If it did anything else then I would end up distracted and not reading books. When I read a paper book I have no other distractions,that's what I want from my Kindle. I already have a phone, a laptop, a desktop, that can do all these other things. I'm on holiday right now, if my Kindle did all those things then I wouldn't feel like I was lying by the pool reading,rather I was lying by the pool on the internet.
> For all I love about it, it seems unlikely to ever progress beyond its current role as a pleasant book reader largely disconnected from all other sources of content.
that summed it up for me. That's all I want. I want it to be disconnected from all other sources of content. I don't want to be interrupted with a notification saying that x website uploaded a new article or whatever.
I don't think anyone is asking for that. But I would gladly pay a small fee to have an app with my newspaper that gets updated in realtime and give me a great reading experience without ads, where I can choose the topics I am interested in. I would also love to have an application to manage lots of scientific articles or that allows me to review papers. And I would like to do those things in my "disconnected" device with the nice e-ink screen. Notifications? Of course not.
A black and white reader isn't going to be a good newspaper or magazine reader. There are better devices for that. He also wished for an app store and that starts to sound a lot like wishing it become an iPad.
That a Kindle is boring is a feature, not a problem. I don't pick up a Kindle for the Kindle-ness, it's for the books on it. With the right book, some days that boring Kindle is the device that I just can't put down.
Frankly, I wish Amazon would stop with stuff like Goodreads integrations. Take that out and focus relentlessly on the reading experience - better display, better battery life, better ergonomics, and most of all - better typography.
> A black and white reader isn't going to be a good newspaper or magazine reader.
Considering newspapers were black and white for hundreds of years, and for a long time printed color photos as black and white, this seems an odd conclusion.
"Weaponizing and Gamifying AI for WiFi Hacking: Presenting Pwnagotchi 1.0.0" [1] is the one I am currently building. Waiting for my Waveshare 2.13" monochrome v2 and UPS lite 1.1. Make sure you get v2, as it has a far better refresh capability (less artifacts) than v1.
I'm more of a fan of the Nook and Kobo series (ability to sideload DRM-less ePubs is non-negotiable). But I like the less-is-more approach for e-readers; if anything, I'd prefer they had even more spartan/minimalist UIs, mimicking the "zero UI" affordances of a physical book as much as possible.
I'm just being finicky, but I still find the e-ink screen flash a little distracting from the flow of reading (even in newer screens that only need it every 6 pages or whatever). Just had a stray idea: what if an e-ink reader had an accelerometer and a screen on either side; the next page is already ready to read, and flipping it over silently preps page n+2 on the screen you were just reading? :)
Epubs and Mobis are for all purposes identical and can converted back and forth with ease (they are both just HTML containers), and you can certainly sideload DRM-free Mobis on Kindle, so I don't see that as a major problem. What is a problem is the very poor handling of PDFs on Kindles.
Amazon even give them all a unique email address so you can just send it supported files as easy as emailing a file. PDFs can be converted to native format by putting "convert" in the subject line.
I've worked on a service which converts web articles and sends them to the Kindle using Amazon's send-to-kindle feature. If anyone wants to try it: https://pushtokindle.fivefilters.org
I've been using it for a while and it changed the way I read the web. I subscribe to RSS feeds with Feedly, then use p2k to send the ones I want to read. Then when I'm eating my lunch I can read interesting stuff without getting sucked into the temptation of aimless browsing, and on a nicer screen. An added bonus is that I don't get exposed to the cesspit of the comments section that seems to lurk at the bottom of every article these days :)
So instead of a 5ms flash, you have to take 0.5s turn the device around? And have one more sensitive surface to care about?
Personally I used to find the flash bothering at first, but now I actually set mine to full-refresh on every page change to totally avoid burn-in. It's not a worse distraction than physically turning a book page.
I'm pretty sure even the latest and greatest readers take longer than 5ms. ;) And the idea is to mimic the persistence of a physical object; flipping the reader over is roughly equivalent to turning a page. But I certainly wouldn't blame anyone for finding my preferences to be unreasonably nitpicky! :D
Bad typography on a device whose entire purpose is reading is not a feature by any stretch of the imagination.
Even if all you expect from the kindle is an "electronic book," they should at least attempt to reach parity with the typesetting of paper books, but they clearly don't care to.
I read a book per week and don't notice any typography issues. Now, I'm sure it can be improved, and I don't doubt that a typography nerd could certainly spot issues. But "bad" seems like quite an exaggeration. I like to protest against this modern trend of exaggerating how "bad" we supposedly have everything just because someone can ID some improvements that could be made.
