Slashdot Mirror
Hands-On With The Kindle
Amazon's Kindle e-book may have sold out in record time, but there's still a lot of discussion about the device's merits. Neil Gaiman likes it well enough, but it's sent Robert Scoble into a fit of apoplectic rage. For a real, meaty, hands-on look at the way the device operates in everyday life, Gamers With Jobs writer Julian Murdoch has a slice of life with the Kindle. He takes us through his Thanksgiving holiday weekend with the device, noting the quirks (good and bad) that cropped up with Amazon's new toy. "Short of reading in the tub, the Kindle is easier to read in more places, positions, and situations than a physical book ... But it's far from perfect. It is expensive. The cover, which I find completely necessary, is in desperate need of more secure attachment (Velcro works great). The book selection is less-than-perfect, although I imagine this will improve with every passing day. And Amazon needs marketing help. The Kindle's launch reeked of 'get it out fast.' The big-picture marketing efforts (like video demonstrations and blurbs from authors) were great, but simple things like communicating how freakin' easy it is to get non-Amazon content on to the device, for free, remain horribly misunderstood."
I don't understand why people would buy this at ~$400. May as well just go and get a low end tablet pc, which you could use for a multitude of other uses.
I'm not the NYT's typical top-ten reader, so I'm not sure something like this would immediately appeal. The last few books I've read were printed from 10 to 50 years ago, which would place them well beyond this device. Pros and Cons just don't weigh enough in favour and like I said, what does this do that a tablet couldn't do? Maybe when they drop it to ~$50 and I can sync it like my iPod to my favourite content feeds each morning it would hold some promise.
Also, books don't require batteries. I've got several devices around now, which all have some form of rechargeable (and expensive to replace) cells. I worry a bit about the availability of replacement cells several years down the road.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
>but simple things like communicating how freakin' easy it is to get non-Amazon content on to the device, for free, remain horribly misunderstood.
And it is in Amazon's interest to show people who might otherwise buy material how to avoid buying material... how?
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
easy it is to get non-Amazon content on to the device, for free, remain horribly misunderstood
If I'm not tied to a single source for my books then I may consider it, but I still enjoy they actual book feelings though. Weight, smell, etc... Some parts of reading a book have nothing to do with what is written... At least for me.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
Ah, so it's more Kindle-ing for the e-book's fire, eh? OW OW OWWW! No hard fruits! *Watermelowned*
Demented But Determined.
Do you mean to tell we that Amazon, a reader that makes money by selling things, aren't talking too much about ways to get non-Amazon content? Besides, what is non-Amazon content? Blogs, RSS feeds, and stuff you upload onto the device. Methinks PR didn't think these were great selling points. That's interesting...
But it's a 14 minute video! Linked from the front page of Slashdot!!
Oh my.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
"Short of reading in the tub, the Kindle is easier to read in more places, positions, and situations than a physical book"
I don't understand how this could be true. Seems like it would be heavier, more sensitive to water/rain/mist/fog, harder to see in bright sunlight, etc etc...
What am I missing?
I think the Kindle will be to traditional books as this device is to walking.
Inventor of the LOLbalrog meme.
Take a look at the specs.
This thing doesn't sync, nor use WiFi. Instead, it downloads content through Sprint's wireless 3G network (the same one that their phones use). There is no subscription fee for this (the data service). It will also download newspaper and magazine subscriptions daily (no syncing or need to find a WiFi hotspot).
Perhaps their pricing model is built around including some type of specially negotiated data plan with Sprint that is amortized over the projected lifetime of the device. (Just speculation).
This just in, Gutenberg wins again!
http://greenobyl.com/ please.... think of the children!!
If you can't say it with written words, it wasn't worth saying. These "video shows" and "podcasts" are nominally entertaining but worthless for conveying any kind of real information. Please don't link to them like they're big-people essays -- it doesn't matter how smart you are, I can read ten documents written by people almost as smart as you are in the time it takes your stupid "veeblog" to buffer, play its stupid intro, and replay the series of meat noises you've encoded the information into.
Please. Just pass them by.
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
a digital book should *NOT* be 10 dollars. i don't care if its a new book and only available as a hardcover for 18 bucks. i'm not spending 10 bucks for it. when the paperback is released, it still looks like the price of the e-book costs about the same, if not a little cheaper than the paperback. if they were selling new releases for like 2 bucks and paperback-released books for a buck (or just sell them all for 99 cents a piece), it would be a huge factor for people who buy a lot of books. it means they may eventually start saving money in the long run if they read that often. plus, it may entice people just to read more often in the first place or to even purchase books on impulse. they may not even read all the books they purchase if its at that price. i think they'd sell a lot more books and make more money due to having lower production costs. books are priced more than music. once the music/filesharing fiasco ends (which will probably be within this decade), books will be next. its a fringe market right now, but more and more books are becoming available online.
I read that the thing does not handle PDFs. Is this true?
If it doesn't, why would anyone buy it?
Does any know how well, if at all, it handles commenting/forums associated with the blogs? Obviously, I'm most interested in /.'s. Especially 2.0. Any insight would be appreciated.
art is science made clear. -cocteau
I'm not forming opinions 'til I can get my hands on one.
Oh gosh - that last sentence probably cost me about 4000 Slashdot karma points...
Three Squirrels
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
That's what e-book readers are. There's absolutely nothing wrong with paper books. In order to be successful, e-book readers have to actually offer benefits over paper books without significant drawbacks. They totally fail at that. The benefits: holding multiple books and maybe some search features. The drawbacks: price, battery usage, DRM, harder to skim through.
So unless you have a reason to carry a lot of books at once time, there's no point.
I bought an E-book from Amazon as an experiment, and hated it. I can only read it with Amazon's Online Reader. Today while trying to read the book I purchased I got an error "book temporarily unavailable, try again later". Great thanks. Also, in shopping for a Wii, I came across this policy on Amazon's website:
Wii Purchase Policy
As you may know, the Nintendo Wii is in great demand, and there are shortages of this product across the U.S. In an effort to provide as many customers as possible with the opportunity to purchase a Wii, we are limiting the number of Wiis customers can purchase in a given calendar month. As a result, each household may only purchase up to 3 Nintendo Wii units per calendar month.
Failure to comply with this policy will result in account actions including, but not limited to:
* Cancellation of all outstanding orders, including Wii orders and other orders.
