no PWM, one can read for hours on end without eye fatigue. Battery life on e-ink devices is in another league as well.
For me at least, issues with an e-ink device simply mean moving on to another device, or another manufacturer/brand, instead of switching to tablets.
My dad, partner, and I all have our own Kindles on my Amazon account. Over the past decade I’ve had them break a few times out of warranty. What I do is chat with support online and explain the issue. They may offer you a coupon to replace it at a discount. Decline and tell them not to worry about it, you’ll just toss it in the trash.
I think this has gotten a free replacement Kindle on 2 of 3 times that I’ve tried it.
I want to upgrade my Kindle but first I need to know where the power button is. My current one has the power button on the bottom and it turns off when I rest it on things - extremely annoying. Can't be certain from the product pictures, but looks like it's on the bottom again.
I had hope at one point to set up a Kindle with large fonts on a treadmill, but that was just totally hopeless. I tried again with a music stand next to the treadmill, but it was too far away, badly angled, and touching the device to flip pages could still turn it off.
And it's not just the accidental power-off, it's also the accidental power-on. I slip the Kindle into a tight pocket in my backpack, and it sometimes turns on by itself. Further, inserting it into the pocket can sometimes reproduce the swipe motion, so it can be on and active (and sometimes randomly page-flipping) inside my backpack.
The last Paperwhite model, for example, did not work upside down, just in landscape mode (and even so, only rotated to one direction). I don’t know whether Amazon finally added a gyroscope to the Paperwhite in order to fix this issue.
I've tried out all the e-ink note taking devices (Kindle Scribe, Boox Go 10.3, Remarkable 2, and Remarkable Paper Pro). The Kindle Scribe can't really compete with the others right now since the software is so limited. I'd only get it if you were a huge Kindle user that very occasionally wanted to take some notes. Otherwise, the Remarkable 2 or Remarkable Paper Pro are your best bets. Those are absolutely excellent products that don't overwhelm you with distractions.
> Otherwise, the Remarkable 2 or Remarkable Paper Pro are your best bets. Those are absolutely excellent products that don't overwhelm you with distractions.
You need a word of caution here. These devices are very good for writing but absolutely suck at rendering ebooks. I was on the market for a new e-reader/writer ultimately decided to go for the Boox Note Air 3 (no backlight on the Go was a deal breaker) and I think remarkable really dropped the ball by releasing the Paper Pro with a pen that needs a battery. Coming from years of using a Kobo Ellipsa, this was a huge deal breaker. The Remarkable 2 is a bit old and underpowered not to mention the limited amount of storage space.
I was quite hopeful for this refresh to upgrade my Oasis but it looks as though they've regressed on weight: 188g for my current Oasis vs 211g for the Paperwhite. The new entry level kindle is indeed lighter but unfortunately lacks a warm light. I hope something else will be on the horizon!
warm light (ideally adjustable temperature) and page turn buttons are the killer features for the Oasis. faster page turns and all the rest I can live without.
I hated not having buttons. The squeeze things on the Voyage weren’t good but at least they were something. The buttons on the Oasis are far better than that, though I still have gripes about them.
I can’t imagine replacing my Oasis. I don’t know what it is they have against the buttons. I might’ve bought the color thing today if it had buttons.
I guess I just can’t upgrade until my device dies and then I’ll have to figure something out.
My oasis is configured to make its lighting unusable. There are no buttons controlling the lighting. You have to navigate a menu on the touchscreen. It's possible to turn the lighting off, but if you do that, you'll be unable to turn it on in the dark, which is the only circumstance where you'd want to.
Some of the biggest pros and cons of Kindles vs Books:
Pros - Lightweight, I can even fit it into a holder on the side of a chair or bed so I don't have to hold it.
- I don't have to physically manipulate the 1000 page book to try and get to certain pages.
- No dust.
Cons - I can't tell you the authors or names of most of the books I've read on it. When you have a physical book you're confronted by the book and author's name, along with an image to burn the combination into your mind. As a kid going to the library I knew whether I had read a book just from the jacket.
- Amazon shenanigans.
- Battery won't last forever and you'll need to replace the whole unit.
That said, there are some additional drawbacks which make me like physical books still:
- For physical books you have an intuitive understand and memory where in the book something happened, e.g. in the first quarter or on an earmarked page. On an ereader every book and every page feels the same.
- Easy multi page view and crossref. For instance, I can have two textbooks about the same subject open and easily compare different sections by just using bookmarks and spreading them on my desk. For that I would need multiple ereaders. Same reason a tablet with pen is nice but feels limiting.
- DRM is annoying enough to be basically an ad for piracy. Get the ebook, download, add it to adobe software, connect cable, transfer to ereader, disconnect cable, still doesn't work, reauthorize device, maybe it works. Meanwhile without drm: add to calibre, get book via wifi, done.
- Maybe better with newer tech, but eink was still somewhat lower resolution and contrast compared to a printed book. Also, page turning is fast enough but not seamless.
Yeah before the Kindle I had a Sony E-Reader which worked fine for a long time, until it eventually ran into battery problems, after which I got my Kindle.
Its battery has degraded over time, but even at half the original length its not a problem.
My eyesight has gotten worse and I can't read a typical book with its tiny print. The biggest Pro for me is adjustable font sizes. Another Pro is free books! After purchasing probably a 1000 books in my life; I'm done buying and storing books. I did the library thing for a few years when the library was only a couple of blocks away but book selection and availability was never good. Now I can easily get any book I want from the comfort of my home.
I count the physical manipulation of pages as an advantage of dead tree books. E-ink is very nice, but there’s nothing like flipping through actual pages to find some information.
Of course, the situation reverses when you’re trying to search a word rather than a page. It’s too convenient to use a global search function on e-readers.
The Kindle is one of the best things Amazon ever did. They made subsidized ereaders and made them cheap. Ofcourse they did it to promote their store but they've never blocked side loading.
I hope they’re not abandoning page turn buttons for good, like my Oasis has — the only reason I bought the Oasis. Touch screens are just not a good reading experience, for me.
That's why I love my Kobo Libra 2. Physical buttons, sweet spot for size, easy to sideload or I can buy on Kobo on device/mobile/desktop or sync pocket or get library books from overdrive/Libby.
Physical page buttons have a small UX disadvantage in that your finger must be located at the button when its time to turn the page. Unlike the soft method where you gently tap screen with finger or pen, and you're not limited to one activation location. So, more energy required with the physical button.
I was disappointed at first the Scribe didn't have buttons, but now I don't care.
On the other hand, touchscreen page turn has several UX disadvantages.
- You have to move the position of your thumb/hand for every page turn (to the screen, and back off of it). I disagree with "more energy required with the physical button"
- You have to obstruct text with your thumb/hand to turn the page
- It's very easy to accidentally turn the page by grazing the edge of the screen while you're reading
It's the opposite - with a physical button, you just put your finger on it and keep it there while reading, so that you only need to push slightly to get to the next page. Whereas with touch screen you need to actively move your finger back and forth every time (since keeping it there would block the screen, and in any case you can't really rest it on a capacitive screen without it registering as a touch).
For one-handed reading especially, that alone makes physical buttons significantly more ergonomic, provided that they're placed such that your thumb rests on them naturally when holding the device.
Is this something people value in an ereader? As long as its fast enough, idk why speed would be the thing they promote in the sub heading. I read on an ipad mini all the time but I don’t understand this.
It’s weird messaging. Who in amazons product and marketing teams decided that this is the most important thing to mention?
If I'm reading a novel then speed doesn't matter at all. If I'm 'flipping' through a book, looking for something, the page turning and refresh speed matters quite a lot.
"Speed" appears to be the only improvement over previous versions. It's only slightly larger than previous versions. My Paperwhite 4 is a little pokey especially in scrolling through a library, but it's not a big deal and not worth "upgrading." So the bigger question is "Why did Amazon create a new version of the Paperwhite with such marginal improvements?"
I wonder if they’re still using soft touch/rubberised plastic on the back? My last-gen Kindle Paperwhite has already started to go sticky and gross.
I’ve also got an issue where the latest software update is causing frequent hangs when opening new books (literally 5+ minutes) and I quite often get stuck in books, unable to summon the menu to go back to my library. Seems to be a fairly common problem judging by Reddit.
I ended up buying a Kobo Libra Colour just this week. So far I’m very happy with it. Performance is better and it’s compatible with a lot more stuff.
The plastic on the back feels normal to me, after many years of usage. I use a case, don’t know if that helps to minimize the “sticky and gross” aspect.
However, I have been experiencing annoying software bugs with both my Paperwhite and my Kindle Scribe. Unresponsiveness, disappearing books, issues with sideloaded fonts… the devices’ software quality has greatly diminished lately.
I had the exact same thing happen, I tried a case to cover up the stickiness but it just made it fell too big. Switched to a Kobo BW which has been nice but I miss the bigger screen.
I’m on the latest update too and, yes, sometimes I can’t get the menu or bookmark to open. I have to reboot the device to get it working again. The previous updates were fine.
Still no remote/bluetooth capabilities. That's the only thing that would make me upgrade, the third-party remotes you can buy are all pretty clunky (bulky clip on the side of the Kindle, need to be recharged often, can only flip forward as they just fake a swipe on the right of the screen).
I paid $20 for a remote page turner on Amazon and the battery lasts weeks. There’s no Bluetooth involved, it just uses basic radio signals to trigger a pulse that the kindle interprets as haptic input.
It’s one of my favorite purchases, because now I can actually fall asleep while reading the kindle since I’m not activating my arm muscles to turn every page.
This is the item (my kindle is one of the earliest versions, from 2011, if that matters): https://amzn.eu/d/aJaesjd
Life changing isn't it? Coupled with a holder attached to the bed I feel like I read twice as fast when I'm using it rather than holding the kindle, side effect being that I look like the people in WALL-E.
I understand that people would prefer if it were built into the device but in all honesty it isn't really that much of an inconvenience when you're already only using it while it's stationary.
I recommended the PocketBook Era to someone who has an Oasis in a sister comment. It supports Bluetooth remotes, keyboards, probably any Bluetooth HID with buttons. You just map any button press you want to reader actions (including ones beyond just page turn). It doesn't support input from them outside the reader interface, but fully usable without the touchscreen (you can map turning it on and off to the button combos too) when reading with a remote or the built in physical buttons.
I was hoping for a greater size - the standard Kindle sizes are totally unusable for users like me who mainly read PDFs.
After experimenting with larger e-ink screen sizes from other vendors I realized I also miss the snappiness of reading a real book. So in the end I settled for the cheapest 12-inch Chinese tablet I could get. Since I spend ca. 40-70 minutes a day reading, it's the best experience for me: the text is crisp, the contrast is perfect, and I can browse pages very quickly (not like in a real book, though, but the best experience so far).
The device is called Dogee T20 Ultra 12", I bought it from a local vendor for ca. 230 euro to avoid dealing with a Chinese vendor. Works without any problems and the battery lasts for many days with my usage pattern (that is only reading ca. an hour a day).
Edit: it looks like the TCL option the other person mentioned is better because of screen glare (I use mine indoors only but probably it would get uncomfortable in full sunlight).
But it seems something one would better test in person especially regarding the contrast/crispness of text hence my question how it works in the 11 model.
Why is no one making higher dpi ebook readers? I've been waiting decades now for an ebook that would actually have the resolution of printed 600 dpi pages. The chunky text simply makes ebooks for me uncomfortable and unpalatable for long reads.
Probably because it's enough for most people. I have a Paperwhite with (I think) 300 dpi and unless I reduce the font size to the minimum and look really close I can't see any issues at any reading distance. It feels like a printed book to me.
My understanding is that e-ink with higher than 300 dpi is very difficult to produce which means it is rather expensive and doesn't look that much better to most people. Additionally, people think of an e-reader as a sub-$200 device so the market for a premium high DPI e-reader is just rather small. People are already complaining about the price of the Kindle Colorsoft, think what they would say if amazon put out a Kindle high DPI and it was in the $400-$500 range.
Ah. So it's just the color filter that basically everyone (except ReMarkable) has done.
I'm kinda curious to see it in person, to see if they are doing it better, but other brands' results have not been appealing at all to me. Washed out, worse contrast, and a consistently pixelated / screen-door look.
I've been buying the kids versions because in the past, it was the ad-free version and came with a free case, but the new kids version seems to have ads if not used in kid mode:
"Will my kid see ads while using this device?
Kindle Paperwhite Kids is automatically set up for your kid to enjoy an ad-free experience. However,
if you exit Amazon Kids using a passcode, sponsored screensavers will be displayed on the device's lockscreen."
I can confirm that the new versions have to be placed in a child mode in order to hide the ads. It seems they have closed this admittedly nice loophole
If the new Paperwhite supported immersion reading (highlights the word as audible book plays), I'd grab it. It works on my Boox with the Android app but as far as I know not on any kindles (battery life + screen refresh speed allegedly. I really want to ditch my Boox, horrible company.
My Kindle Keyboard still works. You can't use the shop from the device, but you can push books from the website (although on mobile, only 3? devices are listed and there's no way to choose from more if you have them...)
Using the wisdom of the crowd here: what is the best ereader for tinkering? I'm browsing the answers here looking for that and I don't know if anything actually fits the bill. Something with Android, tablet-type machines, seems to be the answer? Is there nothing better?
Look into PocketBook readers. They have a full lineup with color and grayscale in various sizes. They run linux, you can ssh into it and install koreader, etc. They have a good privacy story and little vendor lock-in. The experience is a lot like my Kobo, but the matching mobile app is much better. I continue where I leave off with my iPad sometimes, it's a nice feature.
ReMarkable is somewhat tinkerable, it's a shame that (for the RM2/RM3) drawing the screen requires DMAing into memory that's owned by a proprietary blob and moves every update.
Get a Kobo, which model depends on your needs. A Kindle is never yours since Amazon can push arbitrary updates wipe your stuff. Don't buy Boox either, as they include a lot of bloatware, not to mention they're blatantly disregarding GPL.
Kobos are mostly just arm linux machines. You can install KOReader on them for a better reading experience.
FWIW I've been running a jailbroken PW5 for a few years now always connected to the internet without any issues dealing with updates.
I did rename the ota binary. I'm aware that there's always the possibility of Amazon maybe having some other way to push an update, but I haven't had any issues so far.
Good for you, but you can't count on buying a new device and having it be jailbreakable. For someone deciding what to buy it's not a good option. It's also a lot of work and worrying over something you bought and paid for.
I’ve read this, but I’ve also heard various downsides to Kobo, including in the discussion on this post. (Battery issues, general device glitches, etc)
Which Kobo do you use, and how has your experience been?
Libra H2O. Never had noticeable issues I'd say. Battery life is quite long. I couldn't get syncthing to work reliably, though it isn't super necessary.
Depends on what you mean by "tinkering". I had been on the lookout for a large Ereader from the very early days (i love reading books) and had owned a IRex Iliad and Nexus 10. I was looking for at least an A4 size screen (a must for reading technical papers/books) and finally settled on the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra (14.6 inch screen) which i bought this year. I have the Moon Reader Pro+ as my ereader app and with the S Pen you have note-taking capabilities too. Add a bluetooth keyboard/mouse and you have a easy to carry "laptop/tablet/note-taking ereader" for many usecases.
Looks like the base Kindle also hasn't been updated at all. Same dimensions, screen, weight and battery life. They also nixed the base Kindle Kids which was the best deal considering it was the same price as base and they'd fix it if it broke.
I've been using a BOOX Tab Ultra C Pro (with the Kaleido 3 color e-ink) for a year. The colors are quite dim, to the point where I sometimes forget it's a color e-ink display. The Colorsoft display looks significantly better in comparison (even seems to have better contrast than ClearInk?), so I'm curious how it works.
Because most people who read ebooks use a Kindle, and an e-reader having Android is by far the simplest way to read your collection of Kindle books on a non-Amazon e-reader. This is because you can just download the Kindle app to access your collection.
Apparently the reason that all the Android based ereaders use Android 11 is due to the eink driver not supporting anything newer. Though it looks like they have moved to Android 12 on the latest devices so they must have figured something out.
Something that's always bothered me about Kindles is the web browser. Like, I get it, that's not what it's made for. But it should be able to do more than it is currently able to. I don't mean "easily rendering complex websites". The kindle is made for text display, its current displays are surprisingly broad (although still narrow enough that if I'm using the web browser I typically go through stuff I know works - Wikipedia, Google, etc - or things on textonly.website and other such things with an emphasis on being small). But what really nags me is the formats of books it lets you download. Here they are: .prc, .txt, .mobi, .azw3.
They are, needless to say, not the most common formats. A search on google for "computing filetype:[X]", with "[X]" being replaced by pdf, epub, mobi, txt, and azw3 (prc produced seemingly no relevant results) has about 174 results for Kindle-supported files (done by going to the last page as Google's counter is more accurate there), 120 of which were .txt. The non-Kindle supported searches, epub and pdf, had 356 results, 67 of which were epub files. But Google's engine doesn't do great for finding books. A much better database is LibGen. As I couldn't figure out an analysis of all LibGen files, I searched for "Astronomy" (unless noted all LibGen searches are in nonfiction) which yielded 2,550 results, sorted by extension, and counted.
Results:
4 things in .zip format, 0.15 percent
3 in .rar, 0.11 percent
2144 in .pdf, 84 percent
11 in mobi, 0.43 percent
1 in mdf, lit, gz and bz2, 0.039 percent each
214 in epub, 8.39 percent.
156 in djvu, 6.1 percent
3 in azw3, 0.11 percent
8 in 7z, 0.31 percent
2 in chm, 0.078 percent.
In my experience that's rather skewed (I'd never seen a 7z one before, or at least not noticed one). But the general idea - PDF most common, then EPUB, then something else (often MOBI, distantly) - remains. The fact that Kindle can't go from 14 downloadable things to 228 (actually, many legal open access ebooks are published in just pdf or pdf+epub, it's rare to get mobi or azw3) by letting you download an already existent format it kind of supports is a bit ridiculous and has always struck me as odd.
But I am very curious how the color kindle works on the web browser, as noncolor Kindles have the background bleed a bit if you scroll. I imagine you'd end up with this sludgy mess of a background, but I'm not sure.
Interesting that the Scribe looks a lot like my ReMarkable 2 :-). I wonder if there has been some cross pollination with Lab126.
If it weren't for the way Amazon has this option to yank back things you bought I would probably be a much more avid kindle user. As it is I've got a big chunk of my reference library digitized and installed on the ReMarkable.
I also love how they’re mentioning sustainability just below a picture of someone using a kindle on a plane… and what’s sustainable about the kindle? That it’s box is made of recycled cardboard. Times like these I think our species is doomed.
Virtue signaling such as mentioning sustainability in the context of a device that is clearly not significant to sustainability will doom us faster than any significant sustainability issues, so there's that.
My Paperwhite 4 is 6.6” x 4.6” x 0.3”. This new one is 5” x 7” x 0.3”. Unless the bezel is significantly smaller (and from the pictures it doesn't), I'll wait for the next version. I read in landscape because in portrait mode the rapid scanning back and forth is annoying.
I upgraded to the pw 5 when it came out and it had the 6.8" screen and I hate it. With the larger screen I can no longer hold it easily with one hand. Looks like this newer version is even bigger :(
I second giving landscape mode a try. There is something more comfortable about it and you get more space to hold onto each side of the screen.
Of note, the screen seems slower to update when waking up or going to the home screen and keyboard touch points seem slightly off and I'm not sure why that is.
I wish they would do a bigger size kindle scribe. I read pdfs all day on my scribe, and often I wish the screen was bigger so the font size would be large.
The size is good for PDF reading, but PDFs with huge margins or small font sizes don’t work well.
One way to fix the margins issue is to use the “Send to Kindle” feature, which converts PDFs to the Print Replica format and trims their margins in the process. Sideloaded PDFs actually appear with more margins (thus reduced font sizes) than books sent through Amazon’s servers.
Then don't. You can find flaws with any and every company, but it gets bizarre that such a nit-pick gets commented here every time that brand is mentioned. Most people don't care about GPL.
If you publish code openly for the world to use, it's not realistic that they'd respect any wishes or demands you make regarding that code. I can make an instructional video available to the public on how to chop wood more efficiently. If I demand that anybody who uses my technique only does it with birchwood, nobody is going to care.
I discovered this tool (that I self hosted and it works perfectly) to send ebooks to kobo/kindle from anywhere so iPhone included within seconds : https://send.djazz.se
No more plugging it to my laptop, connect to the site from both, type the code and the epub is sent and even converted to kepub. Works like magic
ParabolaRM doesn't support the RM2, let alone Kindles. Also it barely works, given that Parabola is Arch-based and Parabola-RM hasn't been updated in years, it doesn't even support the RM1 these days. Caveat emptor.
I’ve been wanting to have a color ereader for a while (e.g. when non-fiction books have charts, illustrations, and photos I want to see them as they appear in print) and I’ve been looking at Kobo and others. But I want access to buy books on Amazon easily.
It’s my understanding that you can’t easily get Amazon books onto anything else than Kindle, is that not true?
I knew I shouldn't have bought a Scribe 6 months ago! I might have to replace it now; the new one looks excellent, and Active Canvas is awesome. Though I haven't missed not being able to scribble on books all that much I guess after moving to it from my (broken) Boox Note 2
It says that a color image is 150ppi, and black and white is 300ppi. How does a colored highlight work on a mostly b&w page? does that section have reduced sharpness?
for what I've seen it acts like a filter on top of the b&w screen, so used in b&w you don't loose sharpness. however you loose contrast compared to a b&w only screen
I switched from an older Paperwhite to the latest version (before this announcement) IMHO the 6.8 inch size is too big and now they go up to 7 inches? My wife has the regular kindle (because it got USB C before the Paperwhite and she lost hers just in time) and that size is imho perfect. The screen is noticeably worse though.
I still use my Kindle 4, because it's the last version to have buttons, without having a crazy form factor. It was also $100, which is in the absolute max a Kindle should cost.
None of the later version have peeked my interest, because I don't gain anything, compared to my 12 year old Kindle. Prices have gone up, but I've lost the physical button, so I pay more to lose a feature I really like.
Amazon could have more or less stopped Kindle development in 2012 and just worked on reducing the cost ever since and it would still have been a great e-reader.
It's fucking crazy they won't even enable bluetooth media controls. I thought you could get a simple ringer finger bluetooth page turner / remote but no, this is the hacky alternative monstrosity:
I lose interest in everything I try to read. I might make it one chapter, two, sometimes up to 25-30% of a book but I never finish with very few exceptions.
You might be interested in the Kindle Basic. It's the smallest in the lineup and a comparable size to the first-gen oasis (before they increased the screen size) – my previous daily carry.
It's almost a pocketbook form-factor. I overlooked it initially because who wants a basic model? but the only thing I miss in practice is waterproofing. That, and the Oasis OEM cover which was unexpectedly nice, like a leather-bound pocketbook.
I still might prefer 5" model. Compared to current 7th Gen paperwhite, it is not that much smaller. A bit more would make it even more sensible in size.
When e-readers first started, one of the big companies offered a machine that would display an entire page of The New York Times on it large enough to be able to skim the headlines, then you'd tap on the article and it would take you to that part of the page.
Back then, I didn't have the money for it. Now I do, and the only options seem to be too small.
Same, I'm still rocking an older Kindle because it fits in my hip pocket on my cargo pants and so can always be with me whenever I get a quiet moment day-to-day to read.
After trying a third-party E-ink tablet that has Google app store support, I'd never go back to Amazon devices where they prevent you from accessing content that isn't blessed by Bezos.
I bought a used paperwhite in 2015 and have read many hundreds of books on it. Still works flawlessly and even great battery life despite taking it around the world through -45 and +45 many times.
I don’t love Amazon, but this may be the best device I’ve ever owned. It does one thing really, really well.
I’ve said for the past decade that the device that had the most net positive impact on my life is my Kindle. I went from reading a couple of books a year to 30+. It brings me knowledge, calm, joy, adventure and growth with basically 0 downside.
Maybe other devices have been more life changing but their trade offs have all been greater than the Kindles.
Having a pocket-sized wifi-only kindle is what saves me from doomscrolling. Instead of spending god-only knows how many hours a week on social media, I read. It's an mental health game changer.
I bought a Voyage in 2015 and don't want to give it up. I like it more than any of the newer models I've tried. Battery life is starting to get poor, but even 'poor' gives me about a week of typical reading before I have to charge it again.
I've read on my Voyage almost every day of the last 8 years. One of the best electronic devices I've ever owned. I knew it was too much to hope for it to be reintroduced, but I hoped anyway.
I loved my voyage then I lost it for week and splurge bought an 8gb paperwhite that I could read in the hot tub. I just use the paperwhite now. The voyage sits as a backup to the scribe which backs up the paperwhite and goes along for note taking
I haven't done it myself but you can buy replacement batteries online for the Kindle Voyage; last time I checked they were like $30 and replacing it looks easy enough.
I find stuck pixels gradually build up and kill kindles for me, after 4-5 years.
I'm on my third device now, and I have a couple of them which just won't clear. Not the end of the world but eventually there will be so many that reading is just a pain.
It's disappointing they stay below the B5/10" size range, and can't step up to a A4/13" which allows full right/left page display or magazine pages at 1:1 size display.
It's particularly frustrating for manga, which Amazon sells plenty, as it's common to have a full 2 page scene during the most intense parts of the story.
Same of course for many research PDFs with graphs and schemas that are just so much more legible near the A4 size.
That was my main use case for the iPad Pro, which can now be covered by the air as well. The Surface Pro line is also around 13". I think there's really no reason to shy away from the full A4 size, especially when people are ready to pay for the screen real estate.
The one improvement I want from an ebook reader is better typography.
On current devices (especially Kindle, but from what I've seen of screenshots online, also other readers), the font selection is extremely limited and the rendering is atrocious. Nobody seems to have spent any time on kerning, word breaking, or anything else relating to typography and layout.
Even after 20+ years of ebooks, they still don't have the visual quality of paper books. Headings, drop caps, quotations, illustrations — all the beautiful stylistic choices that a paper book makes is just wasted on an ebook.
Anyone have a happy story to tell here? Like some niche device that actually has high resolution and beautiful font rendering?
It's a tough problem to solve and the computation of it all is sufficiently expensive that doing it on a battery-powered device is a significant drain.
A further difficulty is the file formats being used --- ages ago, I tried to argue for an ebook format which specifically noted markup and content as being decorative or semantic and looking over the specification I don't see that that was ever really worked up.
That said, a further difficulty is even if a feature is in the spec, it's not certain if the various hardware and readers would actually be implemented.
One back-burner project I've had for a while is to take a publication, make it into an ePub, then use the ePub as the source for a nicely typeset version (or more likely, series of versions) --- gotta finish a bunch of other projects first.
