Slashdot Mirror
$50 Fire Tablet With High-capacity SDXC Slot Doesn't See E-books On the SD Card
Robotech_Master writes: For all that the $50 Fire tablet has a 128 GB capable SDXC card slot that outclasses every other tablet in its price range, and it evolved out of Amazon's flagship e-book reader, it strangely lacks the ability to index e-books on that card. This seems like a strange oversight, given that every other media app on the tablet uses that card for downloading and storage, and its 5 GB usable internal memory isn't a lot for people who have a large library of picture-heavy e-books—especially if they want to install other apps, too.
...since they fired the Fire team.
all of your ebooks will be stored in amazon's cloud. why would they be on the SD card?
I doubt its a flaw, Amazon wants you using their books and you can store those on the cloud and access them at any time. Why would you need to store it on a SD card?
Because then it would be trivial for you to also read books that you *didn't* get from Amazon. And we can't have that, now can we?
Pretty sure what you want is a CBR/CBZ reader. Also, paper.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
I bought a Kobo H2O. All of the books I have come from "other sources". The wifi is turned off so the device can't track what I read. It is as close to a paper book as I can get in electronic form. I would never buy a Kindle with always on 3G. I don't want to be tracked. All I want is the nice screen and water resistant device.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
It's the best of the shit class.
Get a real tablet instead..
It isn't the tablet exactly, it is a flawed app in the tablet. Still, really a completely bullshit job on Amazon's part.
This isn't the first time I've seen this though. When I got a new Android tablet I couldn't find any ebook app that I really liked. I previously had one that came with an older tablet that worked great, read epub files and did a good job of sorting and indexing things and letting you sort what you had as you wanted. Couldn't move that to the new tablet and couldn't find a copy of it on-line in any of the app stores that I use. I did find one that looked a lot like it (maybe the same product but a newer version and with a company name change), but it could only see the books on the Internal storage. I contacted the publisher and after some hemming and hawing they acknowledged there was no support for the external memory card and they claimed they were "working on that". It is now over a year later and as far as I know there is still no support for it.
It would be useful to me and perhaps to others if readers here would state what app they like for Android for reading ebooks, why they like it, if it supports books stored on the external card, what formats it supports (in my case particularly epub) and so on.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Next stories: "Etch-a-sketch has poor error correction, limited pixel count" "Kindle Paperwhite web browsing experience sub-par, no Angry Birds"
Can't make sense of the headline. I know something about a $50 fire tablet and a 128gb memory card. Can we get a Janit^H^H^H Editor on the headline?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Same reason they won't sell you a new Chromecast or an AppleTV. Their investors finally want to see some ROI.
See their move to remove Apple TV and equivalent products from store.
I'd boycott Amazon, but their product search engine was already thwarting my purchases.
This seems more like a bug than a deliberate design feature, but with Amazon it's hard to know for sure.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
How easy is it to root the fucker?
A modern tablet for 50 bucks sounds great.
>all of your ebooks will be stored in amazon's cloud. why would they be on the SD card?
So... like,
Somebody set up us the Fire
Main screen turn on.
All your eBooks are now belong to Amazon
You have no chance to survive make your time.
Move to SD cards
For great justice.
That someone release a third party firmware for like, like Cyanogenmod. Because honestly, the custom Android OS that Amazon uses is terrible.
I've used Firefox to read ePubs. It seemed to work well for me but I don't have any experience with other applications. But if you CAN use Firefox, does it matter if some other ereader on the tablet fails to work? Or am I missing something here?
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
Are there alternative ebook reader apps you can load on the device that will index ebooks from the SD card? Do you have to root the device first to load other apps on it?
So, what is the problem. Just symlink the folder or mount your SD where the local storage is and issue solved..
Not that many people will do it, but you know, it is not exactly rocket science.
Project Gutenberg is not "stealing".
In paragraph after paragraph he complains that the phone isn't integrated with Google's cloud. So what?
>but I have to log in manually every time to each Google service.
No you don't. Use a password manager. Duh. Keepass runs on Android.
>he doesn't see any epub readers in the appstore that he finds familiar
>used Calibre to put epub books on the sd card
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
Calibre runs on Android!
http://calibre-ebook.com/new-i...
Lots has changed in calibre-land in the last year and a half.A beefed up e-book viewer. Support for Android phones and tablets. A new modern look for the calibre user interface. A portable version of calibre that you can carry around on a USB stick.
Fuck this guy.
It's a fucking 50 dollar computer. Remember OLPC and the effort to spread computers far and wide for the goal of 100 bux each? So it has some compromises because it's a 50 dollar computer. So did OLPC.
--
BMO
I wrote this once already but I somehow lost it. I don't know... Stupid ALT key...
Anyhow, I'm 57. I've seen so many things change in my life. I wasn't around for the great invention of automobile travel, flight, telegraph, or electricity. However, I've seen the world shrink in so many ways. I've seen the culture change, I've seen the people change. I've seen fear turn into begrudging respect. I've seen colors and genders blend. I've seen real aggression and televised police brutality as they beat hippies senseless.
I saw them put a man on the moon. I saw the internet created and then the advent of broadband. I saw cell phones and touch screens. I saw miniaturization that was unthinkable. I've seen Moore's Law play out for quite a while.