* Closure of the offending customer account and related accounts, including:
* The customer account used for making purchases and selling items on Amazon.com Seller accounts
* Any international accounts at Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, or Amazon.co.jp
* The Your Media Library account area, including any digital products you may have purchased
* Any Amazon.com Associates account or Advantage account attached to the closed account
When an account is closed, access to any Amazon Wish List, Baby or Wedding Registry, or profile pages is lost. Any purchase history, saved gifts in Gift Central, and digital products in Your Media Library will not be accessible. Additionally, any outstanding Amazon.com gift certificate or check funds balance will be unavailable.
Bottom line? So if I accidentally buy too many Wii's from Amazon, they'll shut down my account and remove my access to digital media that I have purchased? Unbelievable.
I have never seen this Kyte player before but it's really cool. Where did they come from?
For that price, the Asus Eee PC is a better deal. I got one - neat little thing and it can actually be used for real work, since with SSH, I can do anything with it.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
RTFA, one of the author's complaints is that Amazon's hype made people think it only handled DRM'd content. But it does seem to handle PDF and some other formats just fine.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
i wonder what robert scoble had to say, probably nothing important, at least nothing important enough to show to people with opera
kyte: Browser Requirements
In order to view the kyte website, you will need the following:
JavaScript enabled.
If using Internet Explorer ActiveX must be enabled.
Version 9.0.28 of the
---
Sorry, forgot the post links to quite a few FAs. I was referring to this one
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
You know, I think I have a theory on why people get so upset about the idea of digital book readers. It's not the DRM, it's not the batteries, it's not whether you can loan your book...
The biggest problem is ego.
People who read a lot of books LIKE having huge bookshelves to impress people on how many books they have. "Yes, as a matter of fact, I DO read more than thou, hence, I am more intelligent. Bow down and kiss my ring!"
How many of these people keep around books they know they will NEVER read again? Why not donate them to the library, and clear up space on the ol' bookshelf? Because they like having the scorecard on the wall. Having an e-book spoils all the fun.
I think this is actually a generational thing. I'm noticing that younger people have no problem downloading scanned books, reading them, and moving on. I think the ego stroke of the big library will eventually be extinct, like we're seeing with big walls of record collections.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
While Kindles blemishes aren't exactly earthshattering, I think it suffers from the negative side of the iPod halo effect. We are starting to expect that electronic equivalents will more clearly improve on the original. Just glancing at the Kindle (without probing its deeper features, since consumers likely won't initially either), I don't quite understand why it's so convoluted. Why is there a keyboard on a book? Why not more screen? Why a button for next page, why not tap the screen? Why does it look like a Mac 128K screen instead of a laptop screen? Don't some books have illustrations? Are they in color? Will my NYTimes have photos and charts and whatnot that are sometimes instrumental to understanding the article?
See, I can see how the connectivity and immediate access to content is an improvement and how it's overall adequate and even good in many places, but we've come to expect more out of a 'breakthrough' device, and this just doesn't seem to have it. Doesn't mean it's bad, but it leaves people expecting that better can be done and will soon.
Sorry, if Amazon is going to start paying bloggers to get their blogs subscribed to the Kindle, I can't trust any Blorger who raves about it, since I figure they have an ulterior motive.
Holy crap this thing is fugly!
It's 1980s all over again. The ID guys must have thought beige boxes were a great look in computing too.
And $400? $125 discounted to under $100 when the hype is over makes more sense.
A lot of the same kinds of comments are coming up here as in other forums about the Kindle.
Firstly, even though this article points out explicitly that you can put your own content on the Kindle, lots of people still seem to refuse to believe it. You can! And you can use USB to backup the files, as well.
Secondly, DRM isn't really Amazon's fault. All publishers are really, really aware of electronic rights. There are major disputes between the Author's Guild and publishers because of this. Recently, in particular, there was a big fight with Simon & Schuster. There is simply no way that anyone, either authors or publishers, are going to give up these rights. Maybe a particular author will give away an old book for free over the 'net, but not in general. Both authors and publishers have to eat. Allowing everyone to copy their books is not going to happen. Amazon had no choice but to comply.
Reference books in ebook form can be grepped through. So much more useful than paper versions of book.
That is the main draw to doing it on a computer. But if it is so expensive, why not just spend some more and get a laptop?
A guy here at work bought one. I used it. It is easy to read words on the screen. But it feels like an "old" prototype that he might have picked-up on eBay. I was able to figure out the controls quickly.
Of course, I wanted to try the "basic web browser". Not so good for most sites. But, satisfactory to read text blogs, as long as they are built "special" for text-based browser such as this it seems, or you have to navigate the "vertical scroll" stuff this device creates. Interesting that cell access is free. The scroll-thingy control is fine, but it seems out-dated. Actually reading a couple pages of a book was nice. The page "refresh" on this device seems sluggish at times. The screen response to typing is sluggish as well.
Overall, this just seems like a "let's test the market with this thing we created in a weekend" device.
The Palm T|X sells for around $150 these days.
:)
I've been using one for over 2 years as my eBook reader of choice, and almost never open a regular book now. Toss PalmFiction on it, and you have a top notch e-book reader that can read HTML, MS Word, RTF, Text, PalmDoc and a number of other DRM-unencumbered formats.
Want a more integrated experience? There are over 10 other e-book readers for the PalmOS, some which have their own DRM-encumbered formats, some where you can purchase directly from the eBook app, etc.
Project Gutenberg encodes their documents in Plucker format, which has a native PalmOS reader.
The T|X has WiFi and Bluetooth support, and can connect to the internet via cellphone BT link, WiFi router, USB uplink with a computer, or even IrDA.
It has a 320x480 (2.5" x 3.5") screen, which might seem small, but works really well for reading text. Text can be displayed at any size and be linked to dictionary lookup/wikipedia/etc. Plus, the device fits in my pocket, so I'm actually likely to have it when I want to read a book.
Apart from the eBook features, the device can link to common calendaring and address book apps, browse the web, etc., act as a VoIP phone if you install a microphone, be used to watch movies, listen to music, CREATE content and take advantage of the thousands of software applications written for the PalmOS platform.
Oh, and it can run Linux too
The Kindle might make it. That's a very convincing review.
.LIT, Adobe eBook Reader, and Gemstar--no format had more than three of the books available.