FWIW, it seems to me that a lot of the effort into nice typography/appearance is going into the "coffee table" sort of books which these days are stand-alone apps such as:
and it seems to me that there is a lot of potential for such documents which is as-of-yet only poorly explored --- some examples which seem to be reaching towards this:
- Bembo's Zoo --- this used to be a Flash-based website which was delightful: https://jilltxt.net/bembos-zoo/ --- it really needs to be brought back
- Motion Mountain: The free physics textbook --- https://www.motionmountain.net/ --- if this would read well in a PDF viewer on the Kindle Colorsoft, I'd get one --- as it is, I've been reading through it on my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360, and it's done a lot to help my understanding of physics
- various CD-ROMs and other multimedia efforts --- "The Manhole" became Myst which became a franchise unto itself, Broderbund's "Living Books" are now a popular line of apps, the Voyager series which was _amazing_ and I'd dearly love to see revisited https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1995/01/02/t...
I'd be very interested in other texts which explore this space and which have the potential for nice typography.
That said, I am fine with just reading ebooks on my Kindle w/ flush-left, ragged-right and having the ability to report the (apparently inevitable) typo.
Is it a tough problem, though? Fonts have hinting built in, executing those bytecode instructions should be something even low-powered chips should do just fine. Text flow algorithms have been solved well since Knuth's TeX work in the 1970s, as I understand it.
Obviously, publishers also need to make a better efforts in producing ebooks, but I'm not super familiar with EPUB and don't know where the technology is lacking.
- typeset the document, look through each paragraph for bad breaks/poor spacing, and if concerned about a 2-up option, check the page breaks to make sure pages are even, and adjust as necessary
The problem is it's _hard_ to detect bad breaks, and problems such as "stacks"
the instance of the same word appearing at the left or right edge of a paragraph,
the paragraph shown here has a four word stack forced to occur at the left of
the text as currently written when shown at a reasonable width on a display
are very, very hard to address while maintaining even spacing, esp. if the text
I usually sideload books, downloaded from Libgen, through their send to kindle email setup. Is it illegal to download books from there? Did I just leave a trail of evidence?
I've been using a Kobo Clara Color for several months. I love the size and functionality, but the color isn't that big a deal since I'm not reading picture books.
I used to use a Kindle Oasis, but I like Kobo's software better than Amazon's, so I switched.
The new Kindle lineup is kinda meh, incremental improvements definitely but the tech is already so good that they've become a bit like phones. There's no compelling reason to upgrade my 11th gen Paperwhite, and colour doesn't interest me, at least not in its current state. I'm guessing the reason the new Paperwhite screen is 7 inches is because there's no replacement for the Oasis.
huh the site has an interesting way of doing internationalization — it's just a different blog post w/ Spanish, rather than another language like /[sp]/[blog link]. Curious why they chose that route
It's a website where most articles don't have translations. This article seems like an exception, and I can't think of a simpler way to do this either.
If you had separate paths for each language, most links would have an unnecessary /en/.
Kindle Scribe should show your calendar, news, weather, etc when it's plugged in.
I hope Scribe note sharing is improved from "email yourself a PDF".
And come on, still no physical page turn buttons?
I also want a Kindle Scribe with a scroll display: a high-refresh-rate LCD touchscreen that sits just below the bottom of the eink screen. Use case being: swipe to a bookmark or page very quickly. It would stay off until touched and would be about 2cm tall, with the same width as the eink screen.
I adamantly disagree. There are 10,000 devices in this world that will feed you your email if you really need to see it in the second it comes in. You probably have one in your pocket right now and another on your wrist and a third that you are staring at to read this post.
I use a Remarkable tablet (the Scribe's competitor) for the exact reason that it doesn't come with apps for email or web browsing or an app store or a weather app. It writes really really well (the scribe does too) and lets you focus on that. It doesn't try to be the 4th version of a smart device when you already have so many.
The "email yourself a PDF" note taking issue made the Scribe a no-go for me. Basically, if you transfer your PDF over USB, it wouldn't allow you to use certain note taking features. You had to email the PDF to yourself through Amazon's servers.
I hope Kobo releases a new Elipsa. I waited for the new reMarkable, but it is full of subscription garbage.
Instinctively attracted to the Kindle scribe because I love writing on books as I read them, however I've been disappointed by every device that's taken a crack at this, and I've tried them all. Nothing beats paper, which sucks because digital formats are infinitely copy able, backup able, etc.
I always wonder how they implement write-in-books. Never found a FOSS version. I wanted to add it to an android e reader maybe so at least I could try write in books on various Android tablets or a zfold. Failed at that too!
I have a pretty old paperwhite. When it started deleting books i had side-loaded via calibre, I decided to get a kobo. I have a libra color, and I have to say: price notwithstanding, it's a great device. I don't have a lot of experience with more recent devices, but compared to my 2nd gen paperwhite, it is _amazing_.
Color is good enough to read comic books on it, the google drive integration means it's not too hard to get my CBR/CBZ files on directly. The annotation / notetaking featureas are nice (I haven't leaned into them yet, but they work well even on the small screen size), plus all the regular stuff with normal book reading. Also, since it's kobo/rakuten, the libby integration is better (search and select library books right from the device).
The actual reading app is maybe 90% as good as reading on the kindle (or a more specialized reader like perfectviewer on android). There's some annoyingly fiddly features- font size is kind of weirdly variable, when going through CBR files there's no "read next in the folder" gesture nor is there a "this is read/unread" state in the google drive ui, so you always have to remember which book you are finishing when opening the next in the series.
I tried out one of those boox readers with the android apps, which would be even better software-wise, but the boox hardware seems like garbage (for an N=1 at least). My display came with several rows of stuck pixels, and apparently it's a good thing that I ordered from amazon instead of the boox store, because the reviews indicate getting an RMA from boox directly is a pain.
I switched from a Kindle to a Kobo (monochrome), and simply having the book cover as the lock screen makes me like it so much more. I always paid to not have ads on the Kindle, but it would show a bunch of generic images. The book cover is the obvious choice. Kobo gets it.
The reading experience is a little more bare bones, but good enough, and still offers things a physical book does not.
For anyone with an ad-free Kindle, and running the most recent firmware, and you're looking for the Display Cover option using Amazon's documentation, and you're not finding it...like me.
It looks like earlier this year they moved the option out of Settings > Device Options and it's now located in Settings > Screen & Brightness. Which ironically doesn't seem to be documented anywhere that I can find.
The whole point of e-ink screens is that the device only needs to be "on" when redrawing the screen.
In fact, with respect to the e-ink readers, a "screen saver" that turns on automatically is a bad idea that removes useful functionality - being able to keep the same page up for hours without interacting with the device is a feature, as it allows you to use it as a reference, like you'd do with a paper printout.
"on" in this case mainly means whether it's unlocked and reacting to input. It can make sense to have no distinct lock-screen, but I can also see it leading to frustrated users who are annoyed by not knowing if the device reacts to input or not.
With these displays, there's not really an "off" because as long as there's no change on the display there's no energy usage. Of course, that dies not account for the OS.
The problem is, once you want to flip page you’ll try to press the touch screen and nothing will happen since you haven’t turned on the device with the power button (you don’t want the touch screen active always since it will drain the battery).
I guess they could add some indication on the screen it’s in ”sleep” mode though, like a frame or icon somewhere…
Honestly, I think they should optimize the time it takes a powered off device to boot up and turn the page after the user presses a button[0]. Sure, those readers tend to be full-blown Linux computers with nontrivial boot time, but approximately none of the features this stack provides are needed for simply turning the page.
I'm sure I'm underestimating the complexities of the problem, but the first idea that pops into my head is to add some flash storage that's, say, 5x the size of the framebuffer, and always keep in it the current page + next two and previous two pages (swapping pointers to avoid unnecessary writes), and have an extra microcontroller that would wake on button press, read the appropriate page from the flash buffer, and send it to the display controller. The whole process could take a fraction of the second (+ screen redraw time), all while the main OS wakes up (or boots up) in the background, and the user would experience no delays if all they're trying to do is read their book page by page. Once ready, the OS would update the flash buffer and stay active for a short while, in case the user decides they want to flip pages quickly.
--
[0] - Gosh, I keep forgetting the readers only have touchscreens now. Another reason for superiority of hardware buttons for page turning.
> Gosh, I keep forgetting the readers only have touchscreens now. Another reason for superiority of hardware buttons for page turning.
Kobo still has a reader with buttons thankfully. I don’t understand how people tolerate touchscreen on e-readers. It’s extremely distracting compared to just pressing.
I stopped using one ereader we had because the damn touchscreen kept flipping the page if e.g. a blanked brushed it while I was reading in bed.
Buttons were absolutely perfect for this use case, on a dedicated e-reader—less so, say, an iPad mini that also does other stuff, but also those nicer touchscreens don't accidentally trigger as often so it's not as big a problem. Touch screen is nice for navigating menus but should be disabled when reading.
The obvious things is a tiny RTOS with enough of an ereader buffer to keep 5 screens (random number - maybe even the full boot). press the button the RTOS boots and flips the page almost instantly, then it boot linux in a VM to add more screens to the buffer, and/or take over the screen. Linux would have to be aware it is running in an RTOS like that so it can take over where you left off in the boot.
It doesn't really matter if it's on or off. This is how I have my Kobo configured via KOReader. It does put some small text "Sleeping" at the bottom in a place that doesn't obscure the page, but even this is configurable. I like it because it's like a book laying open, inviting me to jump back in.
There are a bunch of comments about how this is the default experience now. It's only the default experience if you buy the ads-free version.
Since I don't want to pay extra to disable the ads, the trick I figured out is to buy the Kindle for Kids. It comes with a cover, no ads, and a 2 year warranty. You can turn off the kids stuff with one switch, and then it's just a normal Kindle.
If you buy it on Black Friday or one of their other sale days, you should be able to get it for the same price or less than the regular edition would be when not on sale.
> Since I don't want to pay extra to disable the ads, the trick I figured out is to buy the Kindle for Kids. It comes with a cover, no ads, and a 2 year warranty. You can turn off the kids stuff with one switch, and then it's just a normal Kindle.
They closed that loophole. Kindles for Kids now show ads when not in Kids mode.
Wait, you have to pay to not have ads on a Kindle?
When did that start being a thing? I've been using a kindle for about 14 years, my current one is a few years old. I've been thinking about upgrading, but it works perfectly fine, and I've never had it display ads, and haven't had to pay anything for that "privilege".
It sounds like this will be my last Kindle device if I now have to pay extra for no ads, on a device I've already paid for, to read books I also pay for.
I asked Amazon via chat to remove the adds because I was SCANDALIZED, just utterly SCANDALIZED to see romance novels on ads on the lock screen. They removed the ads for free. ;)
I bought the slightly cheaper version with ads years ago and asked support to remove them because they „weren‘t relevant to me given where I am living“. I found out about this option on reddit or in the product reviews on some local retailer‘s site, so I assume it is/was a bit of an open secret.
I got my Kindle before any ads were in play (its like a second generation?), and several years afterwards it started displaying ads. Thankfully a chat with amazon solved it because I wasnt in US, so the ads were not applicable to me, but I definetly did not have option to buy non-ad version when I bought it.
I'm in the UK and you absolutely get ads on kindles unless you have a very old device or bought the ad free model(TBF all kindles sold outside of Amazon at Currys, JL etc are always ad free).
Last I checked, about three years ago, any place selling kindles online (UK/Ireland) had small-print next to them stating that an internet connection and additional fee was required to remove ads.
I've been using the same Kindle Paperwhite for about 13 years and there always have been ads in it because I didn't pay for the 30$ extra initially. It never bothered me as they stop when you put the device in airplane mode, which is what I always do ;-)
Its been that way for years, the ad is on the lockscreen, and its an ad for other books. The version with no advertisement is 20$ more, I don't see the problem if someone wants to get a discount for looking at ads.
As far as problems go, I understand it's been a constant and this specific implementation is pretty low on the list, but generally, greed leading to ads intruding every aspect of our lives and people thinking up with new spots to place ads is a problem.
Creating a different experience around reading books for those who have and those who have not is also a problem, given how important literacy and the printing press are to the development of our society.
I'd love to see most advertising simply banned, but in the case of books there's precedent from back when people used to actually read enough to be worth advertising to: mid-century pulp novels often had a couple pages of glossy ads right in the middle, usually including one or more cigarette ads.
The first or last pages of books are still frequently used to sell other books from the same author or from the same publisher. Not that long ago they'd come with cut-out cards to mail in for your order for more of the publisher's books from the partial catalog printed in your book (nobody orders by mail any more, is the only reason the stopped that, I assume). Some of my books when I was a kid would have the first chapter of another book from the same anthology series at the end, to sell it (Goosebumps did this, for example).
Isn’t it strictly worse if they only offer the $130 no ads version? Why is choice a bad idea in this context? All it means is more people can afford it.
Always been a thing, I think. When you bought it you could pay like $20 extra to not have them - you probably paid and never thought about it since, I imagine.
It's a one-time thing, it's like $20. They've been doing it for at least six or seven years. You probably selected it when you ordered your current model.
When I bought my Paperwhite around 2013, I noticed that ads were an option on the kindles sold in the US but not in Canada. In Canada there was only the no-ads version.
Actually there is a hack. After buying a kindle, you just write to kindle support and say that you are getting ads and you are not aware why are you getting them. They usually would remove them for you. Worked for me though when I bought kindle.
That's not a hack. Customer support just doesn't want to argue with people who are likely to get belligerent. You can get a lot of stuff for free just by throwing a tantrum, but is that really who you want to be?
I disagree. It's exploiting a weakness in customer service provision in order to work around built-in UX degradation. Not many people would think of it.
Our society can only exist because people don't push the boundaries of what is technical legal but still harmful to others. There are also many laws you can break without any risk of getting caught. It has to be that way because we can only invest a limited amount of our resources into enforcement of our laws. It's one big prisoner's dilemma where individuals gain by defecting but if too many people defect on the social contract the whole system falls apart.
Likewise, businesses lose money on people who habitually return things. People who behave reasonably subsidize the "ingenious" minority. Generous warranty and return policies can only exist when most people behave reasonably.
> push the boundaries of what is technical legal but still harmful to others
This is actually a good description the behaviour of megacorps like Amazon. They are constantly looking for new ways to increase and consolidate market share, pushing or breaking the boundaries of anti-trust regulations, at the expense of the consumer.
I wouldn't advocate this sort of behaviour towards individuals or small businesses, only megacorps. Highly dubious that this would actually cause harm to the average person. If anything it would hasten the enshittification process, open the field up to competition, and be a net positive for society.
I am likely coming at this from an entirely different mindset to you. In my mind, the current economic structure implies that sufficiently large corporations are pitched in a battle against ordinary people.
YMMV, I paid for a no ad version of the Kindle and when I moved countries and changed the kindle store I stated receiving ads. After a 5 minute online chat they removed the ads again, but not before confirming my original purchase of the ad free kindle PW 10 in 2018.
Also works to say that you live in a country where Kindles aren't officially sold so you can't make use of the ads anyway even if you wanted to. Don't know if they actually check if you are in one of those countries, but I am so it worked for me.
This was, arguably, a huge driver for Kindle sales in such countries (mine included), as that $20 or whatever saved made much more of a difference for people there.
I've been a kindle user for so long I'm embarrassed to admit I don't have any concept of what it is like to get ebooks outside of the Amazon ecosystem. Was the change easy to make? Do you feel like you have access to as much content as you did with a kindle?
I use a Boox reader, but pretty close to the same experience. For me, I either buy the book from one of the many places that lets you download epub, or buy it on the Kindle store and download it from Libgen. It's really a non-issue. I've only run into one or two books I wasn't able to get an epub of, and those I ended up reading on the Kindle cloud reader on my laptop.
I have both an old Kindle Paperwhite 2nd Gen I think and a Kobo Clara.
The kindle 'lives' in the car and the Kobo at home so I always have something to read.
I use Calibre to sync to both.
Rather than directly accessing Amazon from the Kindle I download bought books to my PC then strip the DRM - so I can read the same book on both the Clara and Kindle.
I'd say that the initial awkwardness is from deliberately not connecting the Kobo or Kindle to the internet to stop them from 'phoning home' when you set them up. The Kindle is easy - just don't connect it, the Kobo seems to insist but there's a simple step-by-step to bypass the enforced sign up on the Clara I use.
I bought a Kindle Paperwhite in 2020, it's been doing that since day 1 of my purchase without jailbreaking or anything.
It's not a new thing that journalists cover old features as if they've just been added, because they just found out about it and feel they're newsworthy
It's definitely not "a decade". I have the 2013 Kindle Paper white and it doesn't have that feature without JB, the oldest device supported is Kindle Paperwhite 7th Gen which is released in 2019.
It's likely you are just lucky to buy a KPW with that feature just rolled out.
More nerds in August 2021, https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/30x1qmxj "the setting that was added a few months ago in Settings/Device Options to show the "Display Cover" of the book you are currently reading"
I think it's more likely you just didn't notice for 6-7 months. It's not just "tabloid" articles that noticed it in April 2021. This wasn't noticed by users on places like mobileread.com until April 2021 either and that place is comprised of some of the biggest eInk fans out there.
By all accounts your Oct. 2020 date is the earliest reported date for it being an official feature. Kobo has had it since day one in 2010, Kindle not so much.
There's a secret slideshow folder(demo mode?) where you can put in your own images that will display when it sleeps. It was kind of fun to use it as an eink display. I never figured out how to remote in/ssh to remotely swap the images though.
From some of the other comments, it looks like a rather recent addition by Amazon (around 2021). I got rid of my last Kindle after 2021, but maybe I never got that update.
If it takes some competition for Amazon to finally add some very basic features like this after a decade, I will keep supporting that competition.
I’ve grown frustrated with Amazon in a lot of areas, this was just one small one. I’m looking to divest my dependence on Amazon, and the Kobo isn’t leaving me missing anything.
Both Kindle PW 10 and 11 gen support showing the cover. Personally I actually don’t like to see the cover of the books. Nobody’s business to see what I’m reading.
I'm keeping cover because it helps me remember the title of the book! Otherwise I typically buy book after seeing recommendation on goodreads or elsewhere, start reading and when someone asks me the name of the book or the author - I have no idea! Cover helps with that.
I've got a Boox Note 3 and love it for what it is (my hardware has been fine), but I'd find it very hard to recommend generally. Boox are dodgy at best (GPL violations, random connections to china, etc...), you start with an already old version of Android and if lucky you might get another major version, they aren't cheap, Android stuff is mostly not designed for black-and-white/low refresh rate and some apps have unreadable buttons, things like that.
But, with that all said... it's great for my specific uses. Android is just so much better if you want to run self-hosted stuff. When it dies or the software just gets that old I'll be really at a loss for what to get to replace it.
Boox is dodgy, but everyone I know that has one loves them. I wouldn't expect any Chinese company to respect GPLs. Although, I've seen people on Reddit say they can have QA issues, and if you receive that unit you're likely SOL, this is the only reason that I've been hesitant to spend money on one. I've also been eyeing this new company, daylight, that has a 60hz refresh rate with what I think is E-Ink[0]. Their website says E-Paper, not sure if that's different from E-Ink. Unfortunately, they've always been on wait list months out every time I've looked.
I have a boox note 3, I don't love it. I barely use it. Have a remarkable 2 but spouse stole it when I iddn't use it much. I bought a scribe and used it more. I had 2 sets of classes this spring. I used the crap out of the scribe. I tried the boox for it and went back to the scribe. All I was doing was taking written notes in class and using it as infinte paper for doing homeworks. The boox takes forever to wake up and just is more laggy. It was usable for reading stuff in google docs outside but an umbrella and a laptop worked better.
That said all 3 have amazing battery life, they'd all last all semester on a charge.
It’s definitely not e-ink, it’s a type of LCD. Been reading about it and it seems like users are pretty hyped about it. I don’t really need another tablet, I want a really good writing experience. I’m test driving the Boox Go 10.3 but I may return it and wait for the new Supernote offering. Or I’ve been reading up on de-bloating the Boox software if I keep it.
It's RLCD but with a twist. It has microperforations, so they can put the backlight behind the screen without making it transreflective. I agree the terminology is misleading though.
It was because of the bad things I read about warranty/support that I bought my Note Air 3 on Amazon. I paid a bit more but at least I knew I could return it easily if there was an issue.
I've seen people on Reddit mention QA issues too, but at this stage I'm more suspicious of sock puppets on Reddit than of Boox. Buying from a source where you know you can return and have a guaranteed warrantee period is prudent for any significant purchase. In my country there's a local distributor that offers this.
My last e-reader was a Boox Note. It did its job but was slow and after a couple of years just didn't start up anymore.
Then I switched to Kindle Scribe, mainly for the large screen. It was amazing, it was so much faster and more responsive. I even started to use the scribe to make notes, though I didn't buy it for that purpose. With the Boox Note I never did that because of the slowness, it was just annoying.
I got a Boox Go 7 as my first ereader a few months back and I feel the same way. I like it for my own use, which is mainly loading foreign language books in from Calibre into KO Reader, but I'd never recommend it to someone unless they were pretty technical.
Yeah, I have a Max Lumi and I feel broadly the same way. My hardware has been great, I use it daily and have read 100s of books and written thousands of pages of notes on it, but wouldn't necessarily recommend it to others because I think mine has already stopped getting updates, the GPL violations aren't great, and the cloud stuff seems a bit dodgy.
On the cloud stuff though -- note syncing has support for WebDAV, so I've fully disabled the Boox Cloud integration and all notes get synced to my self-hosted OwnCloud server, which is nice.
I'd love to figure out how to install some stock Android or Linux on it down the road, though Boox's notes + reading apps are really quite good, and likely very optimized for the hardware.
I will second that the Kobo Libra Colour is an excellent device. To me it's the perfect reading device. To anyone using Calibre with it, make sure you get the Kobo plugin that transforms epub into kepub when sending to device. It normalises text size, margins, and so on so the reading experience is consistent no matter where you uh... procure your library from. I reconvert all my epubs anyway, but that step is critical.
I use Calibre-Web (self-hosted web-UI for Calibre) with my Kobo Forma, and with a quick change of a config file on the device (by plugging it into PC) I can use Calibre-Web as an online book store and retrieve my books over my network, I'd recommend it for anyone interested in keeping a large library and wanting to manage what's on-device.
No jailbreak or anything required, just some config in Calibre-Web and replace a URL or two in a config file on the Kobo.
Does the Libra Colour support KOReader? That removes the need to convert to kepub and generally gives you better rendering, at the cost of having to do more setup.
I run KOReader and Tailscale on my Libra Color. I personally very much dislike Calibre for organizing my library and use it only as a metadata editor, since I don't need to actually convert formats anymore. With Tailscale I can connect to my NAS running Kavita over OPDS and browse my library with the organization I've decided on.
KOReader has some quirks, but Kavita is trying to work around them. Theres a PR for proper syncing so you can read on multiple devices and KOReader doesn't respect the specs for OPDS so doesn't always update after you add books, but it is fixed by a restart of KOReader.
Well, their website seems to suggest it does. I will mention though, that plugin converts them automatically without intervention and does a pretty flawless job.
Ooh, thanks for this. I was having all kinds of font and margin irregularities with my side loads, assumed I just had to power through and manually adjust the fonts in each book
> When it started deleting books i had side-loaded via calibre
This is news to me. All my kindle library is books side loaded via calibre. Then again, my kindle paperwhite is non stop in airplane mode so maybe this is a factor. In any case this is alarming and thanks for the feedback, I will read more about non-Amazon devices because of that.
All my Kindle library is also books side loaded via Calibre (sent to my kindle email address). I have been doing that for years (more than an decade actually) and have never had any book deleted by the device. Is this real?
Ah, ok. I always de-DRM everything automatically (opening books in Calibre does the de-drming). It sometimes happen with the newer systems that newer Kindle books can't be de-drmed, but then I return those immediately.
But I'm surprised a book with DRM can even be added to another device than the one it belongs to, let alone be opened?
> I'm surprised a book with DRM can even be added to another device than the one it belongs to, let alone be opened?
It is probably a path that could potentially lead to another sale. The user reads a few pages of the book, gets hooked, and then is told about the restriction.
That happens on sideloaded books that belong to the same device as well, at least on my Kindle Scribe. These books disappear occasionally, and I have not found a consistent way to make them reappear in the UI. Sometimes they return on their own, other times they do not. Interestingly, their files remain on the Kindle’s file system.
I have had many ereaders: several kindles including dx, remarkable 2, kobo clara 2e and the latest is the pocketbook inkpad lite. (all are b/w)
Honestly, I just wanted an open reflective reader just for reading. Just put the books on the reader with usb and you're done.
I liked the remarkable 2 - they didn't require an account or cloud syncing. I didn't use the pen much, but when I did it was pretty good. I mostly stopped using it because no backlight.
I tried a kobo clara 2e - I had to learn about "sideloadedmode=true" in the settings to use it properly. Decent reader, but a little small. I like dark mode.
then I stumbled on the pocketbook inkpad lite. I use it all the time. 9.7" screen but only $219, backlight, and you just put your books on it and go. No activation or cloud stuff required.
Also, it reads books directly not only in epub, but many other formats like mobi and azw. (I haven't tried .azw)
> When it started deleting books i had side-loaded via calibre
Could you expand on that? I load all my books via calibre but I also have the kindle set to aeroplane mode at all times. Does this happen when syncing?
Happened to me too… Yes, it happened during syncing. I searched up on how to disable Kindle auto update and it’s happening less, but last time I bought a book from Kindle store I got bit again. I guess it’s a sign to stop feeding the hand that bites me.
That is strange. I have had a Kindle for years (probably around a decade), upgrading mutliple times. I am using a Paperwhite Signature for the past year or so and I have not experienced this with any books. I have probably 70% Amazon purchased books, but that still leaves a decent amount of side-loaded books (mostly epub).
The only annoying thing I experience is that the cover art will unload on the side-loaded books where you just get the generic cover with the text of the book. But once you click the book it loads the artwork, which seems to last a few days before quickly going back to the generic cover. But the book itself never leaves the device. I can't say I have experienced this ever (except for once, mentioned below) and I have over 150 books on my 32Gb device.
Just some random thoughts I am wondering:
- Is it an ads-supported model (mine isn't)
- Are the books in a broken-DRM .mobi? Not judging, i've done it too, just curious if Amazon has some sort of "signature" in mobis that allow it to detect a book that had DRM removed?
- Are they standard .epub?