I've been across the globe and back again. I can communicate with anyone, anywhere, for the most part. I have vast stores of knowledge available in formats I don't even need. I can type random gibberish (i don't even have to type it) and get a reasonable answer at a search engine. I have more storage than I'll ever need. I have vehicles that perform better than ever before and are more connected than ever while also having greater safety than ever dreamed about.
It has been awesome and I eagerly await the next turn of events.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
They are fine for consuming Amazon media. They are mixed for consuming non-Amazon material, and have possibly more roadblocks than iOS devices. Unless you are willing/able to root the tablet, I'd suggest selling and it and buying a cheap Android tablet. Check out the DragonTouch tablets.
Make a device I can use, want to use, and is easy to use or I will not buy it.
If you email the ebook files to the special email address of the kindle account, the non-amazon ebooks are added to the library - aka "the cloud", so you really don't need the files on the SD card.
The fact that something is cheap is no reason to put up with obviously bogus technical limitations.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Neither are paid for Harry Potter books that have no DRM.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
... its 5 GB usable internal memory isn't a lot for people who have a large library of picture-heavy e-books
The reason why I gave up on kindle reader is the fact they do a piss poor job on the charts, tables, maps and pictures. Resolution too poor to read the axis lables or the tick mark lables, legends too small, etc. Further navigating back and forth between a paragraph I am reading and referring back to the graph or map is real pain in the neck (some have a much lower opinion than that).
If you are insane enough to accumulate 5GB worth of books in the ebook format, you have no right to complain about the insanity on the part of amazon.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
For all that the $50 Fire tablet has a 128 GB capable SDXC card slot that outclasses every other tablet in its price range, and it evolved out of Amazon's flagship e-book reader, it strangely lacks the ability to index e-books on that card.
No, its internal reader lacks that ability. You don't want to use their reader to read books from third party sources, anyway. You want to sideload a better reader app, which you can actually do without even using ADB, because they let you install ES File Explorer from the official store. That's true even on the Fire TV Stick, let alone the Fire TV, as well as on the Fire tablets.
It's a bit frustrating if the internal reader doesn't index media on the memory card, but it's hardly a show-stopper since you can install your own. It's also probably just a bug.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
First tablet review I'm skimming through without even knowing what the size of the thing is.
Only on the very bottom of the page you get a hint about the size, in "related articles" : it's a 6". Even following the link, it's a mystery as what's the display resolution.
I converted all my ebooks to epub using Calibre and really like the Kobo Glo for reading.
Yes, because Amazon shouldn't be allowed to pursue making a profit in anyway that you might disagree with.
Complaining about first-world problems is a first-world problem.
Remember the Game Boy? It did cost a bit more but it was cheap.
Ebooks - the devices - are the closest things to the original Game Boy, i.e. black and white, made for prolonged offline use and a very long battery life for cheap. That's like an extension of 80s tech.
Turns out I don't really need or want a science-fiction device, which comes with the wrong sort of science-fiction too (Brave New World, panopticon dystopia etc.)
I would want to see a modern "game boy" with D-pad and buttons on the bottom, high res monochrome LCD with touch (black on amber) or OLED, such as 800x1280 or 768x1024 - 1200x1600 or 1280x1280 etc. and lastly fuck networking, do only USB file transfers (or SD) and Bluetooth 4.x. Have a bluetooth USB module included in the box, because Bluetooth is rare enough on PC.
Less than $100, or less than $80 and give me a week battery life. A volume know instead of buttons because, let's have something different and nicer to use. The thing it is not is "app store" friendly. Why not sell software on carts (e.g. a non-action game collection, a map of a whole country or Europe, a scrabble game with multiple languages and dictionaries etc.)
Pixels and brightness cost battery life, you just won't get a week's battery out of a 768x1024 OLED screen. The new AMOLED screen on the samsung g s6 uses more than 1/3W at 1nt.
But with a slight limit in refresh rate, like the non-action games that the GameBoy was great for, e-ink might be the more realistic option.
I doubt we will be seeing Amazon fix this problem any time soon. They are forcing their customers to obtain e-books only from Amazon and locking out other sources. I have obtained nearly all of my ebooks from non-Amazon sources and plan to do so in the future. This is the reason that I considered buying an Amazon Fire only briefly. It's a great tablet in every other way than this, but I will never buy one.
Alright.
By proposing monochrome, sub-pixels are no more so there is only a third as many physical "pixels".
But even then the screen's power use is the biggest factor, in this though experiment.
You can open it, yes. But unlike for any book that is indexed, such as the books on an e-ink Kindle, it loses your place in a manually opened book from the SD card as soon as you close it.
So you CAN read the book. But it FORGETS WHERE YOU WERE LOOKING when you close it, because it doesn't run an "index feature".
That sounds like the "index feature" consists of the tablet remembering:
- What books you read.
- Where you were reading them.
even after you delete the books themselves - or remove the read-only media containing them.
How convenient for government security agencies looking for readers of banned books, police looking at whether you read something about a technique that happened to be used in a crime near you, and so on.
Seems to me that having your book reader NOT keep a record of what titles you've read is a feature, not a bug.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Same issue, "fixed" by introducing the PRS-505 and offering 500 owners a $50 discount on the then-$350 device.
Making recursive jokes is an n - 1th world problem.
Amazon Will Fix it Soon
The Jolly Singh