It's not a hardware problem; it's never been a hardware problem. My year-2000 Rocket eBook is more than good enough to read books for pleasure. Seven years of progress is seven years; all they needed to do was not screw up, and it sounds as if they didn't.
The biggest problem by far with previous efforts was title availability. Sure, they would have an eBookstore with "thousands" of titles, and if you asked the question "is there anything there I want to read?" the answer would be "sure."
But ask the question the other way around, as someone who buys books rather than someone who is sold books. The question then becomes "is book XYZ, that I know I want to read, evenavailable?" The reviewer makes it clear that this is an important question for him, too, and that he thinks Amazon falls a little short. But only by comparison with the ideal. Comparison with earlier eBook efforts is like night and day.
Just before the "eBooks are dead" meme hit, i.e. at about the peak of the craze, I took a look at the book list for Oprah's book club. I thought that was a very fair test. They were scattered across publishers, they were not so old as to be out of print and mostly old enough to allow time for format conversion, and all of them were good books that some disinterested party thought were worth reading. I compared eBook formats and audiobook format, audiobook being an example of a non-print medium for which the conversion costs and distribution costs were far higher than for an eBook.
As I recall, of about forty-four books, something like thirty-eight of them were available as audiobooks, i.e. most of them. And a grand total of six were available in any eBook format at all. And of the three dominant eBook formats at the time--Microsoft
Now, the very first precondition of eBook success is that, darn it, the books you want need to be available. That's not sufficient, but it's necessary. The holes in title availability were huge. For example, to pick one of my favorites at random, there was nothing by Barbara Kingsolver available in any of the three formats.
On a very informal test recently in which I just listed ten books I had bought or was considering buying, I found that eight out of ten were available in Kindle format. Including nine books by Barbara Kingsolver, two of which I haven't read yet.
The second thing is price. By the way, Amazon is honest in saying most books are under $9.99. Many of them are priced a little lower, in fact. These days mass market paperbacks are costing $6.99, $7.99, $8.99 and trade paperbacks are mostly above $10. So it's fair to say Amazon is charging paperback prices, even for books that aren't out in paper. Do I think that's a good price? No, I think it's way too high. But it is much much much better than before. In the old eBook days, the uniform policy was that if the book wasn't out in paper yet, the eBook price matched the hardbound price.
I must have had a dozen conversations with strangers watching me read my Rocket eBook, and they all went the same way. Increasing interest. Not deterred by the $300 price of the device. But when they asked what the books cost and I said "Hardbound prices if the book isn't in paper," the conversation would stop dead right there and I could see their interest level plummet to zero. Maybe they didn't actually roll their eyes but it felt like it.
DRM is sucky. Half the fun of books is being able to lend them. Can you imagine not being able to lend a book to your wife even if you each had your own device? And I am stuck with DRMed Gemstar-format content that will die when my Rocket eBook dies (and its battery life, once 20 hours, is now down to about 2). Locked to a hardware serial number in a proprietary format, and the company is bust and their servers are shut down and no customer-service people to help. So d
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
It would probably sell better if you put it in a shiny off-white plastic case and called it the ibook, which lowers my faith in humanity one notch.
Amazon says that their PDF handling is currently experimental, but that you can convert it.
If you look around, you'll find that PDF support is an issue for pretty much all of these devices. Sony's reader, for instance, can view PDF, but it is unreadable. This isn't a coincidence.
Years ago in the e-book business there were heated debates between the reader-first and the publisher-first groups. The former wanted readers to be able to enlarge, shrink or reformat books however they want. The latter want to be able to control every pixel on the screen, so that it will actually look good. For instance, the classic Alice in Wonderland illustrations flow around the text, which only works if the formatting is fixed.
These e-books are reader-first devices: they let readers reformat books to whatever they want. PDFs are publisher-first. And how do you fit a 8.5x11 inch PDF page on a small screen? If you scale it, then it'll likely be unreadable. If you force everyone to scroll around the page, that'll likely make it irritating to use. There's probably a reasonably good solution, but it certainly isn't going to be easy!
If you could get the content of textbooks or other reference materials for $10 as opposed to the $100+ that they typically cost it would pay for itself in a typical college semester. It would also be a lot lighter, more easily searchable, and generally a vast improvement over any 500+ page reference manual. It isn't anything that an EeePC or a small tablet couldn't do, but it is an alternative which may be more attractive to some people (the EeePC screen isn't great, decent tablets are still more expensive, etc).
Battery usage is probably a non-issue. Everything uses batteries, even the beloved iPod. FWIW, the iPod is also DRM laden, but I guess it's cool enough that people are willing to overlook that.
But if you're just talking about casual reading material, I'd agree that e-book readers are going to be a hard sell.
Memo to Bezo-man, CEO d'Amazon:
... a lot
... or ... if this thing pisses me off I want the option to take all that shit I paid real money for and really keep it _and_ use it on something else. ... without stupid converter tool ... you know ... the ebook equivalent of the stuff a lot of us book people and geeks --your core audience-- do with paper books
Preface,
Dude you really really need to talk to people outside the early adopter, gadget/freak crowd. In anything remotely resembling the device's current form, this device is doomed.
First give it buying appeal:
*) Drop the price
*) Make it a _lot_ less ugly...
*) I shouldn't have to pay Amazon everytime I blink
Make it a little less geeky
*) Make it so the keyboard can be slid out of the way
*) Make it a _lot_ less ugly...
Make the content have a life longer than the device
At some point your content will outlive the device:
1) It fails (and stockholders will make them pull the plug)
2) It succeeds (and to survive the imitators, it becomes non-backward compatible)
3) You just want the latest version and want to take your content with you
4) The darn thing breaks/gets stolen/etc
Since everything has to go through Amazon for a fee, if you want to keep all that stuff you paid for, you're going to pay how many times per device switch times how many devices in your life?
Give me the ability to do all those book things
*) Support more document formats (text, pdf and html should be a bare minimum)
*) Have content longevity (see previous section)
*) Don't give me anything in a proprietary format
*) Let me push stuff from my computer to my kindle directly
*) Let me do annotations/notes/highlighting on pdfs and ship the modified doc back to my computer
*) For bonus points, give me the option to search both the content of books and my notes
*) For double bonus points, make that search rip through my annotations
*) For even more bonus points, give me a Mac/Windows App to manage my docs (think iTunes)
the clock on the wall says 4 til 7
Heresy!