- What is the size of the device? (Maybe smaller 8Gb devices will clean up and prioritize non-Kindle content to make way for "official content)
- Which device is it? (Scribe, Oasis, Paperwhite, older paperwhite, etc)
The one time I had it deleting my book was a large book (it was 400Mb) and it was on an older 8Gb paperwhite. I still had PLENTY of storage space available (I was using around 4Gb) but it kept deleting that book. This was the only time I have seen it happen and it was with this one specific book. That was many years ago and I haven't seen it since. That book was a DRM-removed book I got through "shared" means. Which has led me to question if the Kindle removes it because it could detect that the DRM had been removed or because of its large size. But this was a one-off experience for me. The book was readable by the device. It would download for several weeks at a time before being removed. You could redownload it and it would work for weeks again before dissapearing. I never could figure it out.
For me, they were drm free ebooks I bought legitimately and had to sideload via calibre because the kindle doesn't support epub. It's an old Paperwhite, and it only happens when I go out of airplane mode. However, I have to go out of airplane mode (or had to before I ditched the kindle for a kobo) to get library books and the occasional actual Amazon kindle book when I didn't feel like waiting for the library to get me to the front of the list.
*Edit to add: I believe the kindle won't delete epubs you sideload via the Amazon kindle email gateway, but I have no interest in doing that.
I have been using Send to kindle[1] for years to upload epubs directly to Kindle. It even syncs the position in the books so that if I read it on my Kindle, it syncs the position to the Kindle app on my phone.
I've found that Send to Kindle does a much worse job at converting to MOBI than Calibre, which is a bit ironic but on par with Amazon's overall treatment of non-Kindle books.
Back when MOBI was still the primary format for Kindles, it would actually allow you to upload .mobi files directly via Send to Kindle.
These days it wants ePub only, but things also seem to "just work", and I always assumed it's because they added support for it on device side. What are the issues that you ran into?
Interesting thread. I wonder if this has anything to do with what I experienced with the one (two, actually) I set up for my mom years back. The books were visible on the filesystem but nowhere to be found when using the device.
Fortunately, getting two units in a row with jarring pink blotches was enough of a non-starter to suggest that she just revert to a V4 without my having to explain the confusing behavior.
It also deleted all my side-loaded books. That was the last straw for me. I only buy DRM-free media from now on and only use respectful hardware. I use my Remarkable 2 primarily for e-reading now, though I concede fully it's not the best user experience for reading. But I don't have to worry that it will delete my books! I can also now "write in the margins" which I've found to be a powerful way to take notes. I can't bring myself to write on physical books, but with Remarkable you can have a copy that is stock and a copy with your notes on it. Best of both worlds!
As far as I can tell, it's a fairly rare bug. I've only had it happen to me once in 6 years. But the moment it happened, I decided I was never buying a Kindle again. I still have my paperwhite because it works fine, but it's never connecting to the internet again.
If you switch airplane mode on and off it can happen. If you have airplane mode off when you're side loading content (so the information that you've added files gets synced, you don't have to worry about it. The problem seems to be when things have changed in the cloud it doesn't check for new items you've loaded on the kindle first, and thinks something went wrong and deletes it.
I've had this problem as well. When going from offline to online, it removes books sideloaded via USB. But not books I've added via send to kindle or ones that I've downloaded via the experimental browser. So now, instead of sideloading via USB, I convert to mobi, run a python -m http.server on my laptop and use the experimental browser to download them on kindle.
I stopped using Calibre because it turned out to be more annoying than simply emailing an epub to my designated kindle address. I've never had anything removed. Most of the content comes from libgen.
Easiest is with KOReader. You start a server in Calibre then connect to Calibre in KOReader (not via the web browser). At that point it's like you plugged it in via USB, you can add/remove from the device from your library.
I have my Calibre install setup with the content server feature which makes your Calibre library accessible to any device on the local network. I can then transfer the books to my Kobo by using the browser and hitting the content server's IP address.
I can't remember all the specifics of how I set it up and honestly i've not used it in a while because I used it to get all my old Kindle purchased books on (which was a lot) and i've not booted the docker container since.
Is this a reasonable work around/alternative or have I misunderstood? If so, I apologise. Oh also, I think I had to do some custom stuff with my Kobo as well to support this functionality, but I don't remember it being difficult. Got it all wrapped in an evening of tinkering.
Yeah, I personally don't see any need to maintain a digital book library (like with calibre) when libgen is so accessible. Email to Kindle is a great feature; I've also never had anything unexpectedly deleted.
I switched from reMarkable 2 to (my wife's old) Kindle Oasis to Kobo Sage, and I love Kobo Sage, despite some minor annoyances (like how this is the only thing that don't auto downscale the image in epub I've used: https://b.yuxuan.org/url2epub-downscale-images).
One thing in particular is that the physical page turning buttons are very useful. None of Amazon's new Kindles have physical page turning buttons any more from what I see in the reports.
If you own a Kobo e-reader, check out the Plato reader [0], an unofficial document reader of Kobo devices. I find it interesting that it's written by the same person that wrote the bspwm window manager.
It is one of my favorite pieces of software. The UI is beautiful and, to be honest, inspirational. It frequently reminds me that the best UI should not be noticed. Humbling.
Kobo has a store. It's decent, it won't have Kindle indies, and IMO it has fewer/worse sales, but it's not a big deal to me. They do have a subscription plan with unlimited access to certain books but it's not clear to me how good the catalog is.
You can also buy from third party stores, e.g. Weightless Books for sci-fi & fantasy, and just drag-and-drop the epub onto the Kobo.
Just checked kobo sites due to original comment. The catalog may be smaller but now they (India store) have comparable book prices to kindle. The last time (many years back) I checked, books were not available in India.
I had first edition terrible keyboard kindle and have a paperwhite. It seems libra colour is still not available in India.
YES, I love the physical buttons. I have mine rotated so that the buttons are at the bottom, and it works well. The weight is distributed more evenly this way as well.
Did they actually announce that the Oasis was discontinued or did they just stop making them?
What bothers me with drag and dropping epubs is that you can read it fine and annotate but I can't find the annotations online. I haven't even looked up exporting the annotations manually from the device because that is not my scenario.
It's PC with Calibre app + USB cable + Kindle = books transferred (not just drag and drop if you thought this as the old fashioned way).
It's a step between but think of Calibre as your own book "store". It's an ebook management app that can automatically convert almost any ebook format into the one your device needs but at the same time also gives you the option to edit the ebook details and stuff like that. It's honestly great, I'd totally recommend it.
I have an old Kindle Paperwhite where I both buy books from Amazon and sideload using Calibre and it has never deleted anything to my knowledge.
It's usually in airplane mode, but I of course turn syncing on whenever I buy a book from Amazon, and it never deleted any of my sideloaded books.
I wonder if this is a "feature" of new Paperwhites? If so, it would suck. I was looking to replace mine because it has the old micro USB connector that no other device I own uses, and so I must keep a cable just for it.
I've tried the Hisense A5 and the Bigme Hibreak, and software-wise, found the Bigme Hibreak to suck a little less, as I could not access the Google Play store on the Hisense.
I had one with colour, and one without.
The black and white screen is much better.
Both sadly run outdated Android versions, so I don't do anything like banking on my e-ink phone.
But I have found that not having a LCD screen in my pocket, literally gives me hours of my day back. It literally saves a huge portion of my life from being wasted in the evil pit that is ad-funded recommendation algorithm services.
LCD screens, videos, and ad-watch-time-maximising recommendation algorithm services (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, etc) attract our eyes like moths to a flame.
I have not finished multiple books per month since my pre-smartphone childhood days, until getting an e-ink smartphone.
My Bigme Hibreak, that is my daily driver, runs Android 11, and I don't get timely notifications on e.g. messaging apps. It also came without case and screen protector, which is a big minus.
Do you have experience with e-ink smartphones? Which makes and models work for you?
You're not wrong. Notice how I mentioned my favourite model "sucks less" than the other one. What ever company sells an e-ink smartphone with a fantastic camera and up-to-date Android will get my money for ever.
I'm hearing good things about the Palma. I currently have a first gen paperwhite and am looking to upgrade. I'm thinking either the palma or the kobo libra color. They are about the same price, I think.
It's pretty good. The only problem is that the glass on the screen scratches easily. If you're okay with a screen protector then it should be fine.
In terms of software, it has access to the playstore but I actually haven't downloaded any apps on it. I've used fdroid and aurora store.
I installed a minimal launcher called unlauncher. I use Koreader as my main reader and I have it there most of the time so that I unlock/lock the e-reader and I'm taken directly to the book. It has amazing support on this device (I've used other android based E-readers and support wasn't the best). Can't change front light from the Koreader app though, which is slightly annoying.
Other than that, and the main reason I got an android e-reader, is that I use an android based manga reader. The experience is amazing. Yes, the manga reader is not fully optimised for e-reader screens like Koreader is but it works well enough that it's not a problem.
Overall, it's a really nice E-reader. My favourite thing about it is the size and form factor. Really, I have a 6 inch Kobo reader and this one is much easier to carry around. I'm very much used to reading on my phone anyway so the size is very comfortable for me.
Overall, it's been a positive experience. I'm waiting for either a color device in this form factor with kaleido 3 or perhaps another b/w with carta 1300.
But yeah, it's positive. Hardware is good and software can be made enjoyable.
Thanks for sharing! I too have looked at the Palma, but without it also being a phone, I can't go for it, because I'd have to carry it and a LCD-screen phone.
Colour e-ink works by having a colour filter over the screen, and every third pixel being dedicated to each colour (please correct me, people who actually know the details!).
Therefore they inherently have lower resolution, and are also by nature around 2/3 less white in the pixels not displaying anything.
When reading text, most pixels are uncoloured, meaning in most cases you significantly lose screen resolution, compared to b/w e-ink.
Thus, with colour e-ink screens, unless you're out in sunlight, you'll need backlight most of the time.
This is my reason to keep using the black and white versions, and it might be something for you to keep in mind when you select your next reading device.
I'm in the same boat. Give me USB-C, page turn buttons, maybe even wireless charging and I'd upgrade almost reflexively. I've been eyeing various Android-based eReaders (like Boox Page) that have Kindle support through an app.
I have a single USB-C to USB-C cable for travel that has a permanently attached USB-A adapter on one side, and lightning and micro adapters (also attached) on the other end. Not as slick as just USB-C, but it’s a single cable that does power and data, along with a single USB-C brick, and since it does data it works in any rental car as well. Check them out!
Pedantic clarification. My Kindle Fire in 2011 had color. This is specifically about an eInk display Kindle? The article talks about the "the first-ever color Kindle" without specifying that it is eInk.
That explains my confusion. I am just getting old. The 2011 Kindle Fire still works though power is predictably degraded. I end up using the app on my phone more or my 1st Gen Paperwhite anyway.
I own a Kindle Paperwhite (last gen, relative to this new one) and a Kobo Clara BW (purchase in the last 6 months). IMO, the Kindle is the premium e-reader when it comes to look and feel. It's just a fantastic experience. The issue is Amazon and how even if you want to put your own purchased ebooks on it, you have it send it through their servers. That tied with a few other privacy issues over the years led me to also get a Kobo.
The Kobo can run in a fully offline mode (called "side-load mode" or something like that) and I can transfer my ebooks directly via USB. I use the Kobo most of the time now since most of my reading lately has been independently published ebooks, but I still use the Kindle for books I purchase via Amazon directly.
With all that said, I personally think the Kindle Paperwhite is already the perfect size. It fits snuggly in my back pocket and strikes the perfect balance between screen size being large, but not too large to hold for my average male hands. I'd be a bit concerned about the size increase for my personal use case, but Amazon does a great job with the Kindle in general so I'd like to see some reviews.
As for the new Colorsoft, I'd really like to see some reviews. The color Kobos that came out earlier this year got some mixed reviews for colors, but I'm not sure if that's just the nature of color e-ink or not.
> The issue is Amazon and how even if you want to put your own purchased ebooks on it, you have it send it through their servers.
You can sideload your books over USB too, using Calibre for instance.
I own a few Kindle models and a Kobo Forma as well. The Kindles do have some quirks and bugs (e.g., disappearing books, issues with sideloaded fonts…). But my Kobo Forma’s battery completely died after a couple years of usage, and the device became completely unreliable. After that experience, I’ve resigned myself to live with the Kindle’s problems.
My Kindle had this "bug" where my side loaded books randomly disappear. As a workaround, I have to keep it in flight mode at all times. Not a big issue since that’s what I would do anyway, but in case my Kindle would break, I wouldn’t think long to buy an alternative
This happend to my kindle to! After keeping in in flight mode for years I put it online again in order to buy a few new books from the kindle store, poof suddenly my entire library of side loaded books was gone, with progress and everything. I could see random metadata files related to the books on the drive, be books was gone. Super annoying as many of the books I didn't have locally anymore and to loose the "archivement" of finished books sucks big time. I can see this may be implemented by amazon to counter piracy, but alot of these books was perfectly legal. So the result of this is that I will never put my kindle online again and just stop buying from the Kindle store.
I just email epubs (as .txt) to my kindle's email address and they show up on the device in a couple of minutes. Never had any books just vanish.
I find it easier than converting to Kindle format and then copying over USB.
Why email epubs as txt? You can just email the epubs. I do it every day.
"You have a serious reading problem"
I do! https://3e.org/books/
Keep mine in Aeroplane mode. Download books I buy on Amazon directly from amazon and drop them into calibre. Amazon doesn't get to touch my Kindle ever.
Thinking hard if I ever want to get another Kindle when Amazon can just screw around with what I put on my Kindle ...
Same, though I don't think it is going to help Amazon the way they hope it does. I moved books over to my kindle and had it nuke my humble bundle collections when I added a purchase from Amazon. I've not connect it again until I figure out how to backup and restore MY metadata.
Won’t help with restoring metadata, but if you add books by using the “email to kindle” feature it will keep them in your library through syncs
I had an issue exactly like this with my iPad.
This actually happened to me after connecting to wi-fi but there is a workaround that I found:
Convert your book to .azw3 in Calibre
Instead of sending it to the device in Calibre, locate the azw3 file (Right click -> Open book folder).
Copy the file to your Kindle, but not to the "documents" folder (where Calibre usually puts it) but rather into Downloads->Items
This folder is where books go when you buy them from Amazon or receive them after using the Send to Kindle feature. I have only tried this with azw3 so far but it might also work with .mobi format.
You’re lucky. I’ve seen books disappear from my Kindle even in flight mode. I wonder what is behind such a persistent bug.
> I wonder what is behind such a persistent bug.
At what point do we stop giving the benefit of the doubt that it's a "bug"?
i'm not really sure what benefit you think they're gaining by breaking the less convenient, less user-friendly way to sideload books.
They're perfectly happy to let you email books to the kindle that you bought at other stores (or stole), as well as sync your progress with those books, backup those books to their servers, and generally have the full reading experience with all the benefits of the kindle ecosystem even if you didn't buy the book through kindle. If they didn't want to encourage the use of third-party files, surely they'd make it more difficult than a bug that randomly deletes books off some people's kindles sometimes.
The benefit (or potential gain) is that some people will just buy the book from the Kindle store to avoid the pain. I've seen that happen first-hand to my wife.
Also by emailing books or loading through their servers, they can still track and get that sweet sweet data/metadata that Amazon thrives on. When you sideload, you don't even have to connect it to the internet, which makes analytics more challenging.
okay, but this all still seems like a needlessly complicated conspiracy theory.
if they want people to buy books from their store, why do they make it so easy to not buy books from their store?
bugs happen. not every bug is part of jeff bezos' nefarious plan.
You make an interesting point. Maybe facilitating the usage of sideloaded books is not among Amazon’s priorities. Yet I don’t know how much of that comes from malice rather than simply negligence or lack of interest.
It’s directly against their priority of influencing you to only purchase ebooks through their monopoly. Whether anti-competitive, anti-user practices are malicious or just a consequence of capitalism run wild, I don’t think there’s much of a difference
Most likely, it is something they don’t test because it isn’t officially supported.
Right. And it’s not officially supported because they are incentivized not to support it.
It seems a stretch to imagine that the dev team don't sideload books themselves. Of course that wouldn't be official testing, ...
Out of all the devices where having a physical airplane mode switch would be nice, I'd put the kindle pretty high up. Kinda sucks having a battery that lasts ~45 days in airplane mode, and like a week and a half when I forget to turn it off.
Since the kindles with 3G have disappeared, the need for airplane mode for actual airplane use is a lot less though. Where I am most airlines permit WiFi use and even offer it themselves in flight. Only mobile network connections still have to be switched off.
Airplane mode is mostly a power-saving feature, because WiFi drains the battery pretty hard. As others said, leaving wifi on will kill your kindle in a week or so, whereas it can go on for months without it.
That's not my experience. My kindle paperwhite (latest version until yesterday) lasts at least 3 months with WiFi on. I never turn it off.
Rather than a physical switch just for that, why not a few reminders in the UI if one keeps the airplane mode off for a certain amount of time?
Physical switch is less prone to the whims of a capricious, resume-driven product owner who thinks their users may just want to get rid of airplane mode. Most are diving into firmware.
Most are not* diving into firmware, rather.
I basically always keep it offline, pushing updates via usb-c
I recently picked up a refurbed Kobo Forma, and I absolutely love the device -- with the caveat that, like you mentioned, the battery has been completely unreliable.
Multiple times I have picked up the device to find it completely dead, while it was at full battery less than a day ago. I haven't quite narrowed down the cause yet -- since I did install KOReader and Nickel right after getting the device, it's not running stock software, so I'm not certain if the issue is hardware or software related.
It definitely seems to be doing something in sleep mode that's draining the battery, even with wifi turned off. This really shouldn't be the case -- I'd expect close to 0 power being used when not actively refreshing a page. I've recently turned to mitigating the issue by setting the device to turn off completely after an hour... which is not ideal, but having to wait for the thing to boot up is definitely preferable to waiting for it to charge.
It's annoying because otherwise this thing is pretty close to perfect for me -- the form factor is excellent, extremely lightweight, and I can connect to my Calibre-web server and download any ebook I have on demand. I'd seriously consider buying an extra one to crack open and install my own battery if I knew that would fix the issue.
Edit: Lastly, I have a sneaking suspicion that "refurbished" does not mean "replaced with a new battery", which, honestly, should probably be illegal to advertise a device that way vs "used".
My biggest problem with the Forma is that, even when completely turned off, the battery dies and refuses to charge for days on end. One day, the device says it is charged to 100%; the following day, it dies without an apparent reason. I’ve calibrated the battery many times, but the issue remains. I agree that if it didn’t happen, the device would be excellent.
> But my Kobo Forma’s battery completely died after a couple years of usage, and the device became completely unreliable. After that experience, I’ve resigned myself to live with the Kindle’s problems.
Funny that I got the exact same issue but with Kindle instead. I swore I would never buy a Kindle again https://x.com/_paulmairo/status/1453485148490674177
Sorry, you're absolutely right. The overhead of it was more than I cared to do (needing to use Calibre instead of a drag and drop of a file), especially since Amazon would then report my newly loaded books back to themselves. That's the part that I really didn't like.
Shame to hear about your Kobo's battery. FWIW, they have great repairability (in newer models at least). That said, the Kindle's battery does smash the Kobo's in my experience as well.
You can drag-drop the file from the file explorer, at least on my Kindle (2022). I think the OP mentioned Calibre because sometimes you need to convert the file for Kindle if you have a bespoke format.
FWIW epub is the standard almost every ebook reader supports. AZW3/KFX is the Kindle-only format you mean.
Whenever I’ve converted books to mobi in Calibre it seems they fall back to a slightly worse experience - using “location” markers instead of real page numbers as official Kindle books display, cover art is tricky to get working on the lock screen, etc.
Is this a poor Calibre configuration or are there real limitations to reading books side-loaded on Kindles?
It’s been a few years since I’ve had to do this, but I think that (at least back then) Calibre defaulted to MOBI for the conversion. However, you could manually select KF8 (AZW3), which is essentially EPUB with a different file extension.
You sideload them as epubs and they're fine on my Oasis at least. Calibre does a good job of fixing metadata like covers.
You can find Calibre plugins to convert the books to KFX, Amazon’s native format. There’s also a plugin to recover actual page numbers rather than loc markers in the books. It’s not very intuitive, but it’s doable given the options Amazon gives us.
Why do you need a few Kindles and also a Kobo? Are you keeping them in different places and don't move them? I only have the first Paperwhite which I carry along, it's 11 years old already and it still does the job. The battery keeps up and I was probably lucky to not have noticed any hiccups.
I read several types of books, multiple hours per day: reflowable fiction books, PDFs, books generated from my Markdown notes… I’ve got a Paperwhite, a Scribe and a Kobo Forma, but I’m still searching for the perfect e-reader.
The Paperwhite is too small for PDFs, but great for fiction and portability. The Scribe is excellent for PDFs, but it makes my books disappear sometimes, and it does not work well with sideloaded fonts. The Forma is a middle ground in terms of portability, but its battery died after a couple years and nowadays I only use it near a power outlet.
I use a combination of a Kindle Paperwhite Signature for novels and mainstream books. THen I use a Remarkable Tablet for PDFs, research papers, my own notes, etc.
I find it to be a good combination. Like you said, the paperwhite is amazing for laying in bed at night (really like the backlight) or on the couch or traveling to read. But it is too small for PDFs or serious notetaking. The Remarkable is perfect for those things. The remarkable also gives you full control over your files to do whatever you want. You can connect it to Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc and/or just manage files directly on device (plug it in via usb-c and it shows up as a USB mass storage device).
The two tools compliment themselves nicely. Just my 2 cents.
Similar 2-device story here. Love my Kindle Oasis for reading books, and rely on my reMarkable 2 tablet for writing / notes -- driven by a hyperpaper-based daily planner (its navigable pdfs are a game-changer).
My wife is a pretty voracious reader and has 3 active Kindles that I believe are mostly segregated out by genre/collection. I wouldn't be surprised if this is as much for convenience as anything else, I don't use it much but Amazon's library management and navigation on the Kindles has never impressed me.
She's also one of those folks who sideloads with Calibre as well as purchasing through Amazon.
I think you just naturally end up with that because the things appear indestructible. The first ever kindle I bought (dunno how long ago, it was before paperwhite, so more than 11 years) still works without issue. Even retains all the music I put on it 14 years ago when it was still an experimental feature.
I think the only thing that has been discontinued is the free 3G internet all over the world that they apparently figured was too expensive.
I _loved_ my Kindle Voyage for its adjusting backlight and glass display.
I wish it were less destructible! I upgraded to a Paperwhite (2021) when the Voyage's power button broke. Water resistance is nice, but having to get the "signature" edition for a light sensor and an easily scratched plastic display is quite disappointing.
So you got one bad battery and you decide to ditch their devices? Seems weird. Fwiw I have an 11-year old Kobo that's still going strong lol.
Opted for a pocketbook this time though. Physical buttons and small 6-inch form factor? And respect for your privacy? Count me the fuck in!
I decided to ditch their devices because of the support I got — or lack thereof. First they refused to talk to me, because, for privacy reasons, my device was unregistered. I ended up registering it, and even so they offered just a 10% discount on the purchase of a new device.
Sadly, Amazon’s support is not far behind, considering its inability to fix certain persistent Kindle bugs. But I’ve never seen the hardware itself fail.
If it makes any difference (although I fully agree it does not excuse past bad behavior), for the current gen devices, Kobo has partnered with iFixit to offer user serviceable parts and guides, including replacing batteries [0]. Although iFixit has had partnerships in the past that have fizzled, as long as user-repair is pretty easy, things like batteries are probably generic enough that they can be sourced even if Kobo doesn't end up sticking with it. If the screen fails though, then yeah, you'd better hope they have committed to maintaining stock of OEM parts, which, even with an iFixit partnership, is in no way guaranteed.
[0] https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Kobo
That’s news to me, thanks for the information! I’ve considered replacing my Kobo’s battery, but the issue seems firmware-related, so I never thought it was worth the hassle.
I had a kindle that died. Amazon support was top notch
> IMO, the Kindle is the premium e-reader when it comes to look and feel. It's just a fantastic experience.
Interestingly, I switched from Kindle to Kobo because it was lacking various basic features that made it not feel premium.
* Kobo epubs can show "pages in chapter" progress so I know how much longer there is until a nice stopping point, while Kindle only shows "minutes left in chapter" which is functionally useless.
* Kobo had blue light blocking night shift before Kindle Paperwhite (I think both have it now?)
* Kobo had a convenient feature where you slide your finger along the side of the screen to change brightness, instead of having to go into multiple menus to do this.
It's possible these things have been remedied, but especially the chapter progress thing put such a bad taste in my mouth that I never wanted to touch Kindle again.
> Kindle only shows "minutes left in chapter" which is functionally useless
The kindle recomputes your reading pace as you go, so unless you prefer to do that math in your head and track your own pages-per-minute moving average, I don't see how it's functionally useless
I always find Kindle's "minutes left" too low for some reason, so I have to ignore it. I'd find it simpler - and easier to make progress - if it just showed pages read/remaining within the chapter. Absent that, I am often having to go through the distraction of using the overview feature to figure out where I am in the chapter.
If you tap on the minutes left text in the lower left corner of your screen, it will cycle through pages, minutes left in chapter, section and blank
I do use that, but what I want is some idea of progress or pages remaining within the chapter.
I think they're saying that it doesn't show any info like page numbers
how can it calculate that when I don't turn off the Kindle when I get distracted?
Well if you get distracted easily, then the "minutes left" will be accurate ;)
The kindle hardware is pretty good in my opinion, though they make choices I don’t like.
The ecosystem is amazing and unbeatable.
The software was fine on the original Kindles (well, I had a keyboard), and despite gaining a few features is largely the same since 10+ years ago.
But don’t worry, they added ads to the device that they used to sell you books and they’ve managed not to speed it up one bit!
> The issue is Amazon and how even if you want to put your own purchased ebooks on it, you have it send it through their servers.
I managed to jailbreak my "Kindle Oasis 3" and install KOreader [1] and Syncthing on it (the process of achieving this, as described on mobileread.com/forums was quite horrible by the way.) Very happy with the result though, books are just synced automatically with my Macbook via Syncthing.
Hopefully somehow a similar setup will be possible with the new Kindles, if they can also be jailbroken.
PS. The Kindle Oasis 3 is still great in 2024, it even automatically adjusts brightness with its light sensor.
[1] https://github.com/koreader/koreader
> you have [to] send [books] through [Amazon's] servers.
No, you can sideload books using USB mass storage. It's pretty easy. Kindle Paperwhite is still a great experience even without using the Amazon book ecosystem.