My scanner can be set to 300, 400, or 600 dpi. I find the 400 scans are just easier on the eyes, and the 600 makes no difference (or perhaps that's just my monitor).
Apple’s iBook software supports a larger part of the ePub standard than Kindle does, and does a better job of handling tables, math, and SVG graphics. Plus, it allows scripting, and Kindle doesn’t.
I absolutely love my Kindle Paperwhite, I don't want to read books on any other electronic device, and I totally agree that it's in a weird spot, and I am afraid for its future. But I don't agree with the author that the lack of an "app story" or good web browsers is an issue. I like the Kindle specifically because it doesn't have apps and isn't designed for web browsing. Adding that stuff would not make it better at its purpose.
This. I bought it for one reason- to read eBooks. Nothing else. The fact that I can buy eBooks on there is great. Spelling and a dictionary? Even better.
The one thing I did not buy it for was to use as a tablet. The fact that there is a web browser on there is a neat feature at best.
I think that what the article suggests is not to turn Kindles into tablets, but add specific applications. For example, there may be applications of The New Yorker or the Washington Post which are real reading applications: with no distracting ads or notifications, but with updated content and a tailored experience. Web sites may also have specific Kindle versions. This sounds like a terribly ambitious goal, but we are talking about Amazon. Amazon has been capable of much more in the last 10 years.
The Kindle is fine...but for one thing. The author says using the software is like walking through soft sand. Eh, more like mud to me. C'mon, you've been making these things for over ten years, and I still hesitate to do any action more involved than turning a page.
Fix that, and I don't need anything else. It's the paperback book I always carry with me, only the book can be swapped out at a whim.
You’re shadow-banned, BTW, but I think your question is valid, so I’ll vouch your comment so that I can reply.
Walking through soft sand is simply slow and tiring. That’s it; you can do normal things, it is just slower. But the Kindle is like walking through mud in that mud tries to pull your boots off, you get filthy, if you get in too deep, it’s hard to get out. I’ll walk through soft sand, but I avoid mud if I can, just like I avoid clicking on anything other than the Kindle’s page turn area if I can avoid it.
Kindle is stuck in the iPod model; it is a device that supports the wider Amazon market place, like the iPod was a way for Apple to lock-in people to itunes. It is great if you want to sell hardware, but don't expect any innovations on the software side.
Some of the blame lies on the publisher's feet. They literally colluded to stop Amazon's rise. However, Amazon did not think of reading as an activity you can create a platform around. You can, the rising popularity of Pocket is testament to that fact.
> The Kindle can’t even display web pages well! Its browser is slow and bad, though if you do manage to navigate to a page with an article on it, you can enter “Article Mode” and have a mediocre reading experience.
This statement is made as if the author thinks rendering the contemporary web is a trivial achievement.
Now, I'll admit that there is an enormously complex process required to render modern html and css properly. But there are several engines that do this rendering and are available as open source. So it is easy to render web pages... use one of these engines.
What examples are you thinking? Are you talking about Chrome and Webkit, and that these would be trivial for a Kindle to adopt? The Kindle Oasis is the highest spec Kindle, and it tops out at 512MB RAM. I see that Firefox 70.0 has 512MB for its minimum requirements, but how performant is that kind of computer on today's web?
With the example of Firefox, you wouldn't use Firefox, you would use Gecko which is going to have much lower requirements. There are usually ports for embedded systems that have even less requirements as well (WPE for Webkit for example)
So, just to render a mobi file, a HTML / CSS (2.0) renderer is needed. So, minus JavaScript and some particularly fancy CSS, the Kindle is already most of the way there.
There's no reason to use Android for the operating system of an e-reader, except to leverage the browser technology.
And e-readers use Android, but the technology is used with the bare minimum amount of effort.
One very obvious change is to implement scrolling one page at a time, instead of a very slow slide-show of unreadable text until it finishes scrolling several seconds later.
So, yes, it can't even display web pages well, because they don't try to modify the browser for the medium at all!
My kindle is my most reliable piece of tech. I like that it does exactly one thing, really well. I appreciate a desire for more- but honestly, isn’t that what an iPad/iPhone is for?
The big problem for the kindle for news is the unreliability of updates. My wife has subscribed first to the New York Times and then later to The Washington Post on her kindle. Both subscriptions have randomly failed to update for days on end at times, leading to frustration and amazon customer support calls. We finally cancelled NYT and switched to the Washington post after a period of several days with no NYT updates. Sadly, the post is not all that much better.
I have a 10" Boox Note Pro. It's expensive but pretty good. Android based. Hopefully Amazon will get some more competition here in the future and they might be forced to innovate.