But it's true, and I've been saying it for at least five years, ever since I first got my Rocket eBook reader. Read the article, and you'll understand why. Yes, eBook readers have some downsides, but not many, and they're trivial compared to the upsides -- assuming, of course, that you can get the books you want in electronic format.
Until you've done it, you simply can't understand how liberating it is to be able to read without holding the book in your hands. As the author of the article says, he found he could read while eating, holding his daughter, even running hard on a treadmill. And he's absolutely right that a good eBook device is "invisible" -- within a minute or two you completely forget that you're using it, because it gets out of the way of the content that it's presenting. Reading on your PDA or your laptop is not the same thing at all, because those devices don't get out of the way. Laptops are too big, too heavy, too powerhungry and PDAs are too small.
Here's my bottom line on just how much better eBooks are: My choice of reading materials has adapted to what I can get electronically, because I find paper books so annoying. Luckily, I was already a fan of much of the stuff from Baen Books, and they provide all of their stuff in electronic, DRM-free format for a very reasonable price (half the price of a paperback for single books, and about $2 per book if you buy their Webscription bundles). Because of the super convenience of an eBook, I now read almost nothing but Baen's titles.
BTW, as for reading in the tub: I've been doing it for years with my eBook. Just don't drop it in the water and you're fine (have you ever dropped a paperback in the tub? I haven't). If you're really worried about it, though, there's a very inexpensive and simple solution: Get a big ziploc baggie and put your eBook in it. Seal it up tight and you have no worries about water, sand or anything else getting in, and you'll have no problem pushing the buttons or reading through the clear plastic. I find that I can read eBooks in many places that I wouldn't take a hardcover book, because I'd be too afraid of damaging it, and it's not feasible to read a paper book wrapped in plastic. I also like the fact that my LCD-display eBook reader is readable in the dark. The Kindle isn't, but it's better in daylight (my eBook works in full sunlight, too, but it is a little harder to see).
eBooks are the future not because they're cool gadgets but because they make for a better reading experience.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I keep hearing this described as the iPod for books, which strikes me as a really misguided goal. I don't want an iPod for books, and most serious readers I know wouldn't either. There's something fundamentally different between flipping wantonly through my ever-shifting collection of 10,000 albums and singles, and spending days or weeks immersed in a single great book. I couldn't give a hoot about being able to store 200 books, or download a new title at the drop of a hat. What is the point of wireless? The most voracious readers I know would not find themselves constrained by the need to occasionally hook up to a PC and 10 or 20 more titles. I could map out my entire reading for the next five years in about 5 minutes of downloading from Project Gutenberg. The reading world just doesn't spin as fast or as serially as the iPod world. It's off-putting to see it now falling under the iPod rubric, where it will be forced to compete for a dwindling slice of our increasingly short attention span.
:-) Anyways, going solely on what I've heard from reviews, I'd have to say I agree with the assessment that it probably should have gone on sale in time for Christmas `09. Technology will continue its inexorable march towards perfection, and in a couple years today's screens will look primitive. Early adopters and gadgeteers will snap this up, but readers will stick with our dead trees for a few years yet.
Don't get me wrong, I'm completely open to the idea of an e-book; as an environmentalist I positively love it. But it seems like too much attention has been focused on making an iKindle, to the detriment of the actual reading experience itself. e-ink is much better than LCD, certainly, but anybody who would claim it's is as pleasing to look at as even a $.99 paperback has pretty low standards. And I feel like a real opportunity has been missed in making it waterproof, too. Who wouldn't love to be able to read in the shower!
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
If they would sell me the eBook with my physical book purchase. I love to read, but I also collect books, I like having that chunk of dead tree sitting on a shelf in my house...SO...if I was able to purchase the eBook as part of buying the book...say it was a CD attached to the back inside cover...or at the very most a minimal additional cost, say $1.99 to $2.99 with purchase of a physical copy, and normal price for the eBook otherwise, then yeah I might bite.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
If you want to try out the software and ebooks use Amazons Mobi-Pocket reader:
http://www.mobipocket.com/
Available for nearly every smartphone/PDA device out there.
The reader software is pretty much what runs on the Scoble. I mean the kindle, but without the weird physical UI.
Mobipocket also do mobi-pocket publisher (also free) so you can compress and distribute your own works.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
I received my Kindle two days after launch and have been using it steadily since then. What do I like best? Bottom line it's the "always connected" capability. I use this for downloading books (natch), newspapers, blogs (/. was the first...) and web browsing (lost count of the number of times that a quick check of Wikipedia has settled a breakfast/lunchtime/dinner argument). I've also taken to downloading the first chapters (free) of books in which I may be interested. I'm glad I did in many case - the hype behind books does not always match reality (natch again). I downloaded chapter 1 of Steve Colbert's "I am America" - god knows how that's at the top of the NY Times best seller list, it's *awful*. Glad I could read chapter 1 and realize this was not a book for me. (and no, it wasn't the politics that turned me off - it's just poorly written prose. Mr. Colbert should focus on what's he's good at: TV)
As for the cost: It's fine given that it has bundled always-on wireless access. If I had to pay $25 a month for wireless for the device and if the device was, say, $100 - I'd be out of pocket in 12 months. TCO is good. Look past the $400 price tag and realize what you are getting for the money. A version 1 ebook (it's pretty good - will get better with V2, V3.....) and 24x7x365 wireless access to a huge library. Good value in my book!
Rich people are eccentric. Poor people are strange. Me, I'd be happy with odd.
If this thing had a small white apple logo on it, the media maczealots would be falling over themselves praising its brilliance calling it a "game changer".
Pricing is a hurdle but not a big hurdle. When they sell enough of these the price will probably go down. I have no problem spending $250 for an iPod and the same is probably true of the Kindle. Giving a credit towards content would be a good idea. I might spend $400 if I got $400 of content thrown in. That'd give me my first 20-30 books for free and get me really hooked. I usually read a book every couple days so once I was hooked I'd probably spend a lot more money.
To me, the big difference between a tablet and an eBook is the display and form factor. A tablet usually uses a normal lcd screen. An eBook should be book shaped and, by default, not backlit. The simplicity is a benefit. No operating system issues to deal with. I could us a tablet PC as an MP3 player too but it just wouldn't be as handy.