You are correct, you can sideload, but as soon as you open them in your Kindle, they get an Amazon-DRM; so you can't read the very same files on another e-reader. And - as soon as you go online with your Kindle - said DRM is checked and all non Amazon books deleted. At least, that was the case 10 years ago: I still own a Paperwhite 1st Gen which is now basically defunct.
I switched to a Poke 5P (Onyx) and was surprised at the tons of features. No ads, no DRM and reads basically all formats. Win.
I downloaded all my Amazon-bought books, so I can still read them on PC, but otherwise I'm done with their product.
It sounds like you are trying to move DRM'd books you bought from Amazon to another Kindle, which is indeed not possible – that is the purpose of DRM. You'd need to strip the DRM for that to work.
But as other commenters noted, if you sideload ebooks which do not already have DRM on them, the Kindle will certainly not add any sort of DRM to the files. This is true both if you sideload via USB or even if you use the "email to Kindle" feature.
you can sideload, but as soon as you open them in your Kindle, they get an Amazon-DRM; so you can't read the very same files on another e-reader.
Not true and never has been. The Kindle will make no changes to sideloaded files.
Other than deleting them.
I've literally never run into the problems you are describing. It might be true (it seems implausible but I don't know), but it is not a significant factor in day to day ergonomics.
Text crispness, page turning speed, battery life, physical dimensions are all much bigger factors in an ereader IMO.
What you wrote is completely untrue. I have myriad of books on my Kindle which are not on Amazon, and they are not deleted. Neither does anything weird happen to them.
So, I tested this. You are all partially correct - it's not the Kindle putting the DRM on the files, they already have them when you download them. That said, the DRM code IS matched to the serial number of your Kindle device, so my previous -admittedly not properly tested - assumptions still stand.
I then went to investigate, how all this is done and found this:
https://itstillworks.com/kindle-drm-17841.html
As for the side-loaded books - I still can't open them on any other device (did the DRM check work the same on Paperwhite 1st gen?). No idea why.
I get my books from different sources than Amazon. I can transfer these to my Kindle by e-mail or Calibre, without any issue. And they stay there on the Kindle and work fine. I also sync these books from my computer to other devices, Android and iOS, and they work fine also.
Use EPUB file format and your books will work on all devices, including Kindle.
> Use EPUB file format and your books will work on all devices, including Kindle.
My Kindle won't open EPUB files, only AZW3. But it is easy to convert with Calibre.
The rest is true in my experience. Loading non-DRM AZW3 books works fine; Kindle doesn't magically add DRM to them nor delete them.
If you're getting books from Amazon with DRM, you don't need to sideload them!
I always use my kindles in fully offline, sideload-only. My current one hasn't left airplane mode since I got it in 2018.
Another fully-offline, sideload-only, airplane-mode-forever ebooker here. Plus I didn't even buy it in the first place - a relation had one they said they never looked at, so I asked if I could take it off their hands.
Had a funny experience once with a fellow (who was in his third year of computer science at a reputable university), where we just so happened to get on to the topic of ebooks. I told him how I operate my little machine, which I'd only started using. He was shocked, and stated clearly that he thinks it's unethical towards authors to use a "jailbroken" device like that and not get books through the Amazon store...
Sigh.
I guess he’s never seen the kind of insane contracts people that publish on the Amazon store need to sign xD
As someone who has self-published a book on the Amazon Kindle store once, Amazon's cut is something like 70% + bandwidth fees (author only gets maybe ~25–28% of the selling price).
I find it hard to believe you’d ever earn enough on an Amazon book to make any such contract worth it.
70% of $100k = $70k 30% of $1mil = $300k
Scale makes it seem pretty straightforward to me.
What percentage of books do you think make $m in sales? 0.1%? 0.01%?
https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books
> As for the new Colorsoft, I'd really like to see some reviews.
Here's a hands-on Kindle Colorsoft review, Amazon's first color Kindle is the e-reader of my dreams,
https://www.tomsguide.com/tablets/e-readers/kindle-colorsoft...
submitted earlier:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41858947
I had the exact opposite experience. My kindle battery went wonky after a few years, but my kobo has gone on for a lot longer with no issues. It's made me a little wary of buying a kindle again. Aside, or on top of, not wanting to support Amazon.
Did you try contacting Amazon support? If you had they probably would've shipped you a new one for free.
Why don't you want to support Amazon?
I did not. It was a couple years old, and I wanted to get a bigger screen. As to not liking Amazon, they are anti-union, should be broken up, and their main stockholder is a money hoarding ghoul.
Where do you buy DRM Free books from? (I assume that's a requirement for the device to be fully offline, right?) Do you run everything through that DRM-stripper Calibre plugin?
Excellent list of DRM Free books here:
https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide/ebooks
It's usually a small marketplace like Leanpub. Tilted Windmill Press (Michael W Lucas) [0] is another one I've done a good bit of purchasing from in the last six months or so.
[0] https://www.tiltedwindmillpress.com/
TIL there are DRM books. But I have never owned kindle - just Kobo and Remarkable. I buy at online site of book store or publisher.
Some of the books on the Kobo store are also sold with DRM. They only mention it in small print under eBook Details at the bottom of the page, e.g. Download options: EPUB 3 (Adobe DRM)
A kobo loaded with standard e-books (https://standardebooks.org/) in the kobo format is glorious.
I still have a paperwhite which is ok.
My favorite device right now is a boox Go6, smallish, cheap, android. I don't use many apps on it other than the reader but threw a copy of Kiwix on there, and use it as a writing deck using a bluetooth keyboard, hits a lot of semi-offline use cases for me.
There is only a small difference in their size.
Paperwhite 5: 124.6 x 174.2 x 8.1 mm
Paperwhite 6: 127.6 x 176.7 x 7.8 mm
Yet Amazon has been consistently increasing the size of the Paperwhite models over time, each one a bit larger than the previous one. They remain portable, but no longer fit into one’s pockets, for instance.
FWIW I weighed my Paperwhite Gen 5: 201 grams vs. 211 grams for the new Gen 6. So 5% heavier.
I have the last gen Paperwhite and it still fits in my pocket.
Admittedly I have big pockets.
The lack of physical page turn buttons is a dealbreaker for me. I switched, begrudgingly at first from my oasis to a kobo libre colour and it’s much better. If you stick koreader on it you can even start a Linux shell from the ui which amuses me :)
I've got the same generation PW and have it jailbroken running KOReader. I've considered trying other readers out, not because of issues but rather shiny new thing reasons. But at least when it comes to KOReader, it seems like the PW are the best if you can jailbreak the version you're on.
(I want / need it to run KOReader because I wrote a small Lua plugin for it that syncs reading stats (words per minute, minutes read per year, etc) to a centralized server.)
Yeah I got the Signature Edition of the Paperwhite 11 with their black leather cover, and it's just brilliant. It was a huge step up from the 10 that went before it in every regard.
The resolution and size just nails it, and my favourite feature is the warm backlighting for reading at night. Battery lasts forever, and I can just put it on my Samsung phone stand for wireless charging once in a blue moon - not once have I run out of battery.
I fall asleep so easily to this, currently on the Eisenhorn 40k Omnibus book - and a 184 week reading streak.
I used to be excited about new Kindle releases, have had one since the mammoth DXG - but no more, I'm good now with this, so don't see myself forking out $400 AUD for the new one (with a leather cover).
Also bought one (also a SE) for my son, with a different colour magnetic leather cover. :-)
>The Kobo can run in a fully offline mode
Really? I had to make an account to "activate" my Kobo, but it wouldn't let me make one because I already had an old account with one of their partner websites, whose auth servers were malfunctioning, so it took like two hours to be able to "activate" the device.
Is there a way to bypass that?
You can bypass it, but I forget the details(I just did it a year or so ago with my newest Kobo). A web search should get you there though. The mobile read forums are usually the place where trustworthy details are found.
I am running a kindle voyage (2014). It is the perfect size for male jeans pocket carry, PPI is above 300 and battery works.
Most important! The yoga cover is great for laying on either side, so I can toss and turn in bed and keep reading. Literally no e-reader I have seen since has a symmetrical stand-cover that can be used sideways both ways.
As for Kobo, I just looked the other day and saw they have some great prices for e-readers that have similar features, plus they advertise being completely repairable! And you're not in the Amazon ecosystem. My only gripe years ago was the don't rendering on side loaded books wasn't as good as Amazon, and that Calibre couldn't De-DRM Kobo books as well as Amazon. I think the game has changed a bit, though, and I haven't tested anything in a while.
If Kobo books are crackable, my next e-reader will likely take me away from Amazon. I want that USB-C in my life.
I'm sick of my Kobo constantly crashing and freezing and I will never buy another one.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/16/24271632/amazon-kindle-c...
"The Colorsoft is based on E Ink’s Kaleido technology but uses an entirely new display stack for Kindles, all the way back to a newly designed oxide backplane that makes it easier for E Ink panel’s tiny bits of ink to move around quickly. The E Ink world has been working on similar tech for a while, and Amazon thinks it’s the key to making color work well. The Colorsoft has new LED pixels, and a new way of shining light through them individually to enhance colors. It’s also brighter than ever, to help the whole thing feel more vivid. Some of this tech also helped the new Paperwhite turn pages faster and easier, but it was designed to make Colorsoft work."
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/kindle-color-specs-...
"...Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition packs a suite of innovations that make every hue and shade pop.
Those include custom formulated coatings between the display layers to enhance the color, a light guide with micro-deflectors to minimize stray light, and an ultra-thin coating in the display stack to improve optical performance. We built the display on an oxide backplane for sharper contrast, faster page turns, and better image quality."
That's really cool. I have a Boox device with a Kaleido 3 display and the colours are really muted. And the display is much much darker than a regular BW display. I use it as an info display so I can quickly see the weather forecast and when the next subway leaves.
I'm also impressed by the improvements to Gallery 3 displays used in the latests reMarkable. Gallery 3 has typically had much better colours, contrast and brightness when compared to Kaleido 3. Now I'm very curious for the reviews.
I'm a happy owner of the latest rm pro, but I was curious about the boox. You're actually saying the boox is even more muted and darker?
In the rm pro the colors are still what I consider to be pretty muted. I had a laugh of what "red" looks like then I tried it. I don't care too much about it, for the purpose it's a great addition, but it's also darker than the rm2, which instead turned out to bother me a lot.
I can use the rm2 everywhere, but the rm3 is only saved, in my eyes, by some amount of backlight, which brings it closer, but still not exacly equal to the rm2. And by the way the rm2 is also, by far, not "white". If I consider rm2 to be some shade of ivory, the rm3 is downright gray.
Grayscale rendering on the rm2 display is also better. I do notice the dithering on the rm pro, and there's some color fringing in the ghosting.
I use a Boox Note Air Plus 2, a colleague uses a Boox Note Air 3. My device is black and white, hers is in colour. The black and white device is excellent, I cannot remember the last time I turned on the backlight. The color device is so dark that it is unusable without the back light in normal office conditions. I have not seen it outdoors, however.
If that matches my experience, outdoors helps a bit, but not much. Overall you get better contrast and brightness, but the fact that the background is "gray" and not white becomes even more obvious.
That being said the rm3 is usable without backlight indoors if the place is decently lit (for example, in most offices), but requires some backlight otherwise. The rm2 is usable also in poorly lit conditions.
I also have the Note Air 2, and really don't feel a need for color at this point. It's my go-to e-reader, I have a little remote and a stand for it so I can just kick back in a chair or in bed and read. I couldn't be happier with it, the battery life is still amazing even after a LOT of use too.
If I need color for some reason I have a phone, tablet, laptop etc that do the job better than e-ink presently can.
Which remote do you use?
Just their standard one: https://shop.boox.com/products/onyx-boox-b-t-remoter?variant...
It's great for page flips, turning the backlight on and off, opening the top menu. Sadly it doesn't work for turning power off and on, but I suspect that can be fixed.
Can that device scroll a web browser?
No update to the Oasis; I guess when I refresh I'll get a Boox or other Android-based device with page turn buttons and run the kindle app on it.
I have a first generation Kindle Oasis, which is a great device, in no small part because of its asymmetric design and page turn buttons. The newer Oasis (still last refreshed in 2022) have better lighting (temperature adjustable) and inverse text mode, which are both nice but have not been enough to get me to upgrade. It lacks the battery cover of the original oasis, which while kind of a pain was nice because it gave a very natural way to hold the device.
I'm sad to see that the Oasis line is not mentioned here. I have little to no interest in using my kindle as a writing device, and honestly would prefer that the touchscreen was as little used as possible -- an unresponsive or slow screen is the worst case for a touchscreen, since the feedback loop is terrible.
I don't know if they'll have an OS update to go along with this. I have found successive updates to be worse and worse -- my pages are all crammed with ads (not actual ads since I paid to have them removed, but "recommended books") and large page covers. I can barely fit five titles from my library on a screen; I would much prefer to have just the title/author/progress and fit twenty on a page.
The integration with the Amazon ecosystem is probably the best selling point, but until somebody shuts down Libby I've switched my habits to be almost entirely rent-based rather than buying books.
You should check out the PocketBook Era. It's what I moved to from the Kindle Oasis and I've really enjoyed it. The device isn't as svelte as the Oasis since it isn't subsidized by Amazon, but has an assymetric design and even more physical buttons which you can fully customize the control scheme. Also like the Oasis it gets amazing battery life with it's light weight OS compared to the Android based e-readers.
The PocketBook cloud is just as seamless as the syncing with Amazon if that is something you use. Only time I notice problems is during the weekly maintenance window which just looks like an outage. It has bidirectional sync for your progress as well as syncing new books and has a web interface and a phone app. Also offers the same email endpoint service as Kindle and you can set up Adobe DRM to use with library borrowing as well as other places that distribute ascm. The builtin store probably doesn't have the same availability of titles as Amazon but I haven't used it since I manage my library with Calibre and buy my books from various stores.
Best of all is the customizability. Don't want to use their store or cloud? You can turn off (really just not setup and hide) all the features and integrations individualy to make it an "offline" reader but still bring it online for things like Wikipedia lookup and web searches. You don't even need an account to set it up. You can also load additional dictionaries, fonts, and even applications on it. It has a healthy if small development scene.
There is a new color version but if you don't read things that require color I would get the original; Based on reviews it has the the same downside as Kobo and others that use the Kalaido screen where it's relatively dimmer in ambient light compared to the B/W one and so needs a higher average backlight level to compensate.
Overall I've been really happy with my switch and can't see myself going back to Kindle.
Two things that are stopping me from buying a PocketBook:
1. Android (privacy...)
2. No light sensor to automatically adjust screen brightness to surroundings
(i currently have the Kindle Oasis 3, jailbroken, running KOreader.)
I have a significant library with Amazon -- does this have any support for Kindle books? The Android-based ones let you run a Kindle app, which, while not ideal, at least lets me access the library.
I've considered doing a sweep to download all of my kindle books and de-DRM them so that I have an archive, but this is a tortuous process if your library has over a thousand titles, as mine does.
Not seemlessly because Amazon has their store locked down to Kindle. But you can export all your books from the Amazon web interface or use the desktop Kindle app to download them all. You would then use Calibre with a couple plugins to deDRM them. At that point you have plain ebook files in Amazon's format to do what you want with. Calibre can convert them to any one of the open ebook formats (I personally prefer epub) and sync them to your device(s)). Those ebooks are treated like any others and fully supported by PocketBook cloud if you use it. The convenience of Amazon's store for Kindle is nice, but it's also how they lock you in to their ecosystem and devices so you keep only buying/paying for a subscription with them.
The process is really not bad at all if you use the desktop Kindle app to download your library before importing to Calibre. Each step is fully automated with the only manual parts being setting it up and doing each step in sequence for the whole library but not each individual book.
Amazon's latest file format (KFX, I think) hasn't been cracked. You can't reliably strip DRM from new Amazon books. The tools work on some of the books some of the time, but you can't rely on it working.
The workarounds mostly involve getting Amazon to give you the book in an older format, but then you lose the typography improvements that KFX gets you.
Apple's DRM format (Fairplay?) has never been cracked but I believe Adobe's has. Buying from the Google store of Kobo store is probably the best bet.
The book DRM problem requires a legislative solution.
For exporting a library of books you already own/read there aren't going to be many titles that have any improvements in KFX that you would care about. It certainly doesn't hurt to just try it and see what if any of the titles in the library have issues with being deDRMd.
I second buying from Google Play. Outside of a period of time last year where they had a bug that prevented exporting many titles in their catalog (some error in their backend service), I have never had an issue with purchases from there. I will happily continue getting my books from sources that allow true ownership after purchase regardless of any touted benefits Amazon adds to future DRM schemes, just need the words on the page.
Everybody has different things they care about when it comes to typography and layout.
For me, the kerning, hyphenation, and spacing improvements in KFX are pretty big. I also like that I can choose justified or ragged right.
https://www.reddit.com/r/kindle/comments/viqxjj/heres_the_fo...
Maybe I'm missing something, but those all sound like things that are display layer and shouldn't be dependent on KFX to be able to accomplish. I do know that that you can run preprocessing on epubs to adjust some of the layouting to your preference. The rest should just be determined by the reader application you are using and any shortfall in customization of those aspects would be addressed by improvements to that application.
Regardless, my point was that: A - most of the books already in the library were likely enjoyed/acquired without knowledge of hypothetical improvements from Amazon rolling out a new ebook format and DRM scheme. And B - even if there is some magic that Amazon had to include in KFX to support the improvements you listed and can't be reproduced without them; I personally would not consider those or most any improvements to be worth losing ownership of books that I purchase. The most valuable part of an ebook is the text and ownership of a copy of that is what I'm paying for. It is fairly easy for me to be principaled on only buying ebooks that I know I can own a copy of due to the diverse distribution that exists for most titles. Even when I had an Oasis, I didn't purchase anything through Amazon and loaded all my books over USB.
I haven't been able to find any sort of option to export from the web interface, and poking around at it with dev tools I don't see a non-trivial way to grab whole books. Am I missing something obvious?
The last time I looked into it, you had to have a valid target device or client registered to your account, typically a kindle reader. Then an option to download for transfer with usb would show kn the menu for entries in your library. It will download a kindle format ebook (there are multiple generations and even a new format) that is compatible with that device that and is also DRMd using that devices serial as a key.
So no, I wouldn't say you missed anything obvious, which is a feature not a bug as far as Amazon is concerned.
I bought a Pocketbook Verse Pro last year and it's okay, but has some issues.
There is no PB Cloud support but it uses Dropbox, however that means no syncing progress like with kindle.
It takes a few seconds to start since it's Android and fully turns off.
And highlighting is very clunky.
The software situation with that company is pretty sketchy. From their website both mine and yours are listed as the same OS but seem totally different.
Dropbox syncing is seperate from PocketBook Cloud even though the device calls it Dropbox PocketBook. Your device seems to have gotten all the same recent FW updates as mine on a similar timeframe, so as far as I can tell from release notes and the User Manuals they are running the same firmware and support the same features. Not sure why you have the impression it is running Android, but hopefully you don't have some knockoff?
You do have to setup and login to a PocketBook account to use the cloud synchronization. I have not tried the Dropbox integration, but it only supports a synchronized file folder.
In the user manual for the Verse Pro[1], the setup for PB Cloud starts on page 79 and isn't grouped with the Dropbox sync or email endpoint earlier on in the manual.
The only controversy related to PB Software that I am aware of is that it used to be even more open with a published SDK. It was many years ago that they stopped actively maintaining tne SDK. That doesn't seem to have stopped people from continuing to develop for PB devices, and as far as I'm aware PB have not done anything to prevent this or lock down their devices beyond not continuing public development of the SDK. Certainly theur current lineup of devices allow you to run 3rd party applications and are simple to get root shell access on.
[1]https://support.pocketbook-int.com/fw/634/u/6.8.3796/manual/...
It definitely does not support Pocketbook Cloud; it just isn't an option. I have a pocketbook account and can use it for the app on phones.
Maybe it's a regional thing.
I got that manual from the US support page. What region are you in and have you tried installing the US firmware? Search for"Verse Pro" on the US support page[1] after the device list populates.
I also would have been disappointed with my Era if it didn't have PocketBook Cloud syncronization as advertised since it is functionality I care about. That being said, if it is something locked out of your region you could always install Koreader and setup sync through that.
[1] https://pocketbook.ch/en-ch/support
I'm not trying to solve the issue, just warning people pocketbook is not that good.
The manual on my device also mentions the cloud, but it is just wrong. I think they have regional partners with ebook stores that customize it.
Though I think you are right it isn't Android and I misremembered. I thought thats why it has a dual core cpu and make wonder why it's so slow after boot until it's ready to turn pages.
In response to your edit.
I can't speak to how their distribution is resulting in selling devices that don't have advertised features enabled. It is weird they would allow this while keeping their branding and same device name (maybe they are working around some trade restrictions?) So that is not good, but I don't know how widespread that issue is. And as I pointed out in my response before the edit, this seems straightforward to resolve if you buy from somewhere that has this issue.
Not to belabor the point, but in my original post I mentioned how PocketBook devices are specifically not Android as an advantage in terms of battery life.
I suspect that what you are experiencing with regards to it being "slow" to resume an in progress book and allow navigation may be due to your settings. The PocketBook has a sleep mode that allows quick resume for reading. How long after it goes to sleep before it powers all the way down is fully configurable from disabling it to waiting your choice of many options between 10 minutes and 48 hours. IMO the cold boot time is acceptable and I did not notice a difference from my 1st Gen Oasis. The power loss if you fully disable its auto power off is still great, although I haven't used it that way much beyond when I first got mine so I don't have a comparison to my Oasis.
That being said, I don't have the same model as you so maybe there is a significant difference between them in performance, but it would be easy enough to check independent reviews if I was trying to decide between them.
> I'm not trying to solve the issue, just warning people pocketbook is not that good.
You're entitled to your opinion, but it seems easily solvable based on a 3 second Google search: https://old.reddit.com/r/ereader/comments/1dvwnb8/pocketbook...
They officially discontinued the oasis last year. I'm holding onto my oasis until it dies.
Was there an official announcement of this? All I can find in Google is reddit threads speculating about its discontinuation.
Doesn't seem like there's an official announcement since any news articles about it describe it as a "quietly discontinuing" [0]
I'm in the U.S. and a search for "oasis" has nothing but eye drops in its top results. You have to scroll down to find a listing for the "International Version — Kindle Oasis", selling at just $135 [1], but which Amazon refuses to ship if your address is in the U.S.
[0] https://www.thestreet.com/retail/amazon-quietly-discontinues...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Oasis-now-with-adjustable-warm...
The Verge asked Amazon, and they've said it's completely discontinued now:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/16/24272009/amazon-disconti...
As with all previous kindles, the only official bit is the removal from the store. There hasn't been a case (so far) of a kindle that was removed from the store and then a later model being released.
I have the first Oasis as well. Prior to that I'd pretty much bough every single kindle refresh. Since then I haven't. I'm in the same boat: give me physical buttons.
First I waited for Kindle Voyage refresh, then started thinking about Oasis, but waited for it to have a normal charging port (USB-C) and now the last reader with physical buttons disappears :(
Oh well, at least my Voyage still works and fits in most pockets (and has cool origami cover), the only downside is that if not in airplane mode, it uses up battery in 2-3 days. In airplane mode I can read 2-3 weeks.
The Voyage was a neat device, though its haptic buttons pale in comparison to real buttons. There are a lot of options outside of the Kindle, but if you want to stay in the Amazon ecosystem, you might be in for rough times.
i'm in the exact same boat - was really hoping to see a premium color device with buttons. not sure why they hate us :(
>honestly would prefer that the touchscreen was as little used as possible -- an unresponsive or slow screen is the worst case for a touchscreen, since the feedback loop is terrible.
I agree in principle (slow feedback is the bane of my existence) but I had one of those 10 inch Kindle DX without touch, and it was a pretty bad experience compared to the Paperwhite.
Physical buttons (and possibly the orientation sensor?) were definitely nice to have though.
I have Boox with android like you described. Quality doesn't compare with kindle though. I still prefer reading on kindle.
If you only wanna read normal books, I agree. But I read RSS feeds, mangas and books all on my Boox tablet. Only made possible due to being able to install android apps for RSS and mangas.
I'm in the same situation. I've read some workflows you can do but I really like to just pop open einkbro with my royalroad follow list as the homepage instead of having to run a browser extension to calibre rube goldberg machine every single time a new chapter is released.
I don't love boox but mine hasn't died yet and it's decently competent at my use case.
I have been considering Boox Air 3C. Could you pls. explain more about the differences you see between Kindle and Boox? Thanks.
Boox suck. Stay away. Horrible android os, low speed, battery and hardware quality issues, and dodgy Chinese practices all around.
Can confirm. I own a Poke 5P and the ghosting is really more obvious until you've fiddled with the settings enough - and I do mean fiddle here. Might take a while.
Other than that I'm a real fan: latest update delivered dark mode (black background, white text) and like I said above: no ads, no Amazon-DRM, all formats, cloud storage (if you want to), TTS, annotations that are really comfortable to handle, bluetooth.
screen is not as crisp and a lot of ghosting
I am very, very, very sad to hear this. This does match with my experience of fiddling with various Kindle competitors over the years (nook, kobo), but between generally faster processors and the increasing bloat of kindle OS, I thought maybe the gap would be narrower.
Looks like I've got to build my own.
I'm very happy with my Boox Palma. The Kindle app works fine on it so there's no fiddling with side loading Kindle books into a non-Kindle device.
I was hoping they'd revive the Oasis. That form factor is _perfect_ IMO. Scribe is too big for a replacement. I settled for a Libra 2 which is similar to the Oasis but I feel it's a bit sluggish when it comes to chapter turns, highlights and page turns w/ images but I don't have something in the Kindle line-up to compare it to now.
I love the oasis. Specifically the fact that it’s made out aluminum and is water proof. My daughter is an extraordinary reader since a very young age, long before her motor skills have matured, and ended up with my oasis. She does all the things a young kid does like smear food all over it and drop it all the time. I can just wash it off in the sink once a day and we are all good. If it had been less sturdy and not waterproof there’s no way she could have used it.
Finally the physical page turn buttons are great as well as the bevel on the back for holding it with one hand.
Oasis was peak paperback form factor Kindle.
If not traveling, getting to read an open paperback, two pages side by side, on Kindle Scribe is super enjoyable, then turn it to portrait to read white papers or textbooks.
Yep. Same. Buttons are a must have for me, along with the waterproofing. It was (is) the perfect device aside from going through three of them (replaced via warranty) due to the waterproofing not being as advertised. I am happy I saved the advertisements of folks using in in baths.
Both are features that complement each other. If I can’t read in the rain I don’t want it. This means disabling the touch screen and using the physical buttons to page turn, otherwise you are using hacks like putting it inside a plastic baggie. Haptic buttons would be fine as well, and likely solve some of the waterproof issues along with an update to USB-C charging.