I've had kindles since version 1 (yeah, the big ones). They've all been great except the Voyage. Voyage moved the power button so that it constantly gets pressed in your pocket, unlocking and losing your place in your book. I had to put a screen lock on as a workaround.
I don't know if this is a sign that "people who care" have left the Kindle team. It's just so plainly wrong.
Other than that, if you're listening: Please give me Dvorak keyboard. My kindle is the only device I own that can't do Dvorak.
The demise of TTS was truly unfortunate. I got a 'Kindle Paperwhite' a few years back but I still primarily use my 'Kindle Keyboard' because it has TTS and the paperwhite doesn't.
From what I understand, the publishing industry is to blame, thanks to their fear of cannibalizing audiobook sales. I will never forgive them for this.
Sorry, I assumed people here were familiar with accessibility tech. (If I recall correctly, the marketing material for Kindles used to use the term 'TTS', I don't think it's that obscure.)
I had just realized it must've been the tenth time I've had to google an acronym on HN over the last couple days. You're probably right that it's fair jargon in the context of e-readers. It's just that context is constantly changing as you click between HN comments. I might just be in a sassy mood. :P
I'm going to have to call you out on this. You can't criticize a person for not taking the time to type out text-to-speech and then yourself use "1000ms" - because if I Google "1000ms" it returns 2236.94 Miles per hour!
I have an Oasis, and have since the previous version came out (2017ish?). I was just saying today it's my favorite piece of tech. So lightweight, works great, battery lasts forever in airplane mode. I've been reading a book every 1-2 weeks for the past couple years because of it, and Audible, and WhisperSync.
So in the past ten-ish years, the kindle has remained the same, the amazon store has been flooded with knock off products, and the only other notable consumer products Amazon makes are unremarkable Android tablets, buttons that let you accidentally order more laundry soap, and eavesdropping devices.
I got my Kindle in 2012 and it still runs like a brand new device. I think Amazon's issue will eventually be that, unlike the iPhone, no one needs to upgrade their kindle more than once per decade or so. Of course if the newer models had dramatically better features or apps I would be tempted to upgrade.
I also got my Kindle around then and have never felt the need to upgrade. It works like a charm and I can read for weeks without recharging. I have hundreds of books on it and have never needed to remove any for lack of space.
The only thing that tempts me to upgrade is the new water-proof version so I finally can comfortably read while in the bath...
I don't think Amazon cares that much about Kindle sales — they made it deliberately way cheaper than other e-ink models when it was introduced. Their goal is to profit from book sales on their platform. I bought about a hundred electronic books on Amazon since getting a Kindle, so I think the model works great.
i don't want to ruin your impression of your device but i used mine recently in a store next to a new device and it has noticeable ghosting(characters stay on screen)+ backlight is weaker + interface is waaaay slow
Think it needs a new battery but apparently you can't get that done
It looks cool and the idea of an eink monitor is appealing. I have a Onyx Boox Note Pro that I bought a few months ago that can apparently do something like this but I've not actually tried it.
I take my Kindle when I go backpacking. I like that it's light, sturdy, waterproof,and lasts many days without needing to be recharged. It doesn't compete with my phone. It competes with lugging a bunch of paperback books in my backpack, and it's so much better.
The Kindle isn’t perfect but it is a useful device which doesn’t feed the dopamine craving destruction of my attention span like my iOS devices. In many ways I’m grateful it is just reserved for the slow reading of real books and nothing else.
I have an old Kindle that I don't really use anymore, a Kobo Aura 2, and I recently bought an Onyx Boox Note Pro.
The Boox is awesome. It was expensive, but I think it was worth it. It's a huge 10" paperwhite tablet that runs custom Android. You would not want to lay in bed with it because of it's size and weight, but you can read large PDFs that are difficult to view on smaller screens (mostly due to obnoxious margins and font choices).
Because it's Android I can install browsers and other apps that I might want. I mostly just use it as a boring reader though.
The Onyx software isn't perfect, but it's pretty good considering. They are innovating, which is more than I can say for Amazon or Rakuten/Kobo.
I own a Kobo Aura One, partner owns a Kobo Aura Two. I cannot recommend the One because it is too big; the other Kobo however are great.
Onyx Boox Note Pro and ReMarkable are a completely, utterly different price tag and purpose than a Kobo or Kindle. A Kobo goes for 100-200 EUR (expensive ~40 EUR smartcover recommended though). Onyx Boox Note Pro and ReMarkable go for 350-500 EUR or so, and are also meant for drawing / note taking.
I'm wondering what innovations you need on your Kobo though. I would like to have Calibre support, so that I don't need to have my books stored on the device, but 8 GB is a lot of space for books anyway. Other than that, it Just Works (tm). Syncing works. I can even put the radio off to save battery. FWIW, you can even run custom apps on them.