The limited supply of books is an issue but it does say you can load text and PDF files to the device and a lot of books, even those not offically released as eBooks, are available online if you know where to look. This is a point though - will the people who read a lot be tech savvy enough to bypass the DRM and expense and just download their own books? I'd be a lot more willing to buy eBooks if they didn't have DRM and if I got a discount when I bought the physical book for the cost of the electronic version. I'd be willing to pay a couple bucks a book to get the electronic version for use as a preview and buy physical copies of the books I liked. To me this should be a killer feature for publishers - instead of me going to the library to preview books I'll pay them to do the same. It'd make me a lot less likely to just download the books from third party resources too.
A proper eBook shouldn't use up batteries very fast because usually electronic ink screens only use power when redrawing the screen. (A major benefit over a tablet PC.) Life expectancy of batteries isn't to important to me as they typically last a couple years and by the time they die you're usually ready to upgrade your device anyway. My only worry would be if the content on my eBook is locked to the device with DRM then how can I make backups and easily move the content to a new device? I wouldn't want to end up in a situation such as with many cell phones where you're just screwed when you have to get a new device - content can't be moved over.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
My biggest problem E-books is how easy they are (the DRMed ones) to centrally control. The Ministry of Truth was an expensive operation, what with collecting, incinerating, and reprinting books they wanted to change. E-books can be "updated" at the push of a button. WORM media and the kind of widespread copying publishers hate are our weapons against the rise of the Ministry of Truth.
I referred to iTunes, an application that predates the iPhone by roughly 6 years. Wikipedia has an article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes. One of the program's features is synchonization, protecting you against the loss of content if your expensive device is lost, stolen or broken.
... and cheaper.
Less ugly does not mean sexy. But, Amazon has succeeded in making Sony's eBook reader look damn sexy
Moby Dick can be downloaded for free in under ten seconds in a portable format from http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2701.
More importantly, if you can't back up the content and carry it to other devices, at some point, you've wasted the money you spent on all that content. Thanks to my download testing, I know own a nice paper academic version (picked up for a buck at a used book store) and an electronic version that's going on Palm.
FWIW, Moby Dick is tedious at first, but worth reading... at least it is now that I'm about half way through. I'm looking forward to soaking in the tub with it tonight...
the clock on the wall says 4 til 7
"People who read a lot of books LIKE having huge bookshelves to impress people on how many books they have. "Yes, as a matter of fact, I DO read more than thou, hence, I am more intelligent. Bow down and kiss my ring!"
How many of these people keep around books they know they will NEVER read again? Why not donate them to the library, and clear up space on the ol' bookshelf? Because they like having the scorecard on the wall. Having an e-book spoils all the fun."
Oh gee, the penis theory again. No I collected books because I like reading them, referring to them, and the fact that I will retire sometime and I will have something to read.
"I think this is actually a generational thing. I'm noticing that younger people have no problem downloading scanned books, reading them, and moving on. I think the ego stroke of the big library will eventually be extinct, like we're seeing with big walls of record collections."
And some of us don't think that every thing's a nail. Books have advantages and E-books have a while to catch up to them. I personally would like to see more E-books for all the advantages they bring (including when moving cross-country). But as what's happening with movies and music those advantages will be a long time coming.
An ebook with a network connection has the potential for a no-brainer feature of all time: built-in integration with Project Gutenberg.
I suppose amazon.com doesn't want to do anything that might discourage people from paying $3.96 when they could download it for free.
Still, even though I may well end up buying ebooks, I would never buy an ebook reader that didn't make it ridiculously easy to browse/read Gutenberg books. This is called "get them in the door with the free stuff". The sales pitch is "With this ebook reader, you can easily read 20,000 free books from PG, and buy 100,000 titles from amazon".
Will we see a major rewrite for the next version of Farenheit 451 slated for 2008? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451 Is this why it was named "Kindle"? Is there room for product placement in the new movie? In this neo-futuristic dystopian society what temperature does a Kindle burn at? So many questions....
I dropped for a order the other day, I wrestled back and forth if this is something I really wanted.
My wife was the person that ended up pushing me to order it. We'll be sharing the device, and are buying it for ourselves as a Christmas present.
How on earth could I justify spending $400 on it?
I guess at the end of the day, over the last 2 years my reading habits have changed drastically.
When I bought my first blackberry, I found myself going to bed at night reading blogs, websites and forums such as slashdot instead of playing with books. I moved over to the iphone and have been very happy with the device as a reading unit. I feel that I have got value out of the iphone not because 'its the best and shiniest' or that it's something that I will maybe use, it's a device I use ALL THE TIME. Every night I'll spend time on it reading myself to sleep, during the day, etc. I'll likely subscribe to a couple content providers on the kindel that I enjoy reading. (NY Times, etc) and possibly even a few blogs. I don't mind spending a few bucks a month for content that I can enjoy, shit I'll spend more than what I'll allocate as my monthly budget for Kindle reading material than one or two trips or two to Starbucks.
I guess I enjoy reading on electronic devices, I know I'll use it. I'm satisfied with the reviews, good and bad.
Maybe having purchased a lot of my media and content in the past in digital format, I'm not so sticker shocked by $10 for a digital book.
I spend money here-and-there for stuff that is digitally delivered and I don't own.
- Hollywood Video movie pass.. $20sh monthly
- Various songs on itunes store, now amazon when I can get it ($5-$10 a month)
- Cable TV - $30 a month
- Magazines and shit that I'll grab here and there as I'm interested ($5-$10 a month)
- iPhone internet package ($20 month? forgot exactly what it is for the data package)
- Safari online bookshelf, $20 or so a month for the entire bookshelf which I use for working.
- Books? My wife is a serious reader and buys a few books a month.
Anyway, I'm already spending money on bunch of crap that's entertainment oriented.
I don't really care if tons of others buy this thing or not, but knowing my own usage habits and what I enjoy doing it wasn't hard for me to justify spending a good chunk of change on the little reader. The sony reader has been on my horizon for a while, but I never got into their ebook platform for selling content, and it just never pushed me over the edge from being curious to pulling out my wallet.
Who knows, maybe I'll be disappointed when i get it.. but if I am, I'll just send it back within 30 days for a refund and wait for a better device.
Then on the second reason.. my wife is a serious reader. She'll read through a huge paperback in 3-4 days and loves to chew through them quickly. I believe that we'll save money just based on what she's already buying every month and the savings in the digital version, but at the end of the day that doesn't really sway me one way or another (the savings on her hardback purchases).