Pondering having someone mule me the last of the Oasis International editions available for sale for when my current Oasis finally dies. I really don’t want to go back to the dark ages of touchscreen only.
It's not just the physical buttons alone, but the overall design with a fairly large area on one side to easily grip it with one hand (while still having your thumb over the page flip button).
I really wish UX designers for handheld devices optimized for, you know, ergonomics of actually holding it, rather than just trying to minimize the physical size.
I love mine, and somewhat dread the day when it dies. I've decided I'll probably switch to onyx boox of the same form factor when it dies. I've got the big one from them, which I use for sheet music, and it works nicely. Runs Android too, so you can install the Kindle app and read your old library
Came here just to say this. I've owned an Oasis since 2018 and recently bought the first Scribe model when it went on sale, and naively thought "at this price and 6 years later, it must be a better overall experience" — even as I knew its main selling point was having a writeable interface.
I did know of its drawbacks beforehand — e.g. no physical buttons, not waterproof. The page-turning response/refresh time is noticeably better, but I'm left feeling pretty meh by the overall experience. I haven't had much need to scribble notes so as of now, the Scribe is basically an iPad-sized device with the limited feature set of the Paperwhite.
The size is good for textbook-type material, but not enough to make me pick it over an iPad if I'm traveling. The Oasis is small enough that I can carry it in a coat pocket.
But the buttons really are the killer feature. Being able to disable the touchscreen — especially when I'm anywhere where moisture is an issue (at the beach or gym) — easily makes the Oasis worth bringing even if I could read on my phone. I would have easily gone for a new version of the Oasis but I guess consumers haven't shown enough interest in paying extra for a button interface.
I use Plato on the kobo libra 2, it's much faster. And there's also Koreader.
The Kobo Libra 2 and Libra Color look to have a similar form factor to the Oasis. At least having a chunky area on one side with buttons that give a good spot to hold it.
We had books, but then we thought, what about screens. Then we had screens but we thought, what if screens were more like books. Then we had book screens and we thought, what if the screens we made to look like books were more like screens.
Similarly, I saw someome on social media yesterday post about buying "Monopoly Go" boardgame at the store. The box says "Based on the popular mobile game".
The joke was the same, we had a board game, then we made a mobile video game based on the board game, now they are selling a board game based on the video game that was based on the board game.
In this case there's the extra meta joke with Monopoly originally being created to show how capitalism is bad.
I get the joke, but color has been present in books (manuscripts, before the invention of the printing press, even) basically since their inception, many centuries ago, so just adding color wouldn't make these devices more similar to screens as much as it would make them more akin to... well, books. Just look at these marvels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminated_manuscript.
> I get the joke, but color has been present in books (...)
That's like saying confortable cars have been present since their inception, and then present as a example a royal coach.
True, you technically had colors in books. Just like you had books with hardbacks with gold inlays. The fact is that the bulk of the books being published were not color books because that costs a premium to make and moreso to buy. Hence the default stabilized in softcover books with B/W print on flimsy paper.
With e-readers you do not get higher production costs, and you can just download your books and benefit from that. Some ebooks even ship with high resolution images where you can zoom in all you want or need.
Color was present in cave paintings.
Where exactly in parent's post are cave paintings mentioned, instead of explicitly just books and screens, whose specific relationship is what the tongue-in-cheek comment is about? Your post makes no sense, other than trying to be a "gotcha!" one and failing at it.
Here's a book a little closer in time to the invention of books: https://cdn.britannica.com/25/83825-050-F8826674/Anubis-Egyp...
100% not a book as it's not movable.
Might be a scroll or a codex, but it might even be on a wall.
It's a bunch of sheets of paper, or more likely part of a scroll. You can see the grain clearly in the image.
> it's not movable
I don't know what to say here. This is obviously false. Why did you say this?
What do you think is the difference between a "book" and a "codex"? Why do you think ancient texts are divided into "books"?
Oh my bad, definitely movable then, thought it was a wall.
According to wikipedia:
"The codex (pl.: codices /ˈkoʊdɪsiːz/)[1] was the historical ancestor format of the modern book. Technically the vast majority of modern books use the codex format of a stack of pages bound at one edge, along the side of the text. But the term "codex" is now reserved for older manuscript books, which mostly used sheets of vellum, parchment, or papyrus, rather than paper.[2] "
I would say a codex is a book yes, you are right there. The defining characteristic for me is the binding method, the flippable pages and the bookiness factor of the book.
That said, unbound scrolls that are scrolled into scrolls of scroll are definitely scrolls and not books.
So 2 to 1, gg.
Next up: a kindle with physical pages, each page is a screen!
It might also fold!
Come to think of it, a foldable Kindle would be very nice! And not just because it has the format of a book.
The portability of a Paperwhite combined with the note-taking ability of a Scribe… there’s probably a market for that.
Edit: also, holding the device semi-opened, hands on its back, seems much more comfortable than holding it by the bezels as we currently do.
> The portability of a Paperwhite combined with the note-taking ability of a Scribe… there’s probably a market for that.
There are already erasable notebooks that allow you to scan your notes and send the document to a storage of your choosing. Even BIC sells one of them.
Well... Yes, we'd ideally like the best attributes of both at once. What of it?
Reading code and documentation with an eink screen is tantalising. I have no interest in lugging around tomes and tomes of manuals anymore. When I was in uni and school I'd regularly lug around 15kg+ of textbooks. I love buying physical books but the freedom and flexibility of having ink-like screens is still a bonus.
Especially for things like reading contracts which I find miserable on a screen
That's a perfect summary of the strange evolution we've had with reading devices!
Honestly, my only use-cases for a color eBook reader are comic books and House of Leaves. And I'm not sure if a 7" screen is really big enough for comic books (pretty sure on my Nexus 7 it was better to read comic books half a page at a time in landscape mode than a whole page in portrait).
Sorry but this is a bad take. The active light on "screens" is stimulating, causes eye strain and keeps you awake. The two technologies are not the same.
This again! Kindles have lights, too. On my old Paperwhite, the light could not be turned off. Although it could be dimmed, my iPad's backlight can be adjusted to be much dimmer than the Paperwhite's is capable of.
The Kindle's light is much more diffuse than the iPad's though, much closer to just having a reading light on, which you'd need anyway for a physical book.
The Kindle's light comes from a ring of linear LEDs that goes through a plastic sheet called a diffuser -- same as the light from an iPad. In the iPad the diffuser is behind the image whereas in the Kindle, it is in front of it, but why is that better or "more diffuse"?
>much closer to just having a reading light on
First of all, that contradicts the evidence from my eyes, but second of all, even if it were true, you'd have to persuade me that reading an old-fashion paper book with a reading light is any better at helping me get to sleep at night than reading from an iPad. I'm not buying that one either mainly because a reading light is going to throw more light onto the ceiling, where of course it gets reflected down again, and neuroscientists know (and the Scandinavian tradition "knew" in practice decades ago) that light from the top of the field of vision is more disruptive to sleep than light coming straight into the eye or from the sides or bottom of the visual field.
The eReader manufacturers have done a great job of marketing the alleged benefits of their front lights, even though they’re simple LEDs like everything else. I look for any actual studies on the subject every couple of years and come up empty.
(I do prefer an eReader over a tablet, but I don’t think the light is magically better.)
"evidence from my eyes"
What are you a peasant?
Everybody knows that the modern scholar obtains information from the world through papers, either from google scholar or from the latest libgen domain.
it can definitely be turned off, at least in models from the last many years. other than that the"screen"causes no more eye strain than a book
The dialectics of e-ink
It's mind boggling to me that they wouldn't offer a color version of the Oasis, which is the obvious choice for any real Kindle enthusiast (metal, physical buttons, waterproof, amber light). Not sure who would even buy this color Kindle they came out with.
I have some bad news pal :( https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/16/24272009/amazon-disconti...
> (metal, physical buttons, waterproof, amber light)
apart from the physical buttons the paperwhite signature has all of these.
In fairness, the Colorsoft is waterproof and has the amber light as well. I have grown to enjoy the asymmetric design of my Oasis, though. It's comfortable to hold in a way the new one (and the standard ones) just doesn't seem to be...
They killed the oasis today, sad day.
has an og paperwhite owner, i later switched to a tablet, due to the colours and performance. but if they release a new scribe using a colour eink screen, it would be an instant sell for me.
remarkable pro is well and good but its price does not justify its utility imho.
What's the deal with ereaders and their seeming disdain for sane battery life measurements?
Amazon boasts "up to 8 weeks on a single charge" in all their selling points, then, in the fine print states "A single charge lasts up to eight (8) weeks, based on a half hour of reading per day with wireless off and the light setting at 13".
So, it has 28 hours of actual use time, got it. Why not just say that?
Having a few eink readers/tablets, I can say that I almost never care about battery life. You end up charging them once a week or two anyway. I never look at battery stats for them because it almost never ends up important in practice. I don't even look at the battery stat when deciding which to buy or when I recommend one to a friend.
> don't even look at the battery stat when deciding which to buy or when I recommend one to a friend.
I used to not care but beware if you get yourself a Note Air 3C the BSR can drain your battery at an alarming rate.
The problem is defining "use time". With eInk readers, the only time it needs to be actually awake is when refreshing the screen, and then it goes back to sleep immediately after. So depending on your reading speed, one hour of active reading time - which is what the users themselves would normally think as "use time" - can vary a lot in how much power actually gets used.
That said, I do think they should just give the number in terms of page refreshes and let the users figure it out from there.
TBF phones and computers also take "evocative" numbers on their marketing material.
The "Up to 33 hours of video playback" for the iPhone Pro Max[0] for instance is an absolutely insane use case (nobody's letting their phone passively play local videos for a day and a half), and gives little insight into how long it can stay in sheer standby, do video meetings or handle slack.
[0] https://www.apple.com/iphone-16-pro/
> "A single charge lasts up to eight (8) weeks, based on a half hour of reading per day with wireless off and the light setting at 13".
> So, it has 28 hours of actual use time, got it.
Reminds me of when Quorn sold 3 sausage rolls but labelled them as 12, arguing that if you cut each one in 4 you get 12. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42251481
Because people are dumb and don’t want a book that you have to recharge every day.
But also because it is not really 28 hours of battery life. If you just let it sit without touching it, the battery lasts for several weeks, if not longer.
It's a hard class of devices to give any sort of reasonable battery life length.
Regardless, the battery on these devices even back in 2012 was already good enough.
With light at 13 it won't last weeks. Not even 3 days.
Why would you leave a Kindle untouched with the light on for 3 days?
Because we're discussing battery life with the light at level 13.
The color model is uncharacteristically expensive for Kindle at $280, more than the color Kobos which are $220 for the same 7" size (which also has physical buttons and stylus support) or just $150 for the smaller 6" size. Kindles are usually the cheaper option, at the expense of being less amenable to sideloading and jailbreaking than Kobos are.
This article really buries the lead. It talks about updating monochrome kindles, when they just released their first color Kindle (not counting the Fire). I had to look elsewhere to confirm this was indeed a brand new line of products, and others give it top billing.
It's because Ars ran a separate article just for the color Kindle.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/10/amazons-first-color-...
From the second paragraph of the article:
> In addition to the monochrome e-readers, Amazon introduced its first color e-reader today. The new Kindle Colorsoft, covered in more detail here, looks almost identical to the new Paperwhite and launches on October 30 for $279.99.
The color model is expensive, indeed. My guess is that they will quietly offer discounts after the hype goes away.
the scribe was on a nice discount for fathers day and randomly in march this year
All their splash art shows comics. That makes sense, inasmuch as comics are a primary reason you'd want color in a book. But it still strikes me as a bizarre choice, since Amazon is only offering colors in their tiny form factor. They also make a larger device, and if you want color, you can't have it.
Comics are unreadable on a 7" kindle's tiny screen anyway. What's up with the marketing?
The screen tech is a bit too expensive in larger sizes for now, so it'll take a bit until you'll get a large fast color e-ink screen.
>> What's up with the marketing?
Why advertise a function that you know your device can't fulfill?
Yeah, black friday is near. I am thinking older models will be given higher discount via their deal site woot.com. And latest model on Amazon with 20-50 dollars off depending on original price.
Don’t forget you can also trade in pretty much any old kindle in any condition for another 20% off (plus a few bucks for the old device itself).
I should have known before I gave away old kindles to my younger relatives :)
> being less amenable to sideloading and jailbreaking than Kobos are.
jailbreaking sure but what is the issue with sideloading on kindles? You can either email them which is very practical for third party services that support it (I have a digital magazine subscription that supports this for example) or just drag and drop via USB or a manager like calibre.
I have never had any issues getting documents on the Kindle.
TLDR: Kindles just plain do not work with DRMed library books
https://www.giga.de/artikel/onleihe-mit-amazon-kindle-nutzen...
So the rule of thumb is that Kindles work well with Amazon books and very badly with everything else. Vice versa for non-kindle e-readers
I have recently bought a Scribe 1st Gen, when it was on sale.
Rooting it was a hassle, but it was worth it.
The excellent hardware (display, enclosure) combined with Koreader makes it really joyful to read technical books and documents, especially when combined with Calibre.
As one of those books was about Lisp, i also installed Kterm, tmux, the joe editor and tinysheme, which served as a decent Scheme Playground/IDE while i was on vacation!
is it possible to root still? I'm guessing no
The jailbreak i used is working up to FW v5.16.2, which was obsolete at the time i bought the device (approx. 2 months ago). However i was lucky, since my device came with that very FW version.
The new Kindle paper white may finally get me to upgrade … but also maybe not.
I have a 10+ year old Kindle Paperwhite (I think first gen). I use it daily and it’s still just nearly a perfect device. It’s withstood rough treatment, battery life is still ~2 books long, and it has never been made obsolete by a software update.
No other electronic device I’ve ever bought has had this kind of longevity and it’s not even close.
Cool to think that if I do upgrade now that $159 will probably get me to 2035.
Thinner, waterproof, usbc much faster charging, and I think the screen isn't as brittle. I bought the new one on a whim when it was on hella sale and I really like it.
I've upgraded my Kindle once, to get USB-C charging and a waterproof device. For the price, extremely worth it.
The new Kindle Scribe looks kinda lame compared to the new reMarkable Pro, though significantly cheaper. Maybe the colored ePaper isn't that great, but at least you get some color for highlighting, which is probably a non-insignificant use of these types of devices.
Either way, sad there's no Oasis refresh. I'm not super attached to the physical buttons, but I'd prefer it to not. Oh well.
I had an original Scribe and while the writing experience was superb, I felt like the software experience was minimal and over the year or so I had it, it didn't really get enhanced any. My review of it was: It's just like paper, only more expensive.
It seemed like if you wanted a large ebook reader AND occasional note taking, it's probably great. For my use, I would have been just as happy with just a spiral notebook, probably happier. I used it every day for work notes and todos.
I sold it on ebay and got an Boox Note Air3, similar cost, and the writing experience is not nearly as good as the Scribe, but it is a much more capable device with many more features in the notebook. However, I've fallen out of the habit of using it, I think just because the writing experience isn't as good.
This is similar to me with my reMarkable 2. The writing experience is strictly worse than even cheap notebook and dramatically worse than a nice one with a nice mechanical pencil + lead.
It's fine for reading PDFs, I guess.
Anyone with some critical experience also with the ipad pro pen?
I'd really like some comments there. There's a lot that goes into writing and drawing, and all the online reviews I've seen seem just to praise it.
I used most digital writing devices starting from wacom tables (first intuos series), to laptops with foldable screens and currently using the rm2/rm3.
I agree that nothing still has the precision of a real pen or pencil. I can lazily fill and shade even with a micron fineliner when I want, and simply can't replicate the same precision with anything else I tried. I could buy a lifetime supply of the best pens and paper with the cost of the rm3.
Writing is mostly fine, but when drawing I notice immediately the precision just isn't there. But still, at least on the rm (both 2 and pro), the digitizer is well calibrated, and the feel is good, the pen is actually like a pen and not the sucky abomination what wacom like to call "pens" or the tiny unusable styluses of the samsung "note" or lenovo yoga series. The show distance between tip and display is very good, and even though it seems ridicolous, the slighltly shorter one on the rm3 makes a difference. The rm2 is still requires a bit too much pressure for my taste (I have a light touch being used to mechanical pencils, fineliners and tech drawing); the rm3 seems slightly improved.
I can still tell instantly that lines are occasionally wobbly due to the digitizer's grid and pen position.
That being said I got the rm2 at some point, and it's the first e-notebook I actually stuck with because it's effectively "endless paper" and has reached the "good enough" feeling for me. I used to have tons of sheets of paper with notes, now I have somewhat less ;).
I have bad hand writing and over scratch paper with pencils... I greatly prefer the e-tablets for writing, so ymmv. I'm 47. I just did 6 months of college classes out of the blue, I did about 50/50 paper/tablet so this is based on about 100 hour recent testing. I had to practice a lot of mec pencil and paper as that's how our exams were.
I had exactly the other response when compared to my current scribe. I'm not sure they are trying to compete with remarkable on the design front, or that they should.
Remarkable, as a newer, smaller company, needs to seriously differentiate itself. Amazon can play it safer.
Having said that, I think the white bezel and introducing a professional looking colour to the Scribe, is so much better looking than my current Gen 1.
I normally wouldn't care, I didn't feel my scribe was ugly, until I saw the new one. I'm half considering passing mine to my mother, and buying the new version.
I agree, the new one looks snazzy. Though I have my og scribe in the composition notebook cover which is super slick and discrete.
I wonder why they did not add color e-ink to the Kindle Scribe. Maybe they thought the price would be prohibitively expensive?
Color e-ink (both versions) isn't yet fast enough to be used for writing. Boox and Remarkable had to do a lot of hacky things to make the experiences usable on their color e-ink devices. (Boox currently uses the older color technology, Remarkable uses the newer one.)
That makes sense. Another comment pointed out that even the resolution of colored content (150 ppi) is half that of black-and-white content (300 ppi). Trying to take notes with bad refresh rates and lower resolution would not make for a good experience.
It's only Kaleido that halves the resolution of colored content. The RM Pro is Gallery 3 and offers full-resolution color.
Though, the RM Pro has 229 ppi vs. the 300ppi for the scribe. So for black and white text, the scribe still has a small edge. But it would of course be cool, if the scribe eventually gets color at 300ppi.
In practice the resolution doesn't make a huge difference. (I've got both 300ppi and 207ppi BW e-ink devices and the antialiasing/gamma strategy makes more of a difference than the resolution.)
But a bigger difference is that Gallery 3 uses CMYW pigments; there's no black pigment, rather the microcapsules themselves are tinted black on one end, so the black ultimately ends up a little impure. Also there are only 4 shades of grey for antialiasing rather than 16.
The Scribe is neat, but it's too small (same goes for the Remarkable devices).
It wish it was A4/Letter size to read PDFs at full size. There are a few devices like that out there (I've heard the Fujitsu Quaderno is nice), but none of them can be used with books purchased at Amazon.
And yes, I know about Calibre and the DeDRM tools. They don't work on KFX files and the workarounds degrade the book (you lose typography improvements that are only in KFX).
I'm also disappointed by the Oasis being discontinued. I wanted to trade mine in for a USB-C version.
The current 10inch devices are quite expensive, you can imagine what a 14inch color e-ink screen would be at almost twice the surface size.
The Quaderno is monochrome, not color. You can buy them for $600 right now. If it worked with Amazon and had a USB-C port, I'd order one today.
Have you seen the TCL Nxtpaper 14? It's huge! I'd imagine reading a textbook on it would be as good as the real thing.
If only it wasn't running Android. I actually like that the Scribe and Remarkable are dedicated devices.
I'd like to see one because I'm a little skeptical about the screen. Is it as readable in sunlight as the Kindle?
I've found a laser printer to be a more economical (if not less convenient) option for viewing PDFs. It's more fun too, IMO.
I am so excited for this. I've run into so many books where color would make it ten times better. Also, the Comixology subscription will be so much more valuable with this device. The only thing I have a wish for is that the device is more responsive than the original Kindle. There is nothing more frustrating than tapping a touch screen and waiting 5 seconds for it to respond.
I don’t know if you’ve used a recent paperwhite but they’ve gotten very responsive.
I have the newest paperwhite (prior to the one announced here) and it is incredibly fast and zippy compared to the kindles of old. And they claim the new one is even 25% faster.
I too have the previous generation Paperwhite and it's a laggy piece of junk. About the only thing it's even remotely zippy at is flicking through pages rapidly when I accidentally brush my wet hand against the stupid touchscreen while I'm in the bath.
That's encouraging. I've had mine for years and years. Maybe it's time for an upgrade!
I agree, the lagginess of kindles drove me to distraction and I was actually reading less because of it.
I bought a colour Kobo. Super responsive by comparison. The colour isn't wonderful, I like that it's there.
Also, physical buttons! Such things are only available on the most expensive Kindle, I didn't realize how much I'd missed them.
I don't think any Kindles still have physical buttons. Kind of a bummer because buttons make it much easier to change the page while holding the Kindle with 1 hand
The Oasis has them: https://a.co/d/i5Pdmj7
It looks like this is a closeout since the Oasis was discontinued. Id buy one but they won't ship to my country (USA)
My partner has a Kobo and I'm seriously considering one. My Kindle has done more for my sleep than any other device. I get sleepy reading it, unlike my phone or tablet. I really wish I could my content on either device.
> Also, physical buttons! Such things are only available on the most expensive Kindle
Or the old ones you can get for $10 on eBay :) I use exclusively old models that have physical buttons for Kindles because they're just insanely cheap and still perfectly reliable (the battery too) even a decade later.
Unfortunately I've found the screens on the older ones to be quite fragile (at least the 4th gen)
I went through a phase of buying used 4th gen ones off ebay so that I could have physical buttons to turn the page, but within a couple of months they would always end up up with cracked screens
They would be stored in my bag next to my laptop (and in a case) but at some point I would end up pulling it out to read and find a cracked screen
I think I went through 4 of them before I called it quits, my current paperwhite is still going strong (just no buttons sadly)
My kindle paperwhite is my favorite tech that I own. It has changed by life significantly for the better and allowed me to cut down the time I waste on doom-scrolling social media. I find a book on shadow libraries, convert them into epub format and then send them over to my kindle via USB. Calibre helps in all this. I have read close to a hundred book now--all for no dime.
Shame you don’t see any need to compensate writers for your enjoyment of their work.
Not OP, but a few things:
- the authors are unfairly compensated by amazon and the public libraries due to publisher issues with ebooks already. OP is hardly contributing to this disparity.
- I choose to purchase expensive copies of books I love - but the digital copy is the one I read.
The fact that the situation for authors is already poor hardly makes it better to opt not to compensate them. If you or the OP feel that you’re only playing a small part, that’s between you and your conscience.
And sure, if you’re buying some copy of the book and downloading a convenient second copy, that’s totally different. I was responding to the OP being pleased about not having spent anything at all (except on the kindle itself presumably).
Note that purchasing on Amazon and compensating the author are actually separate categories - if you mail the author the RRP in cash, then they get far more than they would have if you'd bought off Amazon.
In fact, if everyone used a shadow library but mailed the author cash, then Amazon would go bankrupt but the authors would be fine (and wouldn't need to use Amazon in the first place).
I think Amazon would be fine because of the money it makes on other products, but I agree paying the author directly is a more principled approach than just paying nobody.
Worth noting though that it’s not just Amazon and the author in the picture - you would be stiffing the publishers in this scenario, and they paid to get the book printed (and edited, and designed, and shipped to physical stores, and maybe some publicity, and probably gave the author an advance).
You might think “who cares?”, but if the author didn’t (traditionally) sell any of the books they published then they wouldn’t ever get another publishing deal, so you’re harming their career. They could self-publish, sure, but worth keeping in mind the author doesn’t necessarily want that, because of the benefits publishers bring (if they didn’t bring any benefits, people wouldn’t use them - they’re not idiots).
It’s very complicated, and I would argue that people using shadow libraries “for authors’ benefit” ought to be speaking to more authors about whether they want that kind of help. But I agree your plan is much more honest than paying nobody, even if it has some potentially negative effects at scale without more coordinated action.
I was thinking about this recently when a friend group argued that someone getting out of paying hospital bills is unethical since doctors are just as much victims of America's bad healthcare system as patients (due to exploitative pay structures I guess). To me this feels like some kind of victim blaming. The writer isn't getting paid (much), the reader is paying too much to a stranger, yet somehow the reader is the bad guy if they opt out of the process.
I get that the idea is "if everyone opted out the writer would get nothing instead of peanuts!" Or maybe the company shafting the writer would go under and direct sales would happen instead?
The difference is that a reader isn’t in any way a victim. They’re choosing to read a book. And if they don’t pay, the writer will often simply be paid less, to the tune of the royalties on that one book. So, yes, that is stiffing someone.
If everyone opted out you could force major change, sure, but in that case you shouldn’t be reading the book. That’s a true boycott. Reading without paying isn’t principled - it’s just cheap. And if you don’t actually organise it achieves nothing - except stiffing the author.
if you pay, both the author and the consumer are taken advantage of. If you don't, its only the author.
Yeah, there are a lot of things in our political and economic system that are oriented towards making victim blaming, or blaming individuals for systemic problems, the easiest and most natural line of thinking.
I don't know about the commenter above, but most writers I read have been dead for at least a hundred years. Should I purchase their e-book online for $850 each or should I get it from a shadow library?
If they’re dead who cares? Often it’s in the public domain. Go nuts.
You should also try using Libby / Overdrive to see if your local library has the book. I've borrowed 20+ books this year and it's pretty seamless and easy!
I loved my kindle paperwhite so much. I have a case on it all the time, there is not a single scratch on my kindle. One day, out of the blue, the touch screen stopped working. it is unresponsive to any touch, I've soft reset it, hard reset it, googled everything. Apparently its a common thing in amazon forum, and of course what does amazon support say? just buy a new one. At this point my kindle is only 2.5 years old and I'm pissed.
I've bought an ipad since and just read book from my ipad. at least my old ipad doesn't break even after 8 years
The thing is that the iPad screen truly doesn’t compare to e-ink in reading black-and-white books. If the e-ink screen is made properly, with high resolution and no PWM, one can read for hours on end without eye fatigue. Battery life on e-ink devices is in another league as well.
For me at least, issues with an e-ink device simply mean moving on to another device, or another manufacturer/brand, instead of switching to tablets.
I don’t think that was their point.
I don't think they had a point tbf
Really? Seemed like it was that their Kindle didn’t last very long and it’s a common problem while an old iPad just keeps on ticking.
yeah my point was I feel like ipad is more reliable. I can live with not having to read from e-ink.