It doesn’t need to be so much more. It does one thing and does it well. Doing more things would distract me from the book I’m trying to read. I have a 2013 kindle on which I’ve read nearly 20 books this year.
I have a few complaints - I wish the device wasn’t so slow or that the e-ink display didn’t take so long to update. I wish the keyboard had autocorrect because I’ve come to rely on that quite a bit. I wish it would use a USB-C cable so I could carry around fewer chargers.
The older generation of Kindles were nearly perfect devices. I have the last model that was not touchscreen and had the physical paddle buttons on both sides to turn pages, so you can easily read with either hand. It doesn't have a ton of storage, but you can fit hundreds of text-only .mobis in a GB. The battery lasts for weeks, with the wifi turned off.
I'm not so impressed with the newer models. Switching to a touchscreen instead of the physical buttons is a huge regression. If mine ever dies I'll have to fix it or find a refurb.
The Kindle Keyboard is still the best. All it needs is an update for backlighting and higher resolution. DON'T CHANGE ANYTHING ELSE!
I bought the Kindle Oasis, really wanting to like it. At least it brought back the page turning buttons. But they got the buttons wrong. The KK got it right. You can read and turn pages with one hand. Not so on the Oasis. And the Oasis is so slippery it's hard to hold it vertically. I was astonished at that.
The KK doesn't slip out of your hands.
I like the KK so much I bought two of them, so I have one when the other dies. I don't understand why each successor is worse.
+ All the votes for the DX.
Apart from having to replace the battery (and having the ability to do so.), it has been the most trouble free electronic device I have ever owned. I love the screen size, and I can read textbooks, and code at the same time etc. It has niggles (PDF viewing being a bete noire), but it's reliable, coupled with Calibre I can read anything, it hsa handled my lazy attitdue to device care admirably.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] thread> For all I love about it, it seems unlikely to ever progress beyond its current role as a pleasant book reader largely disconnected from all other sources of content.
that summed it up for me. That's all I want. I want it to be disconnected from all other sources of content. I don't want to be interrupted with a notification saying that x website uploaded a new article or whatever.
That a Kindle is boring is a feature, not a problem. I don't pick up a Kindle for the Kindle-ness, it's for the books on it. With the right book, some days that boring Kindle is the device that I just can't put down.
Frankly, I wish Amazon would stop with stuff like Goodreads integrations. Take that out and focus relentlessly on the reading experience - better display, better battery life, better ergonomics, and most of all - better typography.
Considering newspapers were black and white for hundreds of years, and for a long time printed color photos as black and white, this seems an odd conclusion.
1: https://www.adafruit.com/product/1028
Had a chuckle at the garish nails on the model of this one: https://www.adafruit.com/product/4243
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21301467
I'm just being finicky, but I still find the e-ink screen flash a little distracting from the flow of reading (even in newer screens that only need it every 6 pages or whatever). Just had a stray idea: what if an e-ink reader had an accelerometer and a screen on either side; the next page is already ready to read, and flipping it over silently preps page n+2 on the screen you were just reading? :)
I've worked on a service which converts web articles and sends them to the Kindle using Amazon's send-to-kindle feature. If anyone wants to try it: https://pushtokindle.fivefilters.org
I've been using it for a while and it changed the way I read the web. I subscribe to RSS feeds with Feedly, then use p2k to send the ones I want to read. Then when I'm eating my lunch I can read interesting stuff without getting sucked into the temptation of aimless browsing, and on a nicer screen. An added bonus is that I don't get exposed to the cesspit of the comments section that seems to lurk at the bottom of every article these days :)
Personally I used to find the flash bothering at first, but now I actually set mine to full-refresh on every page change to totally avoid burn-in. It's not a worse distraction than physically turning a book page.
Just use your iPad if you want more than an “electronic book”.
Even if all you expect from the kindle is an "electronic book," they should at least attempt to reach parity with the typesetting of paper books, but they clearly don't care to.
And if you want larger for example a boox max 3 is 13.3 inch, "only" 2260 x 1650 for 200ppi though.
https://goodereader.com/blog/e-paper/will-we-see-500-or-600-...
I guess this makes more of a difference for japanese characters or I just don't know yet what I am missing :-)
The one thing I did not buy it for was to use as a tablet. The fact that there is a web browser on there is a neat feature at best.
Fix that, and I don't need anything else. It's the paperback book I always carry with me, only the book can be swapped out at a whim.
Sorry, what distinction is being made here?