I just wanted a device that will be more portable than my laptop, easier to read for long periods of time than my laptop or iphone for that matter. This device is filling a direct need for myself and my wife and it's something that I feel will be used daily. I don't want the device to be able to install linux, I have a macbook pro that works fine and I have an older thinkpad if I really want to run Linux. I don't want something that does everything, I want it to allow me to easily READ BOOKS and periodicals. i could care less that it costs ten cents to send a PDF or something to the device. Fortuately for me, that won't break the bank.. and I don't generate my own content. For me that's like being upset that my car doesn't have an in-dash waffle-iron, I'd never use it even if it did have the ability.
When I look at how many thousands of dollars I spend a year on bullshit-consumer
Amazon is touting this as the iPod of e-book readers ... it's actually the Zune of e-book readers.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
- My paperbacks don't cause radio interference with my speakers
- Zoom is really intuitive - just hold the book closer and closer
- My favorite popup books are 3D. The Kindle won't do 3D for another 10 years.
- I actually like the color Best Buy ads when I read a newspaper since I'm a gadget freak
- I can use crappy books for kindling. The Kindle just doesn't live up to its name in this regard.
- While on the subject of fire, blasphemous book burnings are way cooler than blasphemous ebook deletions.
I think that people who look down on people with lots of books are insecure about their own reading habits.
What - that's a load of crap I pulled out of my ass? Congrats. You're right.
Here's what I do know though - you're full of crap about why people like having books, why people read, and ultimately, why people like large libraries. It's for the same reason that people collect records, plates, coins, stamps, insects, door knobs and other things: they like the objects, and they like collecting them. Books tend to have a specific place of honor because for the longest time, they were the only way that knowledge was passed down. As a result, a large library correlated strongly with being learned, which was why they used to be status symbols.
Today, they're merely an indication of a person's passion. Looking down on people with large libraries says the same thing about you as does looking down on people with any other pastime; be it baseball, baseball cards or collecting train tickets: you're a pompous ass who needs external validations for why you're a worthy individual.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I remember the slashdot comments about the iPod when it first debuted. For those who don't, let's just say it looked about like these comments on the Kindle, lots of hate everywhere from people who had never seen, let alone used the device. The complaints were pretty much identical, too (DRM!, too expensive!, how is this better than a laptop?).
Thus, I'll go ahead and predict the success of the Kindle here and now. Within 2 years 90% of slashdot readers will own one, and those who don't will own a knock off that runs open source firmware.
I don't see myself ever paying $400 for a book reader. I read books on my Nintendo DS. $30 for a flash card and you are good to go. So far the readers just support plain text but I've never found to be a hassle to convert books I wanted to read. You can even hold it like a book and read it with left/right pages. The DS Lite goes dim enough to read it in the dark and not feel blinded too.
This is suppose to be a READING device and it's got a keyboard that takes up like 30% of the surface area... That seems like very bad design to me!
A wireless SD card with 2GB onboard, addressable wirelessly, goes for about $100 now. With one in a Kindle, I could send wirelessly all the transcoded material (PDFs and DOC files) sent back to my desktop or laptop email account.
There are perfectly fine PDAs from a year or two before on eBay for well under $100.
.txt files easily found online.
I carry around an i710 Tungsten, with a 64 MB card loaded with
No... I don't really give a damn about legal/not legal part of it. And he who is about to throw the first kindle at my head should check his mp3 collection first.
I tend to buy hardcovers when I find a copy worth putting on the shelve, and money to buy it.
And most of the writers I read are dead anyway, so its not like they will miss the money.
Well... except Stephen King. He is just dead to me since the Dark Tower.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I've been doing this reading of content with first a Palm III, a Palm Zire and now a Dell Axim. No one ever heard of Avant Go before?! About the only thing that improved was a bookseller offering current books. And streamlined how they get to the device. Of course this only happened when big money got involved in the process. I just don't know about paying $10 for a title. A little hyped up IMHO. Amazing how stuff like the iPhone (like, no camera in it?!) and Kindle get a mad rush to sellout. (reviewer says it's got a poor web browser? Get the Dell Axim on ebay and have both) Kindle is less than cutting edge stuff and if only people knew it they'd save some cash. Cripes! Re-purpose your tired PDA into a reader and save!
"I got it all together but I forgot where I put it."
7.5 - 10% in the standard contract for print books. It's higher for e-books while they're still experimental and being spun off the print production, but once e-books get the kind of distribution and administration infrastructure hung on them that will be needed to take them mainstream, it'll get whittled down.
That's $1 for every book priced at $10. $2.50 for every one priced at $25. Bestsellers notwithstanding, the mean annual income of a writer from their writing is around $5000. Can't remember the exact source, but it is entirely consistent with my own few years on the midlist.
it's "Where the hell did I place that book?"
I like the idea of losing one book when I lose a book, not my whole library.
Plus, just having this thing sitting on your bookshelf looks way less impressive than a bookshelf full of books.
It has "FREE" anywhere internet access. With a built-in Web browser. (It doesn't understand Flash, but some consider that a bonus.) $400 amortized over the years you'd use the internet from anywhere (not to mention the reading bit), doesn't start to sound so bad.
;)
Though I have to say, if you have $400 burning a hole in your pocket, I highly suggest you upgrade your phone first. That thing has been amazing on many more levels, and it will load up your PDF books just fine (just email it to an account that the phone can check, or go to a URL). And, oh boy, when the SDK gets released, oh, maybe in the next couple of months, it will continue to improve (or you can just hack it now, like I did).
I was going to buy a Kindle for my g/f for Xmas, who loves to read, but she is still using a clunky RAZR, so I think I'm pitching in for the iPhone instead.
Back in my day, we had the choice of ASCII art porn or 72dpi black and white dithered porn.
It was quite the day when you could get 256 color 320x200 porn!
"eh, Apple sells songs for $0.99 each which weigh in at about 3-4mb each."
Really? I wasn't aware that the creation of books was the same process used to create music? Are you sure you wouldn't rather compare it to the creation of movies instead?
"As long as we're talking just plain text, it's pretty cheap. You could even compress it, and text compresses very well."
You missed the "e" part, didn't you?
class action lawsuit
How we know is more important than what we know.
"There is still nothing like curling up with a good book."
You're just acclimated to it. No doubt the people who were brought up reading scrolls bitched long and hard about the new "book" thingamajig. "Why, they even CUT the paper. You can't just keep reading, but actually have to stop and turn each and every page!"