My Kindle Paperwhite has been running strong for 10 years. No issues whatsoever except diminished battery life.
Yeah, my 2011 Kindle 3G needed a new battery, but otherwise, it's still as good as new.
Were the quality standards just different back then?
Hardware today last as long as the warranty-1 month.
My dad, partner, and I all have our own Kindles on my Amazon account. Over the past decade I’ve had them break a few times out of warranty. What I do is chat with support online and explain the issue. They may offer you a coupon to replace it at a discount. Decline and tell them not to worry about it, you’ll just toss it in the trash.
I think this has gotten a free replacement Kindle on 2 of 3 times that I’ve tried it.
I want to upgrade my Kindle but first I need to know where the power button is. My current one has the power button on the bottom and it turns off when I rest it on things - extremely annoying. Can't be certain from the product pictures, but looks like it's on the bottom again.
THIS!
I had hope at one point to set up a Kindle with large fonts on a treadmill, but that was just totally hopeless. I tried again with a music stand next to the treadmill, but it was too far away, badly angled, and touching the device to flip pages could still turn it off.
And it's not just the accidental power-off, it's also the accidental power-on. I slip the Kindle into a tight pocket in my backpack, and it sometimes turns on by itself. Further, inserting it into the pocket can sometimes reproduce the swipe motion, so it can be on and active (and sometimes randomly page-flipping) inside my backpack.
Turn it upside down? It works in both directions
The last Paperwhite model, for example, did not work upside down, just in landscape mode (and even so, only rotated to one direction). I don’t know whether Amazon finally added a gyroscope to the Paperwhite in order to fix this issue.
Oh I have the scribe and I guess I thought all models could do that skrry
The biggest flaw of the last gen for sure. It's right where my pinky naturally rests and I'm always hitting it by accident.
I've tried out all the e-ink note taking devices (Kindle Scribe, Boox Go 10.3, Remarkable 2, and Remarkable Paper Pro). The Kindle Scribe can't really compete with the others right now since the software is so limited. I'd only get it if you were a huge Kindle user that very occasionally wanted to take some notes. Otherwise, the Remarkable 2 or Remarkable Paper Pro are your best bets. Those are absolutely excellent products that don't overwhelm you with distractions.
> Otherwise, the Remarkable 2 or Remarkable Paper Pro are your best bets. Those are absolutely excellent products that don't overwhelm you with distractions.
You need a word of caution here. These devices are very good for writing but absolutely suck at rendering ebooks. I was on the market for a new e-reader/writer ultimately decided to go for the Boox Note Air 3 (no backlight on the Go was a deal breaker) and I think remarkable really dropped the ball by releasing the Paper Pro with a pen that needs a battery. Coming from years of using a Kobo Ellipsa, this was a huge deal breaker. The Remarkable 2 is a bit old and underpowered not to mention the limited amount of storage space.
Yeah, my Scribe is great for reading, but for anything else, not so great.
I was quite hopeful for this refresh to upgrade my Oasis but it looks as though they've regressed on weight: 188g for my current Oasis vs 211g for the Paperwhite. The new entry level kindle is indeed lighter but unfortunately lacks a warm light. I hope something else will be on the horizon!
warm light (ideally adjustable temperature) and page turn buttons are the killer features for the Oasis. faster page turns and all the rest I can live without.
I hated not having buttons. The squeeze things on the Voyage weren’t good but at least they were something. The buttons on the Oasis are far better than that, though I still have gripes about them.
I can’t imagine replacing my Oasis. I don’t know what it is they have against the buttons. I might’ve bought the color thing today if it had buttons.
I guess I just can’t upgrade until my device dies and then I’ll have to figure something out.
My oasis is configured to make its lighting unusable. There are no buttons controlling the lighting. You have to navigate a menu on the touchscreen. It's possible to turn the lighting off, but if you do that, you'll be unable to turn it on in the dark, which is the only circumstance where you'd want to.
Some of the biggest pros and cons of Kindles vs Books:
Pros - Lightweight, I can even fit it into a holder on the side of a chair or bed so I don't have to hold it.
- I don't have to physically manipulate the 1000 page book to try and get to certain pages.
- No dust.
Cons - I can't tell you the authors or names of most of the books I've read on it. When you have a physical book you're confronted by the book and author's name, along with an image to burn the combination into your mind. As a kid going to the library I knew whether I had read a book just from the jacket.
- Amazon shenanigans.
- Battery won't last forever and you'll need to replace the whole unit.
There are non-amazon ereaders, e.g. kobo.
- The standby screen is the book cover of your most recent read.
- No amazon shenanigans. Works just fine with calibre or the local library (onleihe).
- I bought my kobo aura hd in 2013 IIRC. Battery is still fine. Apparently newer models even have an ifixit partnership https://help.kobo.com/hc/en-us/articles/21137184146071-Repai...
That said, there are some additional drawbacks which make me like physical books still:
- For physical books you have an intuitive understand and memory where in the book something happened, e.g. in the first quarter or on an earmarked page. On an ereader every book and every page feels the same.
- Easy multi page view and crossref. For instance, I can have two textbooks about the same subject open and easily compare different sections by just using bookmarks and spreading them on my desk. For that I would need multiple ereaders. Same reason a tablet with pen is nice but feels limiting.
- DRM is annoying enough to be basically an ad for piracy. Get the ebook, download, add it to adobe software, connect cable, transfer to ereader, disconnect cable, still doesn't work, reauthorize device, maybe it works. Meanwhile without drm: add to calibre, get book via wifi, done.
- Maybe better with newer tech, but eink was still somewhat lower resolution and contrast compared to a printed book. Also, page turning is fast enough but not seamless.
Yeah before the Kindle I had a Sony E-Reader which worked fine for a long time, until it eventually ran into battery problems, after which I got my Kindle.
Its battery has degraded over time, but even at half the original length its not a problem.
I've had two Kindles since 2010. (My first kindle had a physical keyboard it was that long ago)
It broke because I had it in my back pocket and I sat on it. Bought a new one immediately.
I've yet to have any measurable battery degradation on either and I read 1-3 books a month. (Including 1000+ page monsters by Brandon Sanderson).
My eyesight has gotten worse and I can't read a typical book with its tiny print. The biggest Pro for me is adjustable font sizes. Another Pro is free books! After purchasing probably a 1000 books in my life; I'm done buying and storing books. I did the library thing for a few years when the library was only a couple of blocks away but book selection and availability was never good. Now I can easily get any book I want from the comfort of my home.
Those are some great pros! I have also found a lot of very good Kindle Unlimited books.
I count the physical manipulation of pages as an advantage of dead tree books. E-ink is very nice, but there’s nothing like flipping through actual pages to find some information.
Of course, the situation reverses when you’re trying to search a word rather than a page. It’s too convenient to use a global search function on e-readers.
The Kindle is one of the best things Amazon ever did. They made subsidized ereaders and made them cheap. Ofcourse they did it to promote their store but they've never blocked side loading.
They do block side loading of audiobooks. You can only play audiobooks from Audible on Amazon Kindles.
Silly question, but why would you ever buy a kindle (or a kobo) for an audible book?
I hope they’re not abandoning page turn buttons for good, like my Oasis has — the only reason I bought the Oasis. Touch screens are just not a good reading experience, for me.
Oasis is discontinued, per The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/16/24272009/amazon-disconti...
That's why I love my Kobo Libra 2. Physical buttons, sweet spot for size, easy to sideload or I can buy on Kobo on device/mobile/desktop or sync pocket or get library books from overdrive/Libby.
Physical page buttons have a small UX disadvantage in that your finger must be located at the button when its time to turn the page. Unlike the soft method where you gently tap screen with finger or pen, and you're not limited to one activation location. So, more energy required with the physical button.
I was disappointed at first the Scribe didn't have buttons, but now I don't care.
On the other hand, touchscreen page turn has several UX disadvantages.
- You have to move the position of your thumb/hand for every page turn (to the screen, and back off of it). I disagree with "more energy required with the physical button"
- You have to obstruct text with your thumb/hand to turn the page
- It's very easy to accidentally turn the page by grazing the edge of the screen while you're reading
It's the opposite - with a physical button, you just put your finger on it and keep it there while reading, so that you only need to push slightly to get to the next page. Whereas with touch screen you need to actively move your finger back and forth every time (since keeping it there would block the screen, and in any case you can't really rest it on a capacitive screen without it registering as a touch).
For one-handed reading especially, that alone makes physical buttons significantly more ergonomic, provided that they're placed such that your thumb rests on them naturally when holding the device.
> fastest Kindle Paperwhite ever
Is this something people value in an ereader? As long as its fast enough, idk why speed would be the thing they promote in the sub heading. I read on an ipad mini all the time but I don’t understand this.
It’s weird messaging. Who in amazons product and marketing teams decided that this is the most important thing to mention?
If I'm reading a novel then speed doesn't matter at all. If I'm 'flipping' through a book, looking for something, the page turning and refresh speed matters quite a lot.
I’m personally holding out for a reader with higher refresh like the daylight. I might splurge on the next model.
It does seem odd for Amazon to highlight speed as a major selling point for an e-reader
Maybe they mean fast in terms of the screen refreshing?
"Speed" appears to be the only improvement over previous versions. It's only slightly larger than previous versions. My Paperwhite 4 is a little pokey especially in scrolling through a library, but it's not a big deal and not worth "upgrading." So the bigger question is "Why did Amazon create a new version of the Paperwhite with such marginal improvements?"
I wonder if they’re still using soft touch/rubberised plastic on the back? My last-gen Kindle Paperwhite has already started to go sticky and gross.
I’ve also got an issue where the latest software update is causing frequent hangs when opening new books (literally 5+ minutes) and I quite often get stuck in books, unable to summon the menu to go back to my library. Seems to be a fairly common problem judging by Reddit.
I ended up buying a Kobo Libra Colour just this week. So far I’m very happy with it. Performance is better and it’s compatible with a lot more stuff.
The plastic on the back feels normal to me, after many years of usage. I use a case, don’t know if that helps to minimize the “sticky and gross” aspect.
However, I have been experiencing annoying software bugs with both my Paperwhite and my Kindle Scribe. Unresponsiveness, disappearing books, issues with sideloaded fonts… the devices’ software quality has greatly diminished lately.
I had the exact same thing happen, I tried a case to cover up the stickiness but it just made it fell too big. Switched to a Kobo BW which has been nice but I miss the bigger screen.
I’m on the latest update too and, yes, sometimes I can’t get the menu or bookmark to open. I have to reboot the device to get it working again. The previous updates were fine.
Still no remote/bluetooth capabilities. That's the only thing that would make me upgrade, the third-party remotes you can buy are all pretty clunky (bulky clip on the side of the Kindle, need to be recharged often, can only flip forward as they just fake a swipe on the right of the screen).
I paid $20 for a remote page turner on Amazon and the battery lasts weeks. There’s no Bluetooth involved, it just uses basic radio signals to trigger a pulse that the kindle interprets as haptic input.
It’s one of my favorite purchases, because now I can actually fall asleep while reading the kindle since I’m not activating my arm muscles to turn every page.
This is the item (my kindle is one of the earliest versions, from 2011, if that matters): https://amzn.eu/d/aJaesjd
Life changing isn't it? Coupled with a holder attached to the bed I feel like I read twice as fast when I'm using it rather than holding the kindle, side effect being that I look like the people in WALL-E.
I understand that people would prefer if it were built into the device but in all honesty it isn't really that much of an inconvenience when you're already only using it while it's stationary.
I've also been waiting for remote page turning.
Connecting a Bluetooth remote to the Paperwhite or using the Scribe's pen to turn pages remotely would be fantastic.
I can't understand why remote page-turning capabilities are not being included.
There are multiple listings on Amazon for the clip on remotes that have 10,000 reviews. The use-case is common.
I recommended the PocketBook Era to someone who has an Oasis in a sister comment. It supports Bluetooth remotes, keyboards, probably any Bluetooth HID with buttons. You just map any button press you want to reader actions (including ones beyond just page turn). It doesn't support input from them outside the reader interface, but fully usable without the touchscreen (you can map turning it on and off to the button combos too) when reading with a remote or the built in physical buttons.
I presume Amazon can track my reading habits on a kindle. If that’s the case I’m too sleeved out for it.
Remarkable 2 and rmfakecloud does the trick for me. Private, stable, no ads, and I can load books over Wi-Fi.
I was hoping for a greater size - the standard Kindle sizes are totally unusable for users like me who mainly read PDFs.
After experimenting with larger e-ink screen sizes from other vendors I realized I also miss the snappiness of reading a real book. So in the end I settled for the cheapest 12-inch Chinese tablet I could get. Since I spend ca. 40-70 minutes a day reading, it's the best experience for me: the text is crisp, the contrast is perfect, and I can browse pages very quickly (not like in a real book, though, but the best experience so far).
Can you please point me to the website/device where you got that device? I'm looking for something similar but affordable.
The device is called Dogee T20 Ultra 12", I bought it from a local vendor for ca. 230 euro to avoid dealing with a Chinese vendor. Works without any problems and the battery lasts for many days with my usage pattern (that is only reading ca. an hour a day).
Edit: it looks like the TCL option the other person mentioned is better because of screen glare (I use mine indoors only but probably it would get uncomfortable in full sunlight).
For a similar purpose I use the TCL Nxtpaper 11. There are also a larger version.
Can you tell me your experience? Any bad points? The bigger one looks really nice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5QRVHSexJQ
But it seems something one would better test in person especially regarding the contrast/crispness of text hence my question how it works in the 11 model.
Why is no one making higher dpi ebook readers? I've been waiting decades now for an ebook that would actually have the resolution of printed 600 dpi pages. The chunky text simply makes ebooks for me uncomfortable and unpalatable for long reads.
Probably because it's enough for most people. I have a Paperwhite with (I think) 300 dpi and unless I reduce the font size to the minimum and look really close I can't see any issues at any reading distance. It feels like a printed book to me.
My understanding is that e-ink with higher than 300 dpi is very difficult to produce which means it is rather expensive and doesn't look that much better to most people. Additionally, people think of an e-reader as a sub-$200 device so the market for a premium high DPI e-reader is just rather small. People are already complaining about the price of the Kindle Colorsoft, think what they would say if amazon put out a Kindle high DPI and it was in the $400-$500 range.
>300 ppi (black & white), 150 ppi (color)
Ah. So it's just the color filter that basically everyone (except ReMarkable) has done.
I'm kinda curious to see it in person, to see if they are doing it better, but other brands' results have not been appealing at all to me. Washed out, worse contrast, and a consistently pixelated / screen-door look.
That's disappointing. Rumors were 300 ppi for the color screen.
I've been buying the kids versions because in the past, it was the ad-free version and came with a free case, but the new kids version seems to have ads if not used in kid mode:
"Will my kid see ads while using this device? Kindle Paperwhite Kids is automatically set up for your kid to enjoy an ad-free experience. However, if you exit Amazon Kids using a passcode, sponsored screensavers will be displayed on the device's lockscreen."
I can confirm that the new versions have to be placed in a child mode in order to hide the ads. It seems they have closed this admittedly nice loophole
If the new Paperwhite supported immersion reading (highlights the word as audible book plays), I'd grab it. It works on my Boox with the Android app but as far as I know not on any kindles (battery life + screen refresh speed allegedly. I really want to ditch my Boox, horrible company.
Is immersion reading really a good experience, because it sounds kinda horrible.
It’s a technique for language learning, not for entertainment (necessarily, many people enjoy language learning as entertainment).
got it, thanks. That certainly sounds more productive than whatever I'm doing on Duolingo.
Did we get real buttons again? I can't see myself buying another one of these touchscreen versions....and apparently no real buttons :(
My Kindle Keyboard still works. You can't use the shop from the device, but you can push books from the website (although on mobile, only 3? devices are listed and there's no way to choose from more if you have them...)
Using the wisdom of the crowd here: what is the best ereader for tinkering? I'm browsing the answers here looking for that and I don't know if anything actually fits the bill. Something with Android, tablet-type machines, seems to be the answer? Is there nothing better?
Look into PocketBook readers. They have a full lineup with color and grayscale in various sizes. They run linux, you can ssh into it and install koreader, etc. They have a good privacy story and little vendor lock-in. The experience is a lot like my Kobo, but the matching mobile app is much better. I continue where I leave off with my iPad sometimes, it's a nice feature.
https://pocketbook.ch/en-ch/catalog
Remarkable is very tinkerable[1]. I've had a lot of fun hacking mine! It could be better, but all in all, very good.
[1]: https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable
ReMarkable is somewhat tinkerable, it's a shame that (for the RM2/RM3) drawing the screen requires DMAing into memory that's owned by a proprietary blob and moves every update.
Get a Kobo, which model depends on your needs. A Kindle is never yours since Amazon can push arbitrary updates wipe your stuff. Don't buy Boox either, as they include a lot of bloatware, not to mention they're blatantly disregarding GPL.
Kobos are mostly just arm linux machines. You can install KOReader on them for a better reading experience.
FWIW I've been running a jailbroken PW5 for a few years now always connected to the internet without any issues dealing with updates.
I did rename the ota binary. I'm aware that there's always the possibility of Amazon maybe having some other way to push an update, but I haven't had any issues so far.
Good for you, but you can't count on buying a new device and having it be jailbreakable. For someone deciding what to buy it's not a good option. It's also a lot of work and worrying over something you bought and paid for.
I’ve read this, but I’ve also heard various downsides to Kobo, including in the discussion on this post. (Battery issues, general device glitches, etc)
Which Kobo do you use, and how has your experience been?
Libra H2O. Never had noticeable issues I'd say. Battery life is quite long. I couldn't get syncthing to work reliably, though it isn't super necessary.
depends of what you means by tinkering. The pinenote maybe ? https://pine64.org/devices/pinenote/
Is the Pine Note finally purchasable? Every time I've tried, it's not available.
reMarkable (Linux) or PineNote (Android stock, or Linux)
Depends on what you mean by "tinkering". I had been on the lookout for a large Ereader from the very early days (i love reading books) and had owned a IRex Iliad and Nexus 10. I was looking for at least an A4 size screen (a must for reading technical papers/books) and finally settled on the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Ultra (14.6 inch screen) which i bought this year. I have the Moon Reader Pro+ as my ereader app and with the S Pen you have note-taking capabilities too. Add a bluetooth keyboard/mouse and you have a easy to carry "laptop/tablet/note-taking ereader" for many usecases.
Specifically if you want android then boox something.
Kobo you can put custom scripts on to run stuff like koreader which is nice.
Inkplate probably
Looks like the base Kindle also hasn't been updated at all. Same dimensions, screen, weight and battery life. They also nixed the base Kindle Kids which was the best deal considering it was the same price as base and they'd fix it if it broke.
2022: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09SWV3BYH
2024: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CNV9F72P
Kindle Kids Warranty (2 years vs 1 year): https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
I've been using a BOOX Tab Ultra C Pro (with the Kaleido 3 color e-ink) for a year. The colors are quite dim, to the point where I sometimes forget it's a color e-ink display. The Colorsoft display looks significantly better in comparison (even seems to have better contrast than ClearInk?), so I'm curious how it works.
There is so much market disruption potential for e-readers.
Every one has a pretty big tradeoff if you are looking to use the e-reader as a general study tool (i.e. using it with Anki for language learning)
- boox devices run Android 11, illegally violate the GPL, and have poor customer service
- meebook devices are too underpowered and also run Android 11
- Kindles are too restrictive and anti-consumer; also does not have an Android option
- Kobo is probably the best, but still no Android option
- PineNote or Linux options are too expensive and unstable
Why would I want Android on my e-reader, again?
Because most people who read ebooks use a Kindle, and an e-reader having Android is by far the simplest way to read your collection of Kindle books on a non-Amazon e-reader. This is because you can just download the Kindle app to access your collection.
Anki, audiobook apps, better TTS, basic text browsing on the internet, notes apps, etc.
Apparently the reason that all the Android based ereaders use Android 11 is due to the eink driver not supporting anything newer. Though it looks like they have moved to Android 12 on the latest devices so they must have figured something out.
Supernote seems a promising option which you didn't enumerate.
> Kindles are too restrictive and anti-consumer
Bro I can wake up my Kindle, buy essentially any book I want to read for less than $20 and be reading it in less than 30 seconds.
The Kindle has been one of the most amazing and consumer friendly devices I’ve ever used. I think I spent like $2k on books last year on it.
Vendor lock-in and DRM doesn't bode with my definition of consumer friendly, personally.
Something that's always bothered me about Kindles is the web browser. Like, I get it, that's not what it's made for. But it should be able to do more than it is currently able to. I don't mean "easily rendering complex websites". The kindle is made for text display, its current displays are surprisingly broad (although still narrow enough that if I'm using the web browser I typically go through stuff I know works - Wikipedia, Google, etc - or things on textonly.website and other such things with an emphasis on being small). But what really nags me is the formats of books it lets you download. Here they are: .prc, .txt, .mobi, .azw3.
They are, needless to say, not the most common formats. A search on google for "computing filetype:[X]", with "[X]" being replaced by pdf, epub, mobi, txt, and azw3 (prc produced seemingly no relevant results) has about 174 results for Kindle-supported files (done by going to the last page as Google's counter is more accurate there), 120 of which were .txt. The non-Kindle supported searches, epub and pdf, had 356 results, 67 of which were epub files. But Google's engine doesn't do great for finding books. A much better database is LibGen. As I couldn't figure out an analysis of all LibGen files, I searched for "Astronomy" (unless noted all LibGen searches are in nonfiction) which yielded 2,550 results, sorted by extension, and counted.
Results:
4 things in .zip format, 0.15 percent 3 in .rar, 0.11 percent 2144 in .pdf, 84 percent 11 in mobi, 0.43 percent 1 in mdf, lit, gz and bz2, 0.039 percent each 214 in epub, 8.39 percent. 156 in djvu, 6.1 percent 3 in azw3, 0.11 percent 8 in 7z, 0.31 percent 2 in chm, 0.078 percent.
In my experience that's rather skewed (I'd never seen a 7z one before, or at least not noticed one). But the general idea - PDF most common, then EPUB, then something else (often MOBI, distantly) - remains. The fact that Kindle can't go from 14 downloadable things to 228 (actually, many legal open access ebooks are published in just pdf or pdf+epub, it's rare to get mobi or azw3) by letting you download an already existent format it kind of supports is a bit ridiculous and has always struck me as odd.
But I am very curious how the color kindle works on the web browser, as noncolor Kindles have the background bleed a bit if you scroll. I imagine you'd end up with this sludgy mess of a background, but I'm not sure.
Interesting that the Scribe looks a lot like my ReMarkable 2 :-). I wonder if there has been some cross pollination with Lab126.
If it weren't for the way Amazon has this option to yank back things you bought I would probably be a much more avid kindle user. As it is I've got a big chunk of my reference library digitized and installed on the ReMarkable.
The color display seems pretty neat!
I also love how they’re mentioning sustainability just below a picture of someone using a kindle on a plane… and what’s sustainable about the kindle? That it’s box is made of recycled cardboard. Times like these I think our species is doomed.
Virtue signaling such as mentioning sustainability in the context of a device that is clearly not significant to sustainability will doom us faster than any significant sustainability issues, so there's that.
My Paperwhite 4 is 6.6” x 4.6” x 0.3”. This new one is 5” x 7” x 0.3”. Unless the bezel is significantly smaller (and from the pictures it doesn't), I'll wait for the next version. I read in landscape because in portrait mode the rapid scanning back and forth is annoying.
I upgraded to the pw 5 when it came out and it had the 6.8" screen and I hate it. With the larger screen I can no longer hold it easily with one hand. Looks like this newer version is even bigger :(
I second giving landscape mode a try. There is something more comfortable about it and you get more space to hold onto each side of the screen.
Of note, the screen seems slower to update when waking up or going to the home screen and keyboard touch points seem slightly off and I'm not sure why that is.
I wish they would do a bigger size kindle scribe. I read pdfs all day on my scribe, and often I wish the screen was bigger so the font size would be large.
How suitable is 10" for PDF reading? Is the font too small? Do various e-readers allow PDF content to reflow?
I have been considering Boox Air 3C. PDFs are important for me.
Thanks.
The size is good for PDF reading, but PDFs with huge margins or small font sizes don’t work well.
One way to fix the margins issue is to use the “Send to Kindle” feature, which converts PDFs to the Print Replica format and trims their margins in the process. Sideloaded PDFs actually appear with more margins (thus reduced font sizes) than books sent through Amazon’s servers.
Onyx Boox Tab X is a good option. The new Remarkable Pro with colour is probably a good option as well.
Isn't remarkable pro the same size as Kindle scribe? Their website says 10.8 x 7.8 inches.
I wouldn't buy anything from Boox. Notorious GPL violators.
Then don't. You can find flaws with any and every company, but it gets bizarre that such a nit-pick gets commented here every time that brand is mentioned. Most people don't care about GPL.
I mean, I do. I've written some GPL code that actually runs on Boox devices, and I'm quite annoyed they refuse to comply to share back their changes.
If you publish code openly for the world to use, it's not realistic that they'd respect any wishes or demands you make regarding that code. I can make an instructional video available to the public on how to chop wood more efficiently. If I demand that anybody who uses my technique only does it with birchwood, nobody is going to care.
I discovered this tool (that I self hosted and it works perfectly) to send ebooks to kobo/kindle from anywhere so iPhone included within seconds : https://send.djazz.se
No more plugging it to my laptop, connect to the site from both, type the code and the epub is sent and even converted to kepub. Works like magic
Still waiting for a refreshed Oasis.
Official page: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/devices/new-kindle-color-sc...
How long before we get Parabola on it?
https://www.davisr.me/projects/parabola-rm/
ParabolaRM doesn't support the RM2, let alone Kindles. Also it barely works, given that Parabola is Arch-based and Parabola-RM hasn't been updated in years, it doesn't even support the RM1 these days. Caveat emptor.
I’ve been wanting to have a color ereader for a while (e.g. when non-fiction books have charts, illustrations, and photos I want to see them as they appear in print) and I’ve been looking at Kobo and others. But I want access to buy books on Amazon easily.
It’s my understanding that you can’t easily get Amazon books onto anything else than Kindle, is that not true?
Unless it runs Android then you could download Kindle app from Play Store. Boox eReaders run on Android
The Kindle Paperwhite is without a doubt one of my top 5 favorite gadgets.
I knew I shouldn't have bought a Scribe 6 months ago! I might have to replace it now; the new one looks excellent, and Active Canvas is awesome. Though I haven't missed not being able to scribble on books all that much I guess after moving to it from my (broken) Boox Note 2
It says that a color image is 150ppi, and black and white is 300ppi. How does a colored highlight work on a mostly b&w page? does that section have reduced sharpness?
for what I've seen it acts like a filter on top of the b&w screen, so used in b&w you don't loose sharpness. however you loose contrast compared to a b&w only screen
So is this Colorsoft what's replacing my dear and favorite Oasis?