Walking through soft sand is simply slow and tiring. That’s it; you can do normal things, it is just slower. But the Kindle is like walking through mud in that mud tries to pull your boots off, you get filthy, if you get in too deep, it’s hard to get out. I’ll walk through soft sand, but I avoid mud if I can, just like I avoid clicking on anything other than the Kindle’s page turn area if I can avoid it.
Some of the blame lies on the publisher's feet. They literally colluded to stop Amazon's rise. However, Amazon did not think of reading as an activity you can create a platform around. You can, the rising popularity of Pocket is testament to that fact.
This statement is made as if the author thinks rendering the contemporary web is a trivial achievement.
Now, I'll admit that there is an enormously complex process required to render modern html and css properly. But there are several engines that do this rendering and are available as open source. So it is easy to render web pages... use one of these engines.
And e-readers use Android, but the technology is used with the bare minimum amount of effort.
One very obvious change is to implement scrolling one page at a time, instead of a very slow slide-show of unreadable text until it finishes scrolling several seconds later.
So, yes, it can't even display web pages well, because they don't try to modify the browser for the medium at all!
I don't know if this is a sign that "people who care" have left the Kindle team. It's just so plainly wrong.
Other than that, if you're listening: Please give me Dvorak keyboard. My kindle is the only device I own that can't do Dvorak.
From what I understand, the publishing industry is to blame, thanks to their fear of cannibalizing audiobook sales. I will never forgive them for this.
Sorry, I assumed people here were familiar with accessibility tech. (If I recall correctly, the marketing material for Kindles used to use the term 'TTS', I don't think it's that obscure.)
Think of it as an accessibility issue. Full words are more accessible.
If TTS is fair game in the context of e-readers, ms is fair game... literally everywhere.
I say lets let it be.
The only thing that tempts me to upgrade is the new water-proof version so I finally can comfortably read while in the bath...
I used a zip lock bag to waterproof it. The touchscreen worked perfectly through the thin plastic.
Think it needs a new battery but apparently you can't get that done
One feature I would really like to see is a decent hyphenation engine for improved typography.
It's a quality android tablet with a high speed e-ink display.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/not-ereader-first-e-ink-m...
It looks cool and the idea of an eink monitor is appealing. I have a Onyx Boox Note Pro that I bought a few months ago that can apparently do something like this but I've not actually tried it.
https://onyxboox.com/boox_notepro
The Boox is awesome. It was expensive, but I think it was worth it. It's a huge 10" paperwhite tablet that runs custom Android. You would not want to lay in bed with it because of it's size and weight, but you can read large PDFs that are difficult to view on smaller screens (mostly due to obnoxious margins and font choices).
Because it's Android I can install browsers and other apps that I might want. I mostly just use it as a boring reader though.
The Onyx software isn't perfect, but it's pretty good considering. They are innovating, which is more than I can say for Amazon or Rakuten/Kobo.
Onyx Boox Note Pro and ReMarkable are a completely, utterly different price tag and purpose than a Kobo or Kindle. A Kobo goes for 100-200 EUR (expensive ~40 EUR smartcover recommended though). Onyx Boox Note Pro and ReMarkable go for 350-500 EUR or so, and are also meant for drawing / note taking.
I'm wondering what innovations you need on your Kobo though. I would like to have Calibre support, so that I don't need to have my books stored on the device, but 8 GB is a lot of space for books anyway. Other than that, it Just Works (tm). Syncing works. I can even put the radio off to save battery. FWIW, you can even run custom apps on them.
I have a few complaints - I wish the device wasn’t so slow or that the e-ink display didn’t take so long to update. I wish the keyboard had autocorrect because I’ve come to rely on that quite a bit. I wish it would use a USB-C cable so I could carry around fewer chargers.
But otherwise, I’m pretty happy.
I’ve had this complaint with the kindle for 12 years
And additionally, Amazon seems to have given up on the large form factor.
I'm not so impressed with the newer models. Switching to a touchscreen instead of the physical buttons is a huge regression. If mine ever dies I'll have to fix it or find a refurb.
Reading with one hand on the Kindle Keyboard is great. You can stand in the security line with one hand on your luggage and the other reading the KK.
I have no idea how the touch interface ever got through Amazon usability testing.
I bought the Kindle Oasis, really wanting to like it. At least it brought back the page turning buttons. But they got the buttons wrong. The KK got it right. You can read and turn pages with one hand. Not so on the Oasis. And the Oasis is so slippery it's hard to hold it vertically. I was astonished at that.
The KK doesn't slip out of your hands.
I like the KK so much I bought two of them, so I have one when the other dies. I don't understand why each successor is worse.
Bring back the DX!