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Does it use eInk technology? Can you get 88,000 books (commercial books, excluding gutenberg books) for the Pal T|X? Those are the key features of the Kindle. Also I think the Palm's display is much smaller. Anyway, the Kindle has too many flaws for me to want it right now but I look forward to it coming down in price.
Let's see, compared to the OLPC XO laptop, this thing ain't that great.
The OLPC has a keyboard, and has the ebook mode. You'll get something between 20 and 24 hours of reading in the ebook B/W mode on the OLPC. It has a great shock and water resistant case, I believe you can leave it out in the rainstorm.
David Pogue with NYT demonstrated dropping it on a really jagged rock from about 5 feet off the ground, then threw water on it, then through dirt on it. Plus the OLPC is 400 AND you are donating one to a child in a developing country.
You could get 2 OLPC and totally share ebooks instantly. The mesh networking allows download, plus has regular internet and browser.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBoghPvyhts
...::----::...
I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
There are over 10 other e-book readers for the PalmOS, some which have their own DRM-encumbered formats, some where you can purchase directly from the eBook app, etc. See eReader, MobileRead, ISilo, etc.
Yes, it is.It has a 320x480 (2.5" x 3.5") screen, which might seem small, but works really well for reading text.
I look forward to someone figuring out how to install a PDA Linux distro on it. Of course, with limited interface (no touch screen), it'll be a worse PDA than the PSP. The free cellular data plan could come in handy though, if someone figures out how to escape Amazon's walled garden with it.I highly suggest you upgrade [to an iphone] first. That thing has been amazing on many more levels, and it will load up your PDF books just fine
While the iPhone screen is nice and big, displaying only PDFs blows. For proper ebook reading you need something that can reflow and reformat (and even autoscroll) to suit your screen and your eyesight. Something like Mobipocket or uBook. Actually, because eBook enables you to fiddle with the sub-pixel font rendering, I have begun favouring this over other readers. Until Apple enables an open SDK you're unlikely to find support for many ebook formats (PDB/PRC etc) on the iphone so you're stuck with Windows Mobile or Palm. WM seems to have more readers available for it now. Get something like the Toshiba G900 and you've got an 800x400 screen that's got more pixels than Apple's phone. Bonus: you can also read PDFs on WM/Palm as well... but PDF reading is definitely the least attractive option compared to configurable ebook readers.
Da Blog
use Amazons Mobi-Pocket reader
I was using Mobipocket for a while but I found it often crapped out over specific PDB or even PRC formats created by other programs. Then I got uBook, which opens these files okay but has a less intuitive interface. However, I am liking its ability to tweak the sub-pixel font rendering and the autoscroll option. It's basically an evolved, advanced Mobipocket for people who don't mind 7 (!) pages of config options.
Da Blog
The bookeen does not support Linux, even though it is linux-based... go figure. Read the FAQ under point 8 "The Mobipocket Desktop Reader is not available fro Mac and Linux. On these machines, the Cybook is seen as a simple external storage drive and the Mobipocket files must be transferred manually." I guess you could say they are being nice by not deliberately locking-out non-windows users, but if I'm gonna pay that much, then ALL features should work for Linux. Furthermore, it doesn't look like there's a linux prog out there that does the same thing as mobipocket or ereader. I would love to be corrected on this point but that's what I've seen so far.
The specific incompatibility is this: the software that the reader uses for synchronization, "mobipocket", is windows-only. The features seem really cool though - it can even download RSS feeds so you can view them offline. The WINE Entry for this program says it crashes frequently so that's not an answer(Does wine ever work right?)
Also noticed... ebooks can sometimes cost more than their paper-based counterparts.
"DRM is sucky. Half the fun of books is being able to lend them."
The solution to this is the same for many other "I can't loan digital". Sell it in a fixed medium. Memory chips adequate enough to hold content are cheap and come in very small form factors. e.g. SD, memory stick, etc. The ONLY thing you lose is the instant gratification that a download gives you. But I think that's a trade off most would take in lue of DRM. Also with the standardization out there, you can view your purchase on different devices (inherent in the loan capability).
"Thus, I'll go ahead and predict the success of the Kindle here and now. Within 2 years 90% of slashdot readers will own one, and those who don't will own a knock off that runs open source firmware."
I'd be in the market for an E-reader sooner than that. Why? I use to have an extensive library (new, old, out of print, etc) that I spent years collecting. Fast forward to two months ago. I had to move and quickly. That meant I had a LOT of books, magazines, and other material to get rid of. I lost a great deal which still bothers me to this day. If I had the majority of that in a digital format with a good output device? I would have been able to take all of it with me. THAT's one of the benefits of E-books. All the rest is just icing.
The TX doesn't sell for less than about $260 (brand new), unless you're much better at bargain hunting than I am. It seems that they were available for $199 on Black Friday though, but I unfortunately didn't hear about it.
It's not about ego, it's about maintaining a wonderful, extremely valuable resource. Collecting isn't generally driven by ego, it's driven by love for the thing you collect. I understand that for the barely literate, it may seem like these readers are making fun of you with their big collections, but really, dude, they just love books.
Given that it can run Linux, can it sync to thunderbird properly? I'd really like to know as I'm *supposed* to be making a Christmas list.
Okay, lets get to the important part... Will it blend?!
No kidding. This thing looks like a piece of early 90's era junk compared to my PalmTX, which as reader works exceptionally well day or night, beautiful color screen, can surf the web, play mp3 files, divx movies, stream shoutcast, can connect via wifi to network share drives... It has readers that can open most any ebook format natively. Palm has hundreds of useful programs. Who in their right mind would want a clunky reader that can't even do wifi and has a grayscale screen and utilizes a proprietary network? LOL. Palm must have done a bad job on their marketing if crap like this Kindle sells out. I wouldn't use the thing if they gave it for free.
Me, I love to read, but don't prize the books themselves. It's the words, not the artifacts, that I care about. Hardback fiction I consider a ripoff, and paperbacks go to the local library when I'm tired of them. I bought a tablet computer mainly because it's nice for reading in bed.
And then there are books that are decades, even centuries, out of print. (Read any good neolatin lately?) Getting a physical copy can cost you thousands of dollars — and then you can't actually sit down and enjoy it, because you're afraid you'll damage it. Why bother, when you can get the same content online for free?