I suspect it's the Paperwhite in its new 7 inch form.
I switched from an older Paperwhite to the latest version (before this announcement) IMHO the 6.8 inch size is too big and now they go up to 7 inches? My wife has the regular kindle (because it got USB C before the Paperwhite and she lost hers just in time) and that size is imho perfect. The screen is noticeably worse though.
If amazon wasn’t tracking every single swipe you did across their devices it’d be a no brainer.
No physical buttons, no purchase.
I still use my Kindle 4, because it's the last version to have buttons, without having a crazy form factor. It was also $100, which is in the absolute max a Kindle should cost.
None of the later version have peeked my interest, because I don't gain anything, compared to my 12 year old Kindle. Prices have gone up, but I've lost the physical button, so I pay more to lose a feature I really like.
Amazon could have more or less stopped Kindle development in 2012 and just worked on reducing the cost ever since and it would still have been a great e-reader.
It's fucking crazy they won't even enable bluetooth media controls. I thought you could get a simple ringer finger bluetooth page turner / remote but no, this is the hacky alternative monstrosity:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08T8CZYF3?th=1
Am I only who wants 460nm backlight instead 450nm typical? 1/3 of monitors on the market are already 460 nm ones, and the number keeps going up.
I lose interest in everything I try to read. I might make it one chapter, two, sometimes up to 25-30% of a book but I never finish with very few exceptions.
If the only thing I care about is speed of page turns, what's my best option?
A Kobo device? Colorsoft? Scribe? Paperwhite?
A paperback book. I can get around a hundred pages per second.
If you need an eReader, something with an LCD screen will refresh faster than something with an eInk display.
I wish someone did slightly smaller models still. Not phone size, but bit down. Would be easier to carry sometimes.
You might be interested in the Kindle Basic. It's the smallest in the lineup and a comparable size to the first-gen oasis (before they increased the screen size) – my previous daily carry.
It's almost a pocketbook form-factor. I overlooked it initially because who wants a basic model? but the only thing I miss in practice is waterproofing. That, and the Oasis OEM cover which was unexpectedly nice, like a leather-bound pocketbook.
I still might prefer 5" model. Compared to current 7th Gen paperwhite, it is not that much smaller. A bit more would make it even more sensible in size.
I wish someone did slightly smaller models still.
Funny, because I'd like a larger one.
When e-readers first started, one of the big companies offered a machine that would display an entire page of The New York Times on it large enough to be able to skim the headlines, then you'd tap on the article and it would take you to that part of the page.
Back then, I didn't have the money for it. Now I do, and the only options seem to be too small.
Try a scribe, it's like a kindle DX that you can take notes on and is modern.
Same, I'm still rocking an older Kindle because it fits in my hip pocket on my cargo pants and so can always be with me whenever I get a quiet moment day-to-day to read.
After trying a third-party E-ink tablet that has Google app store support, I'd never go back to Amazon devices where they prevent you from accessing content that isn't blessed by Bezos.
I bought a used paperwhite in 2015 and have read many hundreds of books on it. Still works flawlessly and even great battery life despite taking it around the world through -45 and +45 many times.
I don’t love Amazon, but this may be the best device I’ve ever owned. It does one thing really, really well.
I’ve said for the past decade that the device that had the most net positive impact on my life is my Kindle. I went from reading a couple of books a year to 30+. It brings me knowledge, calm, joy, adventure and growth with basically 0 downside.
Maybe other devices have been more life changing but their trade offs have all been greater than the Kindles.
Having a pocket-sized wifi-only kindle is what saves me from doomscrolling. Instead of spending god-only knows how many hours a week on social media, I read. It's an mental health game changer.
I bought a Voyage in 2015 and don't want to give it up. I like it more than any of the newer models I've tried. Battery life is starting to get poor, but even 'poor' gives me about a week of typical reading before I have to charge it again.
I've read on my Voyage almost every day of the last 8 years. One of the best electronic devices I've ever owned. I knew it was too much to hope for it to be reintroduced, but I hoped anyway.
I loved my voyage then I lost it for week and splurge bought an 8gb paperwhite that I could read in the hot tub. I just use the paperwhite now. The voyage sits as a backup to the scribe which backs up the paperwhite and goes along for note taking
I haven't done it myself but you can buy replacement batteries online for the Kindle Voyage; last time I checked they were like $30 and replacing it looks easy enough.
I find stuck pixels gradually build up and kill kindles for me, after 4-5 years.
I'm on my third device now, and I have a couple of them which just won't clear. Not the end of the world but eventually there will be so many that reading is just a pain.
It's disappointing they stay below the B5/10" size range, and can't step up to a A4/13" which allows full right/left page display or magazine pages at 1:1 size display.
It's particularly frustrating for manga, which Amazon sells plenty, as it's common to have a full 2 page scene during the most intense parts of the story.
Same of course for many research PDFs with graphs and schemas that are just so much more legible near the A4 size.
That was my main use case for the iPad Pro, which can now be covered by the air as well. The Surface Pro line is also around 13". I think there's really no reason to shy away from the full A4 size, especially when people are ready to pay for the screen real estate.
Can't wait to see how well it will run DOOM.
It's not a coincidence most e-ink tablets look the same is it? I'm talking the scribe here vs. remarkable 2.
The one improvement I want from an ebook reader is better typography.
On current devices (especially Kindle, but from what I've seen of screenshots online, also other readers), the font selection is extremely limited and the rendering is atrocious. Nobody seems to have spent any time on kerning, word breaking, or anything else relating to typography and layout.
Even after 20+ years of ebooks, they still don't have the visual quality of paper books. Headings, drop caps, quotations, illustrations — all the beautiful stylistic choices that a paper book makes is just wasted on an ebook.
Anyone have a happy story to tell here? Like some niche device that actually has high resolution and beautiful font rendering?
For font selection, you can drag and drop your own onto a Kobo.
That's good to know. However, as long as the rendering looks like this [1], that's not enough.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F5...
It's a tough problem to solve and the computation of it all is sufficiently expensive that doing it on a battery-powered device is a significant drain.
A further difficulty is the file formats being used --- ages ago, I tried to argue for an ebook format which specifically noted markup and content as being decorative or semantic and looking over the specification I don't see that that was ever really worked up.
That said, a further difficulty is even if a feature is in the spec, it's not certain if the various hardware and readers would actually be implemented.
One back-burner project I've had for a while is to take a publication, make it into an ePub, then use the ePub as the source for a nicely typeset version (or more likely, series of versions) --- gotta finish a bunch of other projects first.
FWIW, it seems to me that a lot of the effort into nice typography/appearance is going into the "coffee table" sort of books which these days are stand-alone apps such as:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-elements-by-theodore-gray/...
and it seems to me that there is a lot of potential for such documents which is as-of-yet only poorly explored --- some examples which seem to be reaching towards this:
- Bembo's Zoo --- this used to be a Flash-based website which was delightful: https://jilltxt.net/bembos-zoo/ --- it really needs to be brought back
- Euclid’s Elements Joyce's Java Version --- https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm... --- I refer to and link to this version by preference
- Motion Mountain: The free physics textbook --- https://www.motionmountain.net/ --- if this would read well in a PDF viewer on the Kindle Colorsoft, I'd get one --- as it is, I've been reading through it on my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360, and it's done a lot to help my understanding of physics
- various CD-ROMs and other multimedia efforts --- "The Manhole" became Myst which became a franchise unto itself, Broderbund's "Living Books" are now a popular line of apps, the Voyager series which was _amazing_ and I'd dearly love to see revisited https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1995/01/02/t...
- Leonardo da Vinci CD-ROM which was a wonderful interface for exploring the "Codex Leicester" --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci_(video_game)
I'd be very interested in other texts which explore this space and which have the potential for nice typography.
That said, I am fine with just reading ebooks on my Kindle w/ flush-left, ragged-right and having the ability to report the (apparently inevitable) typo.
Is it a tough problem, though? Fonts have hinting built in, executing those bytecode instructions should be something even low-powered chips should do just fine. Text flow algorithms have been solved well since Knuth's TeX work in the 1970s, as I understand it.
Obviously, publishers also need to make a better efforts in producing ebooks, but I'm not super familiar with EPUB and don't know where the technology is lacking.
Please try the following exercise:
- download the text of a book from Project Gutenberg
- work up a set of settings/options for a LaTeX document to typeset it as you wish: https://tug.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/memoir/memman.pdf
- typeset the document, look through each paragraph for bad breaks/poor spacing, and if concerned about a 2-up option, check the page breaks to make sure pages are even, and adjust as necessary
The problem is it's _hard_ to detect bad breaks, and problems such as "stacks"
the instance of the same word appearing at the left or right edge of a paragraph,
the paragraph shown here has a four word stack forced to occur at the left of
the text as currently written when shown at a reasonable width on a display
are very, very hard to address while maintaining even spacing, esp. if the text
is fully justified.
> It uses an oxide backplane with custom waveforms for fast performance
What does that mean?
Hmmm... I was wondering why my Kindle Oasis had suddenly become slow and unreliable after the latest update. Now I understand
The color screen is the most impressive as all the colors refresh simultaneously.
I usually sideload books, downloaded from Libgen, through their send to kindle email setup. Is it illegal to download books from there? Did I just leave a trail of evidence?
Are you really asking if it’s illegal to download books from a piracy site?
I wish Kindle Scribe ran Android so I could sideload apps to it.
Take a look at the Supernote.
I've been using a Kobo Clara Color for several months. I love the size and functionality, but the color isn't that big a deal since I'm not reading picture books.
I used to use a Kindle Oasis, but I like Kobo's software better than Amazon's, so I switched.
FYSA for those considering the Boox it is an absolute privacy/security nightmare. Basically a black hole.
The new Kindle lineup is kinda meh, incremental improvements definitely but the tech is already so good that they've become a bit like phones. There's no compelling reason to upgrade my 11th gen Paperwhite, and colour doesn't interest me, at least not in its current state. I'm guessing the reason the new Paperwhite screen is 7 inches is because there's no replacement for the Oasis.
huh the site has an interesting way of doing internationalization — it's just a different blog post w/ Spanish, rather than another language like /[sp]/[blog link]. Curious why they chose that route
It's a website where most articles don't have translations. This article seems like an exception, and I can't think of a simpler way to do this either.
If you had separate paths for each language, most links would have an unnecessary /en/.
Oh wow, finally a color kindle. This is the first I’m hearing of it. This will be great for comics.
Kindle Scribe should show your calendar, news, weather, etc when it's plugged in.
I hope Scribe note sharing is improved from "email yourself a PDF".
And come on, still no physical page turn buttons?
I also want a Kindle Scribe with a scroll display: a high-refresh-rate LCD touchscreen that sits just below the bottom of the eink screen. Use case being: swipe to a bookmark or page very quickly. It would stay off until touched and would be about 2cm tall, with the same width as the eink screen.
I adamantly disagree. There are 10,000 devices in this world that will feed you your email if you really need to see it in the second it comes in. You probably have one in your pocket right now and another on your wrist and a third that you are staring at to read this post.
I use a Remarkable tablet (the Scribe's competitor) for the exact reason that it doesn't come with apps for email or web browsing or an app store or a weather app. It writes really really well (the scribe does too) and lets you focus on that. It doesn't try to be the 4th version of a smart device when you already have so many.
The simplicity of it is a feature not a bug.
And the Scribe won't even accept a bluetooth keyboard. In the Kindle app on my iPad I can use a bt keyboard to turn pages.
The "email yourself a PDF" note taking issue made the Scribe a no-go for me. Basically, if you transfer your PDF over USB, it wouldn't allow you to use certain note taking features. You had to email the PDF to yourself through Amazon's servers.
I hope Kobo releases a new Elipsa. I waited for the new reMarkable, but it is full of subscription garbage.
I hadn't looked at the Elipsa before. It looks very much like the 1st gen Scribe, did Amazon simply buy that hardware?
All of the e-ink displays are made by the same company. That's why they're all so similar.
Instinctively attracted to the Kindle scribe because I love writing on books as I read them, however I've been disappointed by every device that's taken a crack at this, and I've tried them all. Nothing beats paper, which sucks because digital formats are infinitely copy able, backup able, etc.
I always wonder how they implement write-in-books. Never found a FOSS version. I wanted to add it to an android e reader maybe so at least I could try write in books on various Android tablets or a zfold. Failed at that too!
No oasis? No buttons? Sigh…
wow this whole time I assumed there was a color one.
That price though makes it a nope.
I have a pretty old paperwhite. When it started deleting books i had side-loaded via calibre, I decided to get a kobo. I have a libra color, and I have to say: price notwithstanding, it's a great device. I don't have a lot of experience with more recent devices, but compared to my 2nd gen paperwhite, it is _amazing_.
Color is good enough to read comic books on it, the google drive integration means it's not too hard to get my CBR/CBZ files on directly. The annotation / notetaking featureas are nice (I haven't leaned into them yet, but they work well even on the small screen size), plus all the regular stuff with normal book reading. Also, since it's kobo/rakuten, the libby integration is better (search and select library books right from the device).
The actual reading app is maybe 90% as good as reading on the kindle (or a more specialized reader like perfectviewer on android). There's some annoyingly fiddly features- font size is kind of weirdly variable, when going through CBR files there's no "read next in the folder" gesture nor is there a "this is read/unread" state in the google drive ui, so you always have to remember which book you are finishing when opening the next in the series.
I tried out one of those boox readers with the android apps, which would be even better software-wise, but the boox hardware seems like garbage (for an N=1 at least). My display came with several rows of stuck pixels, and apparently it's a good thing that I ordered from amazon instead of the boox store, because the reviews indicate getting an RMA from boox directly is a pain.
I switched from a Kindle to a Kobo (monochrome), and simply having the book cover as the lock screen makes me like it so much more. I always paid to not have ads on the Kindle, but it would show a bunch of generic images. The book cover is the obvious choice. Kobo gets it.
The reading experience is a little more bare bones, but good enough, and still offers things a physical book does not.
Just FYI, this is now a Kindle option too. https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=23435466011
For anyone with an ad-free Kindle, and running the most recent firmware, and you're looking for the Display Cover option using Amazon's documentation, and you're not finding it...like me.
It looks like earlier this year they moved the option out of Settings > Device Options and it's now located in Settings > Screen & Brightness. Which ironically doesn't seem to be documented anywhere that I can find.
Finally! But what I'd really like is the last page read is the screen saver.
- My kobo 'refreshes' the screen at the start of every chapter.
- I typically stop reading at the end of chapters
- The so-called screen saver creates dark and light points wherever there are dark and light points on the book's cover
- The screen needs to be refreshed to return these points to homogeneity
Outcome: most of the times the screen is refreshed, I get no use of it. Most of the time I spend reading, the screen needs to be refreshed.
There’s a “Refresh screen every:” setting under “Reader settings” where you can configure this.
That would be weird, it would make it hard to know if the device is on or off.
The whole point of e-ink screens is that the device only needs to be "on" when redrawing the screen.
In fact, with respect to the e-ink readers, a "screen saver" that turns on automatically is a bad idea that removes useful functionality - being able to keep the same page up for hours without interacting with the device is a feature, as it allows you to use it as a reference, like you'd do with a paper printout.
I use my Kobo only for technical books / diagrams etc, having it stay on the thing I'm looking at for hours is _absolutely_ a feature.
"on" in this case mainly means whether it's unlocked and reacting to input. It can make sense to have no distinct lock-screen, but I can also see it leading to frustrated users who are annoyed by not knowing if the device reacts to input or not.
Yes, yes!
With these displays, there's not really an "off" because as long as there's no change on the display there's no energy usage. Of course, that dies not account for the OS.
The problem is, once you want to flip page you’ll try to press the touch screen and nothing will happen since you haven’t turned on the device with the power button (you don’t want the touch screen active always since it will drain the battery).
I guess they could add some indication on the screen it’s in ”sleep” mode though, like a frame or icon somewhere…
Honestly, I think they should optimize the time it takes a powered off device to boot up and turn the page after the user presses a button[0]. Sure, those readers tend to be full-blown Linux computers with nontrivial boot time, but approximately none of the features this stack provides are needed for simply turning the page.
I'm sure I'm underestimating the complexities of the problem, but the first idea that pops into my head is to add some flash storage that's, say, 5x the size of the framebuffer, and always keep in it the current page + next two and previous two pages (swapping pointers to avoid unnecessary writes), and have an extra microcontroller that would wake on button press, read the appropriate page from the flash buffer, and send it to the display controller. The whole process could take a fraction of the second (+ screen redraw time), all while the main OS wakes up (or boots up) in the background, and the user would experience no delays if all they're trying to do is read their book page by page. Once ready, the OS would update the flash buffer and stay active for a short while, in case the user decides they want to flip pages quickly.
--
[0] - Gosh, I keep forgetting the readers only have touchscreens now. Another reason for superiority of hardware buttons for page turning.
> Gosh, I keep forgetting the readers only have touchscreens now. Another reason for superiority of hardware buttons for page turning.
Kobo still has a reader with buttons thankfully. I don’t understand how people tolerate touchscreen on e-readers. It’s extremely distracting compared to just pressing.
I stopped using one ereader we had because the damn touchscreen kept flipping the page if e.g. a blanked brushed it while I was reading in bed.
Buttons were absolutely perfect for this use case, on a dedicated e-reader—less so, say, an iPad mini that also does other stuff, but also those nicer touchscreens don't accidentally trigger as often so it's not as big a problem. Touch screen is nice for navigating menus but should be disabled when reading.
The obvious things is a tiny RTOS with enough of an ereader buffer to keep 5 screens (random number - maybe even the full boot). press the button the RTOS boots and flips the page almost instantly, then it boot linux in a VM to add more screens to the buffer, and/or take over the screen. Linux would have to be aware it is running in an RTOS like that so it can take over where you left off in the boot.
It doesn't really matter if it's on or off. This is how I have my Kobo configured via KOReader. It does put some small text "Sleeping" at the bottom in a place that doesn't obscure the page, but even this is configurable. I like it because it's like a book laying open, inviting me to jump back in.
Hasn’t this been the case for a few years now?
boo, book cover on lock screen not available for Scribe (yet)
There are a bunch of comments about how this is the default experience now. It's only the default experience if you buy the ads-free version.
Since I don't want to pay extra to disable the ads, the trick I figured out is to buy the Kindle for Kids. It comes with a cover, no ads, and a 2 year warranty. You can turn off the kids stuff with one switch, and then it's just a normal Kindle.
If you buy it on Black Friday or one of their other sale days, you should be able to get it for the same price or less than the regular edition would be when not on sale.
> Since I don't want to pay extra to disable the ads, the trick I figured out is to buy the Kindle for Kids. It comes with a cover, no ads, and a 2 year warranty. You can turn off the kids stuff with one switch, and then it's just a normal Kindle.
They closed that loophole. Kindles for Kids now show ads when not in Kids mode.
Kindle for Kids is not available outside the US afaik. At least not in a lot of European countries.
I could see you loading up a book they deemed not kid friendly and being told sorry you can not read this book on this device.
Wait, you have to pay to not have ads on a Kindle?
When did that start being a thing? I've been using a kindle for about 14 years, my current one is a few years old. I've been thinking about upgrading, but it works perfectly fine, and I've never had it display ads, and haven't had to pay anything for that "privilege".
It sounds like this will be my last Kindle device if I now have to pay extra for no ads, on a device I've already paid for, to read books I also pay for.
When will the madness stop!?
I asked Amazon via chat to remove the adds because I was SCANDALIZED, just utterly SCANDALIZED to see romance novels on ads on the lock screen. They removed the ads for free. ;)
I bought the slightly cheaper version with ads years ago and asked support to remove them because they „weren‘t relevant to me given where I am living“. I found out about this option on reddit or in the product reviews on some local retailer‘s site, so I assume it is/was a bit of an open secret.
Congrats, you made a big fuss to save $20
megacorp set an arbitrary price for this, and you think the consumer is at fault?
At least ten years ago https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/technology/personaltech/r...
Can't read that but that is surely if you bought the subsidized ad-version of the kindle.
There's no difference between a "subsidized ad-version" and what al_borland said: that they "paid to not have ads on the Kindle"
You can get a Kindle for $110 with ads, or for $130 without ads.
I got my Kindle before any ads were in play (its like a second generation?), and several years afterwards it started displaying ads. Thankfully a chat with amazon solved it because I wasnt in US, so the ads were not applicable to me, but I definetly did not have option to buy non-ad version when I bought it.
I read it as if it was a subscription, my bad.
I'm an avid kindle user, I've never seen ads on my device. I'm in the UK
I'm in the UK and you absolutely get ads on kindles unless you have a very old device or bought the ad free model(TBF all kindles sold outside of Amazon at Currys, JL etc are always ad free).
Last I checked, about three years ago, any place selling kindles online (UK/Ireland) had small-print next to them stating that an internet connection and additional fee was required to remove ads.
I've been using the same Kindle Paperwhite for about 13 years and there always have been ads in it because I didn't pay for the 30$ extra initially. It never bothered me as they stop when you put the device in airplane mode, which is what I always do ;-)
Its been that way for years, the ad is on the lockscreen, and its an ad for other books. The version with no advertisement is 20$ more, I don't see the problem if someone wants to get a discount for looking at ads.
As far as problems go, I understand it's been a constant and this specific implementation is pretty low on the list, but generally, greed leading to ads intruding every aspect of our lives and people thinking up with new spots to place ads is a problem.
Creating a different experience around reading books for those who have and those who have not is also a problem, given how important literacy and the printing press are to the development of our society.
I'd love to see most advertising simply banned, but in the case of books there's precedent from back when people used to actually read enough to be worth advertising to: mid-century pulp novels often had a couple pages of glossy ads right in the middle, usually including one or more cigarette ads.
The first or last pages of books are still frequently used to sell other books from the same author or from the same publisher. Not that long ago they'd come with cut-out cards to mail in for your order for more of the publisher's books from the partial catalog printed in your book (nobody orders by mail any more, is the only reason the stopped that, I assume). Some of my books when I was a kid would have the first chapter of another book from the same anthology series at the end, to sell it (Goosebumps did this, for example).
Isn’t it strictly worse if they only offer the $130 no ads version? Why is choice a bad idea in this context? All it means is more people can afford it.
Yeah I don't find it that bad either. The ads are non-intrusive (only when not using the device) and the standard wallpapers are super boring anyway.
As much as I hate advertising, this is as good as it gets
Always been a thing, I think. When you bought it you could pay like $20 extra to not have them - you probably paid and never thought about it since, I imagine.
It's a one-time thing, it's like $20. They've been doing it for at least six or seven years. You probably selected it when you ordered your current model.
When I bought my Paperwhite around 2013, I noticed that ads were an option on the kindles sold in the US but not in Canada. In Canada there was only the no-ads version.
Actually there is a hack. After buying a kindle, you just write to kindle support and say that you are getting ads and you are not aware why are you getting them. They usually would remove them for you. Worked for me though when I bought kindle.
That's not a hack. Customer support just doesn't want to argue with people who are likely to get belligerent. You can get a lot of stuff for free just by throwing a tantrum, but is that really who you want to be?
> Hacking might be characterized as ‘an appropriate application of ingenuity’.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html
It's not far off a hack. And not OP but personally I've got very few problems with getting one over on massive corporations like Amazon.
It's about as ingenious as littering to save yourself a 20 second walk to a trash can.
I disagree. It's exploiting a weakness in customer service provision in order to work around built-in UX degradation. Not many people would think of it.
Our society can only exist because people don't push the boundaries of what is technical legal but still harmful to others. There are also many laws you can break without any risk of getting caught. It has to be that way because we can only invest a limited amount of our resources into enforcement of our laws. It's one big prisoner's dilemma where individuals gain by defecting but if too many people defect on the social contract the whole system falls apart.
Likewise, businesses lose money on people who habitually return things. People who behave reasonably subsidize the "ingenious" minority. Generous warranty and return policies can only exist when most people behave reasonably.
> push the boundaries of what is technical legal but still harmful to others
This is actually a good description the behaviour of megacorps like Amazon. They are constantly looking for new ways to increase and consolidate market share, pushing or breaking the boundaries of anti-trust regulations, at the expense of the consumer.
I wouldn't advocate this sort of behaviour towards individuals or small businesses, only megacorps. Highly dubious that this would actually cause harm to the average person. If anything it would hasten the enshittification process, open the field up to competition, and be a net positive for society.
I am likely coming at this from an entirely different mindset to you. In my mind, the current economic structure implies that sufficiently large corporations are pitched in a battle against ordinary people.
It's not a weakness, it's Amazon's strategy to be generous in customer support to ensure loyal customers.
not so - they will fight you on the ad removal most of the time
YMMV, I paid for a no ad version of the Kindle and when I moved countries and changed the kindle store I stated receiving ads. After a 5 minute online chat they removed the ads again, but not before confirming my original purchase of the ad free kindle PW 10 in 2018.
Also works to say that you live in a country where Kindles aren't officially sold so you can't make use of the ads anyway even if you wanted to. Don't know if they actually check if you are in one of those countries, but I am so it worked for me.
This was, arguably, a huge driver for Kindle sales in such countries (mine included), as that $20 or whatever saved made much more of a difference for people there.
This policy has been around for several years.. Hopefully, some competition from other e-reader brands will help rein that in
I've been a kindle user for so long I'm embarrassed to admit I don't have any concept of what it is like to get ebooks outside of the Amazon ecosystem. Was the change easy to make? Do you feel like you have access to as much content as you did with a kindle?
I use a Boox reader, but pretty close to the same experience. For me, I either buy the book from one of the many places that lets you download epub, or buy it on the Kindle store and download it from Libgen. It's really a non-issue. I've only run into one or two books I wasn't able to get an epub of, and those I ended up reading on the Kindle cloud reader on my laptop.
What are your favorite places to buy books that let you download the epub versions also?
Yes completely.
I have both an old Kindle Paperwhite 2nd Gen I think and a Kobo Clara.
The kindle 'lives' in the car and the Kobo at home so I always have something to read.
I use Calibre to sync to both.
Rather than directly accessing Amazon from the Kindle I download bought books to my PC then strip the DRM - so I can read the same book on both the Clara and Kindle.
See: https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools
I'd say that the initial awkwardness is from deliberately not connecting the Kobo or Kindle to the internet to stop them from 'phoning home' when you set them up. The Kindle is easy - just don't connect it, the Kobo seems to insist but there's a simple step-by-step to bypass the enforced sign up on the Clara I use.
