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Reading the New York Times On a Kindle 2
reifman links to his thorough and thoughtful review of the experience of reading a newspaper on the Kindle 2. "I've been eager to try The New York Times on the Kindle 2; here's my review with a basic video walk-through and screenshots. I give the Kindle 2 version of The Times a B. Software updates could bring it up to an A-. Kindle designers should have learned more from the iPhone 3G. Unfortunately, my Kindle display scratched less than 24 hours after it arrived. As I detail in the review, Amazon customer service was not very accommodating. Is it my fault — or will Kindle 2 evolve into an Apple 1G Nano-like $22.5M settlement? You can read about Hearst's e-reader for newspapers from earlier today on Slashdot."
the only bad thing about it is ... Amazon has near-complete control over the pricing structure. (The pricing structure thing hurts authors, too.)
Doesn't this thing read pdfs and/or text files? If so, can't the authors sell their books from any website they want, for whatever price they want? Exactly how does Amazon exert control over the pricing structure?
Will you hand me the sports section to read while you browse the NYT magazine?
Hey, where's the crossword?
I recently tried a Kindle 2. The Kindle is much more *readable* than your back-lit display. The E-ink screen does not cause more stain on your eyes than reading a normal book. It's passively lit, and it looks very good. It takes a while to refresh a while page, but that's a small price to pay if you're reading pages at a time. And the E-ink retains the image when the device is off, so it's using no power most of the time.
I've tried reading on my iPhone. It just doesn't work. Good for short term, terrible for long term reading.
Oh, and it plays mp3's and has a (primitive) web browser over 3G.
So, we are all waiting for the Chinese version of this device without all the lockdown and including all the obvious useful fetures?
So it can't read PDFs. Big negative IMHO - I wouldn't mind having something like this (at $150 max) to stash dozens of technical references and white papers on. But I'm not going to go through the hassle of converting every PDF I'd want to store.
and... you can't read text on an LCD?
LOL. Allow me to chime in with the OP for folks like you that refuse to get it.
Of course you can read text on an LCD, just like you can also read text on a CRT with 60Hz flicker, in giant lights at softball game, or hand scrawled on a bathroom wall with really bad kerning. You can also rub lemon juice on paper cuts to keep them from getting infected, but the majority of us choose not to.
The point is that e-ink is easier on the eyes, which makes what you're reading ... wait for it ... easier to read.
In Jeff Bezos' interview on The Charlie Rose show, he used a flashlight analogy, saying thta reading on a convential screen is like staring into a flashlight. The light may not be as bright as a typical flashlight, but it's a helluva lot brighter (and different) than the light reflected off a piece of paper. Or a Kindle. Ergo, Bezos opted not to use a LCD screen, while being aware of the tradeoffs of doing so. The reaction to his decision has ranged from praise to amazement to a shitload of Kindles being sold.
I think you've missed the whole point of PDFs. They are meant to preserve formatting.
I think the OP is saying he hates PDFs as a format for reading electronically. This is completely logical. As you note, PDF is specifically designed to not be like a computer document, but rather to preserve printed media formatting. This makes them totally unsuitable for on-screen reading. Why people continue to distribute documents that will never be printed in PDF format is beyond me. I blame Adobe for pushing the Acrobat Reader software as being something more than the printer-friendly format it is.
What I'm waiting for is a color e-ink reader, with a roughly 8.5x11 screen (or at least the same aspect ratio), and the capacity to natively display PDF documents. I imagine something the size/weight of a laptop screen, with a touch screen and a few nav buttons at the edges.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
And with a Nokia Internet Tablet you get eight hours of battery life and a much smaller screen, as opposed to eight days of battery life and a fairly decent sized screen.
I have an N800, I love it, but a Kindle it is not. If the Kindle were cheaper, I'd probably get one to complement my N800, not to replace it. They're different products aimed at different applications, and what the Kindle is designed to do is something I don't believe the N800 is a particularly good match for.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.