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Amazon Announces Kindle 2, With Slew of New Features
Engadget is reporting that Amazon has announced the new Kindle 2 for release on February 24th at a price point of $359. Thinner than an iPhone and coming standard with "Read-to-me" text-to-speech capability, the new device also has seven times more storage, faster page turning, a 16-level e-ink display, longer battery life, and a new five-way joystick. Looks like life just got a lot more interesting for fans of the original device. Engadget also has live coverage from the Kindle 2 press conference.
Convince me not to.
It is the ease of getting new material that appeals to me, I like to read but I am terrible at buying books.
The price is a bit steep. Eventually these have to come down in price? Anyone any ideas when there will be a decent sub $100 ebook reader?
with the release of the original Kindle. Perhaps they still can.
The Kindle here is somewhat of a disappointment to me but its aesthetics are much better than than the first generation. Yet, the screen is only usable for fiction novels and the like, and the form factor is such that the keyboard takes up half the space. Either way, they should have eliminated the physical keyboard for an onscreen version (really, you can't exactly type a thesis with that thing as it is now) for that searching or annotation convenience. For serious annotation, the iRex iLiad and DR1000S have a wacom enabled screen with stylus. In this way, you can really go for a small reader that fits in a purse, or use that existing or slightly bigger form for 10x8 screen, allowing to display 11x8.5 pages sans margins.
I don't know how they sell the new york times on something like that. I can see it on the even smaller iPhone but only because of multitouch and reverse pinching (zoom in) to the exact story someone wants. But I would not pay for an ereader at current prices in the fiction novel page size; I would glady pay money for something that allows me to read reference guides and textbooks without scrolling horizontally, perhaps not vertically.
All the other readers I see on the market are toys. Like iRex, which sells there models as finished products but are woefully in the prototype stage even after years of development and being on the market because lack of serious money behind it, I suppose. One symptom there is that despite the promise of e-ink not using energy other than when the page is being changed, their CPU doesn't really go to sleep, requiring daily recharging of the device and thoroughly defeating half of the purpose of a good ereader in the first place. I tried the Sony, it wasn't bad but nothing great.
If the Kindle should get credit for anything, it was the Sprint EVDO connection in the first and now 3G in the second without stupid monthly fees - it just being there. That alone will make it the winner in time, everything else stay the same.
If Apple had been keen on building their media empire, they'd should have gotten into ebooks when the 1st gen kindle was released tbh. The market was ready for something with a decent interface and good hardware/software integration. They already sell music, movies, tv shows, and this will consolidate the last major piece of the list. Before someone says "color" screens, or Plastic Logic's flexible screens or the like, that's precisely what upgrades are for. Now, I'm afraid, the worse is better philosophy won out again.
Other than screen size, this model looks like a winner.
Amazon's Kindle 2 is the same as a Sony PRS-700 (out for a while now) without a reading light, without a touch screen, and with Amazon DRM lock-in. The only good thing going for the Kindle 2 is Amazon's marketing and their exclusive Kindle store.
If only it was about the size of regular sheet of paper and could show pdf files, I'd buy one today just to read journal articles without having to stare at the computer screen all day or print them all out (or walk to the library).
"Read-to-me" is not exactly a killer ap.
For a long while I was set on getting an ereader. I just had to have one. I tried reading books on my crackberry but the screen was just too damn small and scrolling was a pain. The only thing that kept be from buying a Sony ereader or a Kindle was the price. For the money you can instead buy an Xbox 360 (I have two and the last was only $160 thanks to a coupon at CircuitCity), or an Iphone ($199 for an 8 gig) or hell, get both. So that's what I ended up doing. I bought both.
Is my ereader experience as great as that on a Kindle? I dunno. What I do know is that it's "good enough" for my uses. I just want to read some fiction. I want to kick back and read some Robin Cook or Dean Koontz in the can or at a theater while waiting for the show or whatever. I use Stanza on my iPhone and I downloaded a few collections via torrents and I'm all set for quite a while. Plus I have a phone and an mp3 player and God knows what else I've added to my phone. And like I said earlier, I also have a second Xbox 360 which obviously lets me play games but I wanted a second for streaming movies and tv shows into my bedroom.
Maybe if I had a train ride to work everyday a Kindle would make sense, but even then it's too big to be dropped in my pocket and I'd still have to have my phone with me. Who wants yet another gadget to lug around?
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
For novels, sure, you read one or maybe two in parallel. But now consider reference manuals and other techie books. I'm sure anyone reading /. has loads of them. I sure wouldn't mind taking them all with me if at all possible on this device.