See: https://yingtongli.me/blog/2018/07/30/kobo-rego.html - basically SQL commands.
and you can get firmware updates for the Kobo devices via
https://pgaskin.net/KoboStuff/kobofirmware.html
and they are easy to apply - drag / drop.
I don't get books from Kobo's site as it used to be hard if not impossible to strip the DRM from them - which meant I couldn't read them on my Kindle.
Hope that helps.
kindles have displayed the book cover on the lock screen for approximately the last decade.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/16/22387146/amazon-display-c...
2021.
People have certainly been asking for it for at least the last decade. Jail breaking doesn't count.
I bought a Kindle Paperwhite in 2020, it's been doing that since day 1 of my purchase without jailbreaking or anything.
It's not a new thing that journalists cover old features as if they've just been added, because they just found out about it and feel they're newsworthy
It's definitely not "a decade". I have the 2013 Kindle Paper white and it doesn't have that feature without JB, the oldest device supported is Kindle Paperwhite 7th Gen which is released in 2019.
It's likely you are just lucky to buy a KPW with that feature just rolled out.
I cannot speak on when it was actually introduced.
I only added my experience because bongobingo said 2021 and cited a tabloid "article" as proof.
The feature definitely predates April 2021, how long? I have no idea, possibly only 6-7 months, as I bought mine in October 2020.
Reddit nerds only notice in April 2021, https://old.reddit.com/r/kindle/comments/mo67x9/the_new_kind...
More "tabloids" in April 2021 https://www.tomsguide.com/news/amazon-kindle-update-adds-kil...
More nerds in August 2021, https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/30x1qmxj "the setting that was added a few months ago in Settings/Device Options to show the "Display Cover" of the book you are currently reading"
Amazon discussing rolling it out during ... April 2021, https://www.amazonforum.com/s/question/0D54P00008A1VpoSAF/di...
Maybe you were in a pre-release A/B or region, or simply didn't notice the update.
I think it's more likely you just didn't notice for 6-7 months. It's not just "tabloid" articles that noticed it in April 2021. This wasn't noticed by users on places like mobileread.com until April 2021 either and that place is comprised of some of the biggest eInk fans out there.
By all accounts your Oct. 2020 date is the earliest reported date for it being an official feature. Kobo has had it since day one in 2010, Kindle not so much.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=4110557
First archive of the amazon announcement page was in April 2021 https://web.archive.org/web/20210419114306/https://www.amazo...
It’s a small detail, but it adds a lot of personality to the device
There's a secret slideshow folder(demo mode?) where you can put in your own images that will display when it sleeps. It was kind of fun to use it as an eink display. I never figured out how to remote in/ssh to remotely swap the images though.
I have a kindle that just displays the book cover. Are you sure it’s not just a setting?
From some of the other comments, it looks like a rather recent addition by Amazon (around 2021). I got rid of my last Kindle after 2021, but maybe I never got that update.
If it takes some competition for Amazon to finally add some very basic features like this after a decade, I will keep supporting that competition.
I’ve grown frustrated with Amazon in a lot of areas, this was just one small one. I’m looking to divest my dependence on Amazon, and the Kobo isn’t leaving me missing anything.
Both Kindle PW 10 and 11 gen support showing the cover. Personally I actually don’t like to see the cover of the books. Nobody’s business to see what I’m reading.
I'm keeping cover because it helps me remember the title of the book! Otherwise I typically buy book after seeing recommendation on goodreads or elsewhere, start reading and when someone asks me the name of the book or the author - I have no idea! Cover helps with that.
I've got a Boox Note 3 and love it for what it is (my hardware has been fine), but I'd find it very hard to recommend generally. Boox are dodgy at best (GPL violations, random connections to china, etc...), you start with an already old version of Android and if lucky you might get another major version, they aren't cheap, Android stuff is mostly not designed for black-and-white/low refresh rate and some apps have unreadable buttons, things like that.
But, with that all said... it's great for my specific uses. Android is just so much better if you want to run self-hosted stuff. When it dies or the software just gets that old I'll be really at a loss for what to get to replace it.
Boox is dodgy, but everyone I know that has one loves them. I wouldn't expect any Chinese company to respect GPLs. Although, I've seen people on Reddit say they can have QA issues, and if you receive that unit you're likely SOL, this is the only reason that I've been hesitant to spend money on one. I've also been eyeing this new company, daylight, that has a 60hz refresh rate with what I think is E-Ink[0]. Their website says E-Paper, not sure if that's different from E-Ink. Unfortunately, they've always been on wait list months out every time I've looked.
https://daylightcomputer.com/product
I have a boox note 3, I don't love it. I barely use it. Have a remarkable 2 but spouse stole it when I iddn't use it much. I bought a scribe and used it more. I had 2 sets of classes this spring. I used the crap out of the scribe. I tried the boox for it and went back to the scribe. All I was doing was taking written notes in class and using it as infinte paper for doing homeworks. The boox takes forever to wake up and just is more laggy. It was usable for reading stuff in google docs outside but an umbrella and a laptop worked better.
That said all 3 have amazing battery life, they'd all last all semester on a charge.
It’s definitely not e-ink, it’s a type of LCD. Been reading about it and it seems like users are pretty hyped about it. I don’t really need another tablet, I want a really good writing experience. I’m test driving the Boox Go 10.3 but I may return it and wait for the new Supernote offering. Or I’ve been reading up on de-bloating the Boox software if I keep it.
Daylight is a reflective LCD, like what you’d find on the classic Game Boy. I find their marketing of it as “e-paper” to be highly misleading.
It's RLCD but with a twist. It has microperforations, so they can put the backlight behind the screen without making it transreflective. I agree the terminology is misleading though.
It was because of the bad things I read about warranty/support that I bought my Note Air 3 on Amazon. I paid a bit more but at least I knew I could return it easily if there was an issue.
I've seen people on Reddit mention QA issues too, but at this stage I'm more suspicious of sock puppets on Reddit than of Boox. Buying from a source where you know you can return and have a guaranteed warrantee period is prudent for any significant purchase. In my country there's a local distributor that offers this.
My last e-reader was a Boox Note. It did its job but was slow and after a couple of years just didn't start up anymore.
Then I switched to Kindle Scribe, mainly for the large screen. It was amazing, it was so much faster and more responsive. I even started to use the scribe to make notes, though I didn't buy it for that purpose. With the Boox Note I never did that because of the slowness, it was just annoying.
I got a Boox Go 7 as my first ereader a few months back and I feel the same way. I like it for my own use, which is mainly loading foreign language books in from Calibre into KO Reader, but I'd never recommend it to someone unless they were pretty technical.
Yeah, I have a Max Lumi and I feel broadly the same way. My hardware has been great, I use it daily and have read 100s of books and written thousands of pages of notes on it, but wouldn't necessarily recommend it to others because I think mine has already stopped getting updates, the GPL violations aren't great, and the cloud stuff seems a bit dodgy.
On the cloud stuff though -- note syncing has support for WebDAV, so I've fully disabled the Boox Cloud integration and all notes get synced to my self-hosted OwnCloud server, which is nice.
I'd love to figure out how to install some stock Android or Linux on it down the road, though Boox's notes + reading apps are really quite good, and likely very optimized for the hardware.
I will second that the Kobo Libra Colour is an excellent device. To me it's the perfect reading device. To anyone using Calibre with it, make sure you get the Kobo plugin that transforms epub into kepub when sending to device. It normalises text size, margins, and so on so the reading experience is consistent no matter where you uh... procure your library from. I reconvert all my epubs anyway, but that step is critical.
I use Calibre-Web (self-hosted web-UI for Calibre) with my Kobo Forma, and with a quick change of a config file on the device (by plugging it into PC) I can use Calibre-Web as an online book store and retrieve my books over my network, I'd recommend it for anyone interested in keeping a large library and wanting to manage what's on-device.
No jailbreak or anything required, just some config in Calibre-Web and replace a URL or two in a config file on the Kobo.
Does the Libra Colour support KOReader? That removes the need to convert to kepub and generally gives you better rendering, at the cost of having to do more setup.
I run KOReader and Tailscale on my Libra Color. I personally very much dislike Calibre for organizing my library and use it only as a metadata editor, since I don't need to actually convert formats anymore. With Tailscale I can connect to my NAS running Kavita over OPDS and browse my library with the organization I've decided on.
KOReader has some quirks, but Kavita is trying to work around them. Theres a PR for proper syncing so you can read on multiple devices and KOReader doesn't respect the specs for OPDS so doesn't always update after you add books, but it is fixed by a restart of KOReader.
Well, their website seems to suggest it does. I will mention though, that plugin converts them automatically without intervention and does a pretty flawless job.
Ooh, thanks for this. I was having all kinds of font and margin irregularities with my side loads, assumed I just had to power through and manually adjust the fonts in each book
> When it started deleting books i had side-loaded via calibre
This is news to me. All my kindle library is books side loaded via calibre. Then again, my kindle paperwhite is non stop in airplane mode so maybe this is a factor. In any case this is alarming and thanks for the feedback, I will read more about non-Amazon devices because of that.
All my Kindle library is also books side loaded via Calibre (sent to my kindle email address). I have been doing that for years (more than an decade actually) and have never had any book deleted by the device. Is this real?
It's explained elswhere in this thread - only the "DRM'ed" ebooks that "belong" to another Kindle are deleted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41866327
Ah, ok. I always de-DRM everything automatically (opening books in Calibre does the de-drming). It sometimes happen with the newer systems that newer Kindle books can't be de-drmed, but then I return those immediately.
But I'm surprised a book with DRM can even be added to another device than the one it belongs to, let alone be opened?
That happens on sideloaded books that belong to the same device as well, at least on my Kindle Scribe. These books disappear occasionally, and I have not found a consistent way to make them reappear in the UI. Sometimes they return on their own, other times they do not. Interestingly, their files remain on the Kindle’s file system.
I have had many ereaders: several kindles including dx, remarkable 2, kobo clara 2e and the latest is the pocketbook inkpad lite. (all are b/w)
Honestly, I just wanted an open reflective reader just for reading. Just put the books on the reader with usb and you're done.
I liked the remarkable 2 - they didn't require an account or cloud syncing. I didn't use the pen much, but when I did it was pretty good. I mostly stopped using it because no backlight.
I tried a kobo clara 2e - I had to learn about "sideloadedmode=true" in the settings to use it properly. Decent reader, but a little small. I like dark mode.
then I stumbled on the pocketbook inkpad lite. I use it all the time. 9.7" screen but only $219, backlight, and you just put your books on it and go. No activation or cloud stuff required.
Also, it reads books directly not only in epub, but many other formats like mobi and azw. (I haven't tried .azw)
inkpad's 150ppi is a dealbraker
> When it started deleting books i had side-loaded via calibre
Could you expand on that? I load all my books via calibre but I also have the kindle set to aeroplane mode at all times. Does this happen when syncing?
Happened to me too… Yes, it happened during syncing. I searched up on how to disable Kindle auto update and it’s happening less, but last time I bought a book from Kindle store I got bit again. I guess it’s a sign to stop feeding the hand that bites me.
It deletes all side-loaded books when you connect it to the internet, happened to me as well.
That is strange. I have had a Kindle for years (probably around a decade), upgrading mutliple times. I am using a Paperwhite Signature for the past year or so and I have not experienced this with any books. I have probably 70% Amazon purchased books, but that still leaves a decent amount of side-loaded books (mostly epub).
The only annoying thing I experience is that the cover art will unload on the side-loaded books where you just get the generic cover with the text of the book. But once you click the book it loads the artwork, which seems to last a few days before quickly going back to the generic cover. But the book itself never leaves the device. I can't say I have experienced this ever (except for once, mentioned below) and I have over 150 books on my 32Gb device.
Just some random thoughts I am wondering:
- Is it an ads-supported model (mine isn't)
- Are the books in a broken-DRM .mobi? Not judging, i've done it too, just curious if Amazon has some sort of "signature" in mobis that allow it to detect a book that had DRM removed?
- Are they standard .epub?
- What is the size of the device? (Maybe smaller 8Gb devices will clean up and prioritize non-Kindle content to make way for "official content)
- Which device is it? (Scribe, Oasis, Paperwhite, older paperwhite, etc)
The one time I had it deleting my book was a large book (it was 400Mb) and it was on an older 8Gb paperwhite. I still had PLENTY of storage space available (I was using around 4Gb) but it kept deleting that book. This was the only time I have seen it happen and it was with this one specific book. That was many years ago and I haven't seen it since. That book was a DRM-removed book I got through "shared" means. Which has led me to question if the Kindle removes it because it could detect that the DRM had been removed or because of its large size. But this was a one-off experience for me. The book was readable by the device. It would download for several weeks at a time before being removed. You could redownload it and it would work for weeks again before dissapearing. I never could figure it out.
For me, they were drm free ebooks I bought legitimately and had to sideload via calibre because the kindle doesn't support epub. It's an old Paperwhite, and it only happens when I go out of airplane mode. However, I have to go out of airplane mode (or had to before I ditched the kindle for a kobo) to get library books and the occasional actual Amazon kindle book when I didn't feel like waiting for the library to get me to the front of the list.
*Edit to add: I believe the kindle won't delete epubs you sideload via the Amazon kindle email gateway, but I have no interest in doing that.
I have been using Send to kindle[1] for years to upload epubs directly to Kindle. It even syncs the position in the books so that if I read it on my Kindle, it syncs the position to the Kindle app on my phone.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/sendtokindle
I've found that Send to Kindle does a much worse job at converting to MOBI than Calibre, which is a bit ironic but on par with Amazon's overall treatment of non-Kindle books.
Back when MOBI was still the primary format for Kindles, it would actually allow you to upload .mobi files directly via Send to Kindle.
These days it wants ePub only, but things also seem to "just work", and I always assumed it's because they added support for it on device side. What are the issues that you ran into?
Interesting thread. I wonder if this has anything to do with what I experienced with the one (two, actually) I set up for my mom years back. The books were visible on the filesystem but nowhere to be found when using the device.
Fortunately, getting two units in a row with jarring pink blotches was enough of a non-starter to suggest that she just revert to a V4 without my having to explain the confusing behavior.
It doesn't do this for me. I've got side-loaded and Amazon store books on the same device, no problem.
It also deleted all my side-loaded books. That was the last straw for me. I only buy DRM-free media from now on and only use respectful hardware. I use my Remarkable 2 primarily for e-reading now, though I concede fully it's not the best user experience for reading. But I don't have to worry that it will delete my books! I can also now "write in the margins" which I've found to be a powerful way to take notes. I can't bring myself to write on physical books, but with Remarkable you can have a copy that is stock and a copy with your notes on it. Best of both worlds!
Huh. All my books are side-loaded and I've not had any issues.
As far as I can tell, it's a fairly rare bug. I've only had it happen to me once in 6 years. But the moment it happened, I decided I was never buying a Kindle again. I still have my paperwhite because it works fine, but it's never connecting to the internet again.
I don't have that problem with my paperwhite...
I've side-loaded .mobi and .pdf files, and have never had anything disappear, whilst still buying some things from Amazon kindle store...
That’s not right, I always buy books from Amazon over WiFi but also sync my books from Calibre. No issues for probably 10 years.
is your wifi on when you add your calibre books? if so, thats why.
My wifi is alwasy on, I'm using a cable to sync from Calibre though after they kinda deprecated the "E-Mail to Kindle" feature.
Happened to me also. I will use the device in airplane mode as long as it lasts, but this is my last Kindle.
Happens to me consistently if my device is on Airplane mode for a long time.
If you switch airplane mode on and off it can happen. If you have airplane mode off when you're side loading content (so the information that you've added files gets synced, you don't have to worry about it. The problem seems to be when things have changed in the cloud it doesn't check for new items you've loaded on the kindle first, and thinks something went wrong and deletes it.
I've had this problem as well. When going from offline to online, it removes books sideloaded via USB. But not books I've added via send to kindle or ones that I've downloaded via the experimental browser. So now, instead of sideloading via USB, I convert to mobi, run a python -m http.server on my laptop and use the experimental browser to download them on kindle.
My notes/ underlines were wiped out when synched. (new edition with quality issues- spellings, I think- corrected.)
Any workaround?
I stopped using Calibre because it turned out to be more annoying than simply emailing an epub to my designated kindle address. I've never had anything removed. Most of the content comes from libgen.
I think Calibre is able to integrate with the “Send to Kindle” email interface as well, so you can have the best of both worlds :)
Sigh.. "Send to Kobo" would be nice to have
Try this: https://send.djazz.se/
Minimal work if you configure the site as the homepage in the Kobo web browser.
Easiest is with KOReader. You start a server in Calibre then connect to Calibre in KOReader (not via the web browser). At that point it's like you plugged it in via USB, you can add/remove from the device from your library.
You can use Google Drive with Kobo.
I have my Calibre install setup with the content server feature which makes your Calibre library accessible to any device on the local network. I can then transfer the books to my Kobo by using the browser and hitting the content server's IP address.
I can't remember all the specifics of how I set it up and honestly i've not used it in a while because I used it to get all my old Kindle purchased books on (which was a lot) and i've not booted the docker container since.
Is this a reasonable work around/alternative or have I misunderstood? If so, I apologise. Oh also, I think I had to do some custom stuff with my Kobo as well to support this functionality, but I don't remember it being difficult. Got it all wrapped in an evening of tinkering.
Yeah, I personally don't see any need to maintain a digital book library (like with calibre) when libgen is so accessible. Email to Kindle is a great feature; I've also never had anything unexpectedly deleted.
I switched from reMarkable 2 to (my wife's old) Kindle Oasis to Kobo Sage, and I love Kobo Sage, despite some minor annoyances (like how this is the only thing that don't auto downscale the image in epub I've used: https://b.yuxuan.org/url2epub-downscale-images).
One thing in particular is that the physical page turning buttons are very useful. None of Amazon's new Kindles have physical page turning buttons any more from what I see in the reports.
> When it started deleting books i had side-loaded via calibre
Never had that happen, either with stuff loaded through Calibre or Amazons document service.
I have the Kobo libra 2. I love the thing, especially the Pocket integration.
I also have a Kobo Libra 2 and sing it’s praises.
I upgraded from an Oasis 2 and couldn’t be happier. When it comes to upgrade again, Amazon DRM readers will not even be looked at.
If you own a Kobo e-reader, check out the Plato reader [0], an unofficial document reader of Kobo devices. I find it interesting that it's written by the same person that wrote the bspwm window manager.
It is one of my favorite pieces of software. The UI is beautiful and, to be honest, inspirational. It frequently reminds me that the best UI should not be noticed. Humbling.
[0] https://github.com/baskerville/plato
How do you legitimately buy books on it?
Kobo has a store. It's decent, it won't have Kindle indies, and IMO it has fewer/worse sales, but it's not a big deal to me. They do have a subscription plan with unlimited access to certain books but it's not clear to me how good the catalog is.
You can also buy from third party stores, e.g. Weightless Books for sci-fi & fantasy, and just drag-and-drop the epub onto the Kobo.
Just checked kobo sites due to original comment. The catalog may be smaller but now they (India store) have comparable book prices to kindle. The last time (many years back) I checked, books were not available in India.
I had first edition terrible keyboard kindle and have a paperwhite. It seems libra colour is still not available in India.
> first edition terrible keyboard kindle
That's still my favourite ever Kindle, simply for the side buttons for next/previous page.
Touch interface is so much more inconvenient in comparison, for the main purpose of reading and navigating through books.
I got the kindle oasis because of the next/prev page buttons. I don't know why they discontinued it.
YES, I love the physical buttons. I have mine rotated so that the buttons are at the bottom, and it works well. The weight is distributed more evenly this way as well.
Did they actually announce that the Oasis was discontinued or did they just stop making them?
It sounds like they did both:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/16/24272009/amazon-disconti...
Well, that is a shame. I hope that my Oasis lasts forever!
What bothers me with drag and dropping epubs is that you can read it fine and annotate but I can't find the annotations online. I haven't even looked up exporting the annotations manually from the device because that is not my scenario.
Have an older Kobo Aura H2O as well as new Onyx Boox Pgae and both work fine. :)
These Kindles look great but I want to upload my own books.
I wonder if there is a way to do that safely, long term.
I've been doing that for years using the Calibre app. No problems so far.
Since I'm a total noob, I guess:
PC + USB cable + Kindle = books transferred the old fashioned way?
I'm very tempted by the thing another commenter mentioned, with not giving the Kindle internet access, if it works, I need 0 smart features.
It's PC with Calibre app + USB cable + Kindle = books transferred (not just drag and drop if you thought this as the old fashioned way).
It's a step between but think of Calibre as your own book "store". It's an ebook management app that can automatically convert almost any ebook format into the one your device needs but at the same time also gives you the option to edit the ebook details and stuff like that. It's honestly great, I'd totally recommend it.
yeah just dont turn on the wifi, you can even update the kindle via usb to get some new features if you like.
Is there a good store for comics and manga? I realized everything I had was locked in to annoying Amazon DRM, which has quite limited support.
If you have a library card, check out Hoopla
It's frustrating when promising devices are let down by poor hardware quality. Your experience with stuck pixels on the Boox sounds disappointing
I have an old Kindle Paperwhite where I both buy books from Amazon and sideload using Calibre and it has never deleted anything to my knowledge.
It's usually in airplane mode, but I of course turn syncing on whenever I buy a book from Amazon, and it never deleted any of my sideloaded books.
I wonder if this is a "feature" of new Paperwhites? If so, it would suck. I was looking to replace mine because it has the old micro USB connector that no other device I own uses, and so I must keep a cable just for it.
I got a libra color myself and cab second this recommendation.
It was so good I got a second one for my 5 year old daughter, figured it was a good alternative to the iPads I see her peers with.
I want to recommend getting an e-ink smartphone.
I've tried the Hisense A5 and the Bigme Hibreak, and software-wise, found the Bigme Hibreak to suck a little less, as I could not access the Google Play store on the Hisense.
I had one with colour, and one without.
The black and white screen is much better.
Both sadly run outdated Android versions, so I don't do anything like banking on my e-ink phone.
But I have found that not having a LCD screen in my pocket, literally gives me hours of my day back. It literally saves a huge portion of my life from being wasted in the evil pit that is ad-funded recommendation algorithm services.
LCD screens, videos, and ad-watch-time-maximising recommendation algorithm services (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, etc) attract our eyes like moths to a flame.
I have not finished multiple books per month since my pre-smartphone childhood days, until getting an e-ink smartphone.
My Bigme Hibreak, that is my daily driver, runs Android 11, and I don't get timely notifications on e.g. messaging apps. It also came without case and screen protector, which is a big minus.
Do you have experience with e-ink smartphones? Which makes and models work for you?
I'm sorry, as much I'd like to buy a e-ink smartphone, your recommendations doesn't read like a recommendation at all.
Notifications and a kind of recent android version are two deal breakers.
You're not wrong. Notice how I mentioned my favourite model "sucks less" than the other one. What ever company sells an e-ink smartphone with a fantastic camera and up-to-date Android will get my money for ever.
I wonder why all these eink devices seem to be stuck on Android 11. Did google change something about bringing android to weird devices?
I'm hearing good things about the Palma. I currently have a first gen paperwhite and am looking to upgrade. I'm thinking either the palma or the kobo libra color. They are about the same price, I think.
I have the Palma.
It's pretty good. The only problem is that the glass on the screen scratches easily. If you're okay with a screen protector then it should be fine.
In terms of software, it has access to the playstore but I actually haven't downloaded any apps on it. I've used fdroid and aurora store.
I installed a minimal launcher called unlauncher. I use Koreader as my main reader and I have it there most of the time so that I unlock/lock the e-reader and I'm taken directly to the book. It has amazing support on this device (I've used other android based E-readers and support wasn't the best). Can't change front light from the Koreader app though, which is slightly annoying.
Other than that, and the main reason I got an android e-reader, is that I use an android based manga reader. The experience is amazing. Yes, the manga reader is not fully optimised for e-reader screens like Koreader is but it works well enough that it's not a problem.
Overall, it's a really nice E-reader. My favourite thing about it is the size and form factor. Really, I have a 6 inch Kobo reader and this one is much easier to carry around. I'm very much used to reading on my phone anyway so the size is very comfortable for me.
Overall, it's been a positive experience. I'm waiting for either a color device in this form factor with kaleido 3 or perhaps another b/w with carta 1300.
But yeah, it's positive. Hardware is good and software can be made enjoyable.
Thanks for sharing! I too have looked at the Palma, but without it also being a phone, I can't go for it, because I'd have to carry it and a LCD-screen phone.
Colour e-ink works by having a colour filter over the screen, and every third pixel being dedicated to each colour (please correct me, people who actually know the details!).
Therefore they inherently have lower resolution, and are also by nature around 2/3 less white in the pixels not displaying anything. When reading text, most pixels are uncoloured, meaning in most cases you significantly lose screen resolution, compared to b/w e-ink. Thus, with colour e-ink screens, unless you're out in sunlight, you'll need backlight most of the time. This is my reason to keep using the black and white versions, and it might be something for you to keep in mind when you select your next reading device.
no oasis refresh?
no buttons? no purchase.
Been waiting a long time, I suppose it's time to move to alternatives, as it's a pain to carry around a usb-micro cable just for my kindle.
Oasis was officially discontinued last year. I'm in the same boat. I love my oasis and will not upgrade until I get those buttons.
ah, I missed that announcement - that's a shame; thanks for the info
I'm in the same boat. Give me USB-C, page turn buttons, maybe even wireless charging and I'd upgrade almost reflexively. I've been eyeing various Android-based eReaders (like Boox Page) that have Kindle support through an app.
A friend showed me usb adapters from usb-c to lightning and I found that very helpful for usb-c -> micro as well to charge the kindle.
unfortunately it's not much different carrying an adapter around than carrying the cable; but I'll have a look at options, thanks
I have a single USB-C to USB-C cable for travel that has a permanently attached USB-A adapter on one side, and lightning and micro adapters (also attached) on the other end. Not as slick as just USB-C, but it’s a single cable that does power and data, along with a single USB-C brick, and since it does data it works in any rental car as well. Check them out!
just to be clear its a small piece like this https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-Adaptor-Charger-Extender-Sams... which I feel like is much easier to bring around than another cable, but I can see how it's annoying to have another dongle
Pedantic clarification. My Kindle Fire in 2011 had color. This is specifically about an eInk display Kindle? The article talks about the "the first-ever color Kindle" without specifying that it is eInk.
Fire tablets haven't been called "Kindle Fire" since late 2014, so I doubt many people are confused.
That explains my confusion. I am just getting old. The 2011 Kindle Fire still works though power is predictably degraded. I end up using the app on my phone more or my 1st Gen Paperwhite anyway.