And what about those poor students who have to schlep around hundreds of pounds of textbook? (When did education get so freaking massive?) Don't tell me that they're tied to using physical books!
I've been hearing the "I want real books" argument since the early 80s, which was when people first started to talk about ebooks. Always made by somebody who hadn't really tried the alternatives. What's keeping people away from ebooks isn't some silly aesthetic. It's cost, limited content (publishers hate the idea), and the clumsiness of the necessary technology. Someday soon these factors will improve to the point where people will make the switch and stop talking nonsense. We're not there yet, but we're getting awfully close.
coupon for ringtones
For my money, no electronic device in my life time will ever replace the book. As the first guy pointed out, I don't have to worry about batteries (unless I'm in the dark - then a back-lit screen would be nice). Books feel better in the hands, and displays will struggle for a while yet to compete with the "resolution" of the printed page.
However, I would buy such a device for some printed content. That content would be magazine and journal articles. It could also be new short fiction (including novellas). I'm not sure if the licensing model would be trickier or easier - magazine literature typically has a short shelf life, and publishers might not worry so much about DRM. Also, this model may require a subscription fee, although I would bet it would be very competitive with the price of new books for the Kindle.
Dark Reflection
Now, start browsing. Yes, New-York-Times bestsellers are $9.99 or lower. Sadly few of the books in the Computers and Internet section are significantly cheaper than the physical versions: Fred Brook's Mythical Man Month - $25.91 in eBook format. Martin Fowler's Refactoring - $35.87. Joshua Block's Effective Java - $39.99. To be fair, not all computer-science books cost that much but $25+ for an eBook is too much for me.
So while the overall selection is good and the prices on a lot of large-print-run books are great, it looks to me like the publishers are sticking with the view that books with low print runs must be priced higher, even when electronic. Too bad. I was hoping Amazon eBooks would let me carry more of the stuff that interests me beyond literature.
Two questions for anyone who has one, but its about the ebooks not the reader -
1) Can you buy a kindle book from your pc not the kindle, and download it to your pc?
2) Can you read the kindle book on (say) a Sony ebook or on your pc?
Or are these books locked to the Kindle? Is it hackable in that case?
For me at least the books are what counts, not the reader. No way am I ever buying a book I can only read on one particular reader, any more than I will buy a CD that is locked to a Sony or Marantz CD player, or a Tune that can only be played on one particular brand of player....
Good points, but there is one huge drawback. That is the loss of what I call "the peoples' library", more commonly known as the book exchange.
There are a lot of places where there is a shelf that says "take what you want, give what you can".
Heck, the military base library where my wife works has a large book exchange outside its front door. No need to be a patron, no need to face anyone, just an incredibly eclectic collection of books that constantly turns over without any form of organization other than an old bookcase that someone donated.
If you have ever traveled as a backpacker, the hostel book exchange is a godsend.
I would really hate to see the death of anonymous, free book exchanges...
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Damn, Amazon is good.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I bought an m130 years back and was completely blown away. It was my first pda, pretty color screen, sd expansion cards, totally brilliant. I did a lot of reading on that thing. When my first 130 died I bought another one and it croaked as well. Saying to hell with it, I upgraded to the first Tungsten when it was a close-out special and it's been running strong ever since.
I took a look at the Palm line recently since a friend had expressed interest in an ereader. What the hell happened? I loved the palms and now they're all muddled! So we've got smart phones, the zires are replaced with some clunktastic piece of crap with low ratings, the tungstens are still stupid expensive.
Is anyone making a reasonable, entry-level pda that doesn't cost a mint? Because these things break so easily, I consider them to be consumable electronics. When I compare my tungsten to the blackberry I had from my last job, the berry seemed far more durable. RIM really put some effort into making those devices monkey-proof.
So has palm just gone completely into stupid land? I'd be just as happy to settle for a smart phone except they do NOT have the same flexibility I expect from a pda at the price point I want. The palm phones look too damn expensive. The phone companies also lock the shit out of these phones. I had full web access on the berry. I picked up a basic phone to replace it, not wanting to pay out the ass for the full data plan. I check out the data features on this phone and they want to charge me $2.99 a month just to have access to wikipedia! And that's not even covering airtime for the data, that's a separate charge! Folks, that's the kind of greed we're talking about when corporations take over the net, they're going to nickel and dime you to death just to access stuff you used to be able to get to for free.
But back to the original question, are there any good entry level pda's now?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
P.S. Where can you find a tablet PC for $400?
Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon. --Woody Allen
Yeap, a palm pilot is still the way to go. I don't have the TX but I have the T5. Just about the same thing except I have more memory and a faster processor. Where you have the wifi, I have to use a card. But for reading ebooks they are pretty much the same.
I've tried a shit load of readers on the thing but always seem to go back to the mobi reader. I just got used to the fonts on it. I always strip out the drm from any book though, and redo it with the mobipocket creator.
I've had three palms over the last few years, I can't remember the last time I read a non fiction dead tree. The display is smaller than kindle and it does use more juice. Still with my normal reading habits I can go 2 or 3 days without recharching it. I put a leather cover on mine and it opens up like a small book. It even has that leather smell that a good book has.
And most importantly it fits in my pocket with drawing undo notice to itself. I can carry it just about everywhere.
Any deficiencies the palm has over the kindle are more than made up by it's versatility. Its a mini computer is what it is. In my hand I have all my email, my address book, a check book program (quicken), a dice roller (in case I come across a adhock D&D game), all the rule books to 2nd edition D&D, a mp3 player, and I have 300 of my best photos on the fucker.
Anything the Kindle can do my T5, or the TX, can do better. And I just checked the website, the TXis 299, a hundred bucks cheaper.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
I previewed, I really did.
I can't remember the last time I read a non fiction dead treeThis should read, I can't remember the last time I read a fiction on a dead tree.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
On the up side, the TX has an excellent user community, and there has been a LOT of work put into fixing Palm's mistakes in hardware and software by TX users themselves. People have added a proper touch screen, internal microphone, internal vibrator (for alarms), IrDA extender and WiFi range extender, just to name a few things. There have also been a huge number of OS and support software patches written by end users, and the latest developer versions of TXLinux are actually at the usable stage.
Check here for some of the things people are doing with the TX. There. Now I've done some of the advertising Palm neglected to do. Too bad they still most likely won't do a new version of the TX -- nothing new on it in 2 years.
Does it run Linux?
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