Not going to happen, as I'm definitely not going to buy my books again, just in a different format.
Give me my current bookcollection for free with the device, I already payed for the content and the duplication cost of e-books is zero.
Comparing pictures of the two, they are totally different - in form factor, and external buttons. You mention the Kindle does not have a touch screen while the PRS-700 does.
So while possibly they may share the same OS (though even there I suspect large differences) they are not the same at all. And it seems to me that by "better" you very likely mean "has more features on a checklist".
I don't own either reader so I have no stake in which one is in fact better. But I have talked to a number of unlikely people (as in, not really gadget people) that owned and really liked the original Kindle so I think that Amazon may have something to the device they have built beyond the feature list that does make it more pleasing for people to use.
I myself am still wary of these readers but I like the concept, I just want something with perfect PDF/graphics support so I can use one to read technical books with diagrams.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If not, still not interested. I don't want to pay amazon to convert something I've already paid for. Postscript is a standard, and they should make it compatible if they want to increase their market share. Period. I have my entire o'reilly and cisco library in PDF on my laptop. The only reason I'd get a kindle is to have them in a more convenient form for study and reference when I'm unable to access my laptop. Oh yeah, so far as I know kindle books can't be read outside of the kindle appliance.
I'm a mathematician and have frequent need to reference books and papers for particular results. When I'm away at a conference and I'm bringing some journal papers along for the trip I either need to (1)print out every reference the paper cites in case I need it, (2)rely on the host institution's library which, while usually very extensive, it not generally set-up for guests to have full access, or (3)hope I already know the results they're going to reference.
Being able to download a journal article and all of its citations, and all of their citations, etc. to a specified level would be a killer app for academics. Being able to have all the papers we need on hand is incredibly useful. Having reference books as well would be irresistible.
I imagine anyone that refers to technical documents would feel similarly.
This was one of my chief complaints when I bought my girlfriend a Kindle for Christmas.
Then I looked into it - you can have up to six Kindles on one account. If I buy one of these for myself, and she buys a book, or I buy a book, we both get it.
Of course, if we split up we have to haggle over who gets Kindle Account Custody, or else see what one another is reading for eternity. :) And for $659 between the two (I paid $300 during the 'Oprah' sale on the Kindle 1 in November), it's still not cheap.
that this thing looks ugly as sin? I have the first version of the kindle, and this one just looks uglier. The screen is the same size from what I gathered, but it looks smaller. That's because the rest of the thing is larger, except that it is thinner. But the larger width and height gives it the illusion of a smaller screen. That just doesn't sit well with me. I'm not crazy about the new keyboard either.
At least it has all the features of the previous one, including wireless internet. As far as cost of books, you don't have to buy them, you can "pirate" books if you want.
Disclaimer: I am in no shape or form advocating copyright infringement. Nor the use of the word "piracy" or any derivatives there of, as it pertains to copyright infringement.
I read a couple of books on a Palm. I don't need a screen this big, so the device is no longer portable.
I am instead considering an ipod touch with stanza. That screen is much better than my old palm and should be plenty good for reading on the go.
The touch is smaller and more versatile to me.
Is there much of a counter argument for people who don't have eyesight issues?
"And then I can't read until it's returned to me. Fantastic."
And that's different from dead-tree how?
Did you mentally insert an "it" in my quote?
I said that I couldn't /read/ until it was returned to me, not that I couldn't read "it". The clear difference between loaning a dead-tree book to someone and loaning my reader to someone is that if I loan the dead-tree book, I can still read something else. If I loan someone my Kindle...not so much. Well, I can get a dead-tree book to read, but then what's the point of the Kindle?
I understand the technology and where it's going. I'm saying that I don't like it, and I'm stating the reasons.
One sony and both iRex devices seem to have touchscreen capability, according to this page.
It seems to reduce the text quality though, at least judging by the Sony readers. The one without touchscreen (PRS-505) has noticeably higher contrast and whiter background than the one with it (PRS-700). Given the choice, I went for 505 for precisely this reason - I don't need to mark and search for text in fiction books, and none of the existing readers are good enough to read technical books & materials (except possibly for iRex, but that one's insanely expensive).
The situation is far worse than even the bad old days of DRM'ed music.
There is Palm eReader, MobiPocket, Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader formats with DRM. Then there is text, PDF and other DRM-free formats.
You can either choose to pay for your books and end up with dodgy DRM laden crap that will only work on one or two devices, or you can just go to The Pirate Bay and load up for free. Unlike music, it's not like you can just buy a physical copy and rip it, although I'm not sure how legally dubious downloading something you already own just to format-shift is.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC