I'm surprised to say this, but I like the Kindle ads. I have an ad-free Kindle and I got the ad-supported version for my wife (she was on the fence about getting a Kindle at all, and knowing it was cheaper compelled her to finally get it). The ads are pretty great! As the blog post says, they are unobtrusive and only displayed when the Kindle is off. More importantly, though, they are sometimes useful. The first few ads that I ended up clicking on were "$5 off any Amazon purchase" and "Buy any one of these 100 bestselling business eBooks for $1." Yes, there are ads that have nothing to do with Amazon or books, but the fact that I occasionally see an ad that makes me go "Wow, I will use this!" is pretty unexpected and pleasant. If my Kindle 3 ever breaks, I plan to replace it with the ad-supported version.
I like them too. I buy something via the ads about once a month. In fact, I bought the Kindle with ads just for one of the ads which was a few hundred dollars off a TV. The Kindle was essentially free.
I wish the review (or the accompanying ecosystem review) had considered the freedom/openness of each device. To me that seems like the #1 concern I would have with a reader for content I value over the long run.
It has seemed to me that the Kindle is the device with the most lock-in whereas the Kobo has the least (it uses Adobe's DRM scheme, which at least has a tool which lets you move your content from device to device). I'm less sure about the Nook.
Second, it has never really been completely clear to me what would happen to my content were one of these companies to go out of business. Any thoughts?
Finally, since the review mentions periodicals, I think it would be great to review the periodical retention policies of the devices. I have a friend who has a Kindle and complains bitterly about its periodical retention scheme-- about how it always wants to age out (and remove) old issues of a magazine (which you have to tediously disable issue by issue), and how, once gone, you can never regain access to periodicals you once had. Want to re-read that New Yorker from last year on the upgraded Kindle you just got for Xmas? You can't...
[Posting as a non-ereader owner who keeps trying to figure out which one to get; I have used my phone as a client with Kindle and Kobo stores]
I resisted the Kindle for a long time because of the DRM/openness issues that you mention. They idea of not being able to share books, to not "own" what I had paid for, etc. really bothered me. Last year, someone bought be a Kindle for Christmas, so I figured I may as well give it a try. The Kindle quickly became one of my most cherished possessions.
Some observations:
1) Yes, the DRM sucks, philosophically speaking. I would even pay a little more just to get DRM-free versions, but unfortunately that's not an option (yet?).
2) Over time, you save money on books. A dollar here, two dollars there; it quickly adds up. Pretty soon, even if you ever had some book removed from your Kindle, you would have saved more than enough money to just go buy the physical copy.
3) That said, the horror stories about books getting removed (like the ironic '1984' fiasco from a few years ago) or accounts being locked are extremely rare. Out of millions or tens of millions of Kindle owners, there are only a handful of stories about people being screwed by DRM.
4) Because of the convenient form factor, the ease of taking the Kindle everywhere I go, and the ease of buying books (a double-edged sword), I read 2x as much as I used to. In 2010, I read just under 40 books; for 2011, I'm on track for about 70. For me, this alone makes the Kindle worth it, regardless of DRM.
5) You can have several Kindles under one Amazon account. This means my wife and I can buy 1 book and read it at the same time on our individual Kindles. That's pretty sweet.
6) As others in this thread have mentioned, you don't have to buy books through Amazon. That lets you potentially sidestep the DRM issue depending on the availability of what you like to read.
So yes, in theory, DRM sucks, and I would happily pay higher prices to truly own everything that I purchase. In practice, the cons of DRM are outweighed by everything else.
I went a long time refusing to buy any DRM content for fear of whatever.
But at the end of the day, I just write it off as an experience. I'm not paying $5 to own this book/song/software for eternity. I'm paying $5 to experience it for whatever duration it lasts. Much like paying $9 for a movie ticket to sit for two hours in a theater, I might pay $9 to read a book over several days on my device and possibly re-read it a few months down the road.
It's a different mentality. But it's one we regularly apply elsewhere without similar qualms. A nice dinner. A theme park ticket. A trip overseas.
I think the greatest argument against DRM is more anthropological than practical. It doesn't affect me that much at all today and now. But it would be sad indeed if future generations lost access to great works of the 21st century because of DRM.
I recently got a Kindle 3. I actually won it rather than buying it, so I didn't do much research into alternate options, so I only really know how the Kindle works.
You can just buy ebooks outside of the Amazon store and load them onto your Kindle. Calibre is a perfect program for this--it helps manage your collection and converts the files for you. It's very good at converting epub to mobi--which makes sense; the formats are related--and is pretty good with other formats. Pdf is more difficult, but it does do a decent job sometimes. Other times it's a complete mess.
Thanks to Calibre, you are not really tied to Amazon for getting ebooks. If you do opt to use Amazon, you might have some issues, but I don't know because I haven't bothered. I also have no idea about periodicals because I don't read any. I basically use my Kindle to read random science fiction novels when I have free time.
The real advantage of the Kindle isn't in the market (as far as I'm concerned) but in the convenience and form factor. I've actually found it easier to read than a paperback, and it lets me carry a decent collection of books around easily. I suspect other ereaders are similar in that regard.
I got the Kindle 4 for my wife and now I want one. I think the Amazon store is a little nasty (there is no "confirm" screen during purchases) and so on, but I think there are enough sources of ebooks other than Amazon.
Authors can now surely offer ebooks directly from their sites, instead of involving a middle man. I don't know why this hasn't taken off.
It would make for a nice return to the artisan age, where we bought stuff directly from the creators.
On the Kindles, the ads aren’t intrusive, and if you get an ad model and change your mind later, you can just pay the difference and get the ads removed. So it’s not much of a risk to just get the ads.
This is the first time I have heard this... you would think they would market that ability more.
Kindle is dangerously close to having too many models. Customers are becoming confused. I was at a Best Buy and I overheard a couple looking at a Kindle. This Best Buy seemed to only have the Special Offers models. The couple was asking for the ad-free version, and the employee wasn't giving them a sure answer. He thought that after you buy the Special Offers version it would ask you if you wanted to remove them for the addition $30. I'm a super nerd and even I don't know if that is true (I suspect not).
There are a couple of problems here: Amazon is allowing retailers to carry part of the line. Radio Shack has even fewer choices (mine didn't have the Touch at all). But worse, they have too many choices, and the retailers aren't able to (or are failing at) educate their employees on the devices. That couple I saw is going to be pissed if they take the device home and aren't able to remove the ads.
On the flip side, it encourages people to just buy from Amazon.com where you know what you're getting.
> you would think they would market that ability more
Maybe Amazon thinks that if it is obvious, no one will pay up front to have ads removed, and getting more money at the time of purchase is more valuable than future ad revenue.
As a 3rd gen Kindle owner, I don't really see how this product/experience could be meaningfully improved until color, full-motion, hybrid reflective/backlit screens (like Pixel Qi and Mirasol) are good and cheap.
I agree. I'm sure you could get some improvement over the Kindle 3, but it's already as good, if not better, for reading novels than a paper book. Any improvements in that direction would be, at best, marginal.
However, there is one thing that could really be improved: typography. The default setup is not particularly good for English text--manageable but subpar--and is even worse for Russian. It's still readable, but they do not wrap long words with a hyphen leading to an annoyingly ragged margin.
If they fixed the typography, the experience would be even better. I know this because I took several of my books and reformatted them using LaTeX (I had way too much time on my hands :)), which does wrap words and generally produces a much better-looking result. The LaTeX books were significantly easier to read than the Kindle ones--I think they were even a little better than what I expect of most paperbacks. However, they also take up more space and take more effort to make.
So, since my only issue can be fixed by changing the ebook format, and isn't much of an issue at that, I think its safe to say getting an ereader now would be a good bet.
Well, form entry and browsing in general really are painful with a Kindle non-touch.
When you're on vacation, and want to buy a new book (hotel has wifi - but the wifi login page is has a very small button... good luck).
Also the page buttons are too easy to hit (for me), I tend to hit them while handling the Kindle in a non-reading manner (I can't always "sleep" the device before putting it down for example).
All in all, I'm pretty happy with the device, much easier for reading than an iPad.
The Kobo touch seems pretty hackable -- it's very easy to root the device; the firmware upgrades are just tarballs that overwrite files in the main partition and it has a backup partition if you screw it up. There's some documentation on mmapping the e-ink display and using ioctl to update portions of the display.
I'm looking to get one of these for my wife for Christmas (Neither the Nook or the kindle are really available in Canada) but I'm not allowed to mess around with her devices. However I think having an e-ink Linux machine might be an interesting device to play with.
I have the version before the Touch -- the one where they added wifi. I'd love to hack it just enough to get fixed width code examples to (mostly) fit the display width. Or, better yet, to get it to support a landscape display of ePub books (for the same reason).
I don't suppose someone's already done something along these lines? (Just asking in case happenstance brings a knowledgeable reader past this comment.)
I have a Kindle Touch, and honestly, every day I wish I got the non-touch.
Touch does not go well with e-Ink. The delayed responses are far more intuitively compatible with hardware keys. You can press, let go, and know what's going to happen. The tactile feedback makes up for the delayed UI response.
But with the Kindle Touch, I press.... and then I don't know if it registered or if it's just slow, so I press again and again. I think a lot of it has to do with the general sluggishness of the Touch models that the blog author mentioned - it's very, very noticeable. But the other part is just that at the end of the day, feedback is important. Either immediate visual feedback (a la iPhone, not Android - referring to how iPhone is programmed to "slide" on first touch whereas Android is programmed to give some room before switching screens) or immediate tactile feedback.
Can anyone comment on the page turn speed of the non-touch Kindle4 vs the Kindle3? I picked up a Kindle Touch thinking that the refresh speed would be better than the 3rd gen model, but, like Marco, I didn't really find it to be the case.
I took a very brief look at the Touch and 4 (ads version) while breezing by them in a Target (I know -- and they had some Sony's and Kobo's as well; these things are really going mainstream).
Anyway, after spending a few seconds with them, my impression was that page turn on the Touch and 4 were about the same. If so, you could use your Touch experience as a basis for comparison.
EDIT: Reading his article, now. Apparently, I didn't spend enough time with them to form an accurate observation:
The Kobo Touch is the slowest at page-turns, followed closely by the Kindle Touch. In fact, my old Kindle 2 turns pages slightly faster than the Kindle Touch. I’ll come back to that in a minute.
[+] [-] lpolovets|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tedunangst|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metajack|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dprice1|14 years ago|reply
It has seemed to me that the Kindle is the device with the most lock-in whereas the Kobo has the least (it uses Adobe's DRM scheme, which at least has a tool which lets you move your content from device to device). I'm less sure about the Nook.
Second, it has never really been completely clear to me what would happen to my content were one of these companies to go out of business. Any thoughts?
Finally, since the review mentions periodicals, I think it would be great to review the periodical retention policies of the devices. I have a friend who has a Kindle and complains bitterly about its periodical retention scheme-- about how it always wants to age out (and remove) old issues of a magazine (which you have to tediously disable issue by issue), and how, once gone, you can never regain access to periodicals you once had. Want to re-read that New Yorker from last year on the upgraded Kindle you just got for Xmas? You can't...
[Posting as a non-ereader owner who keeps trying to figure out which one to get; I have used my phone as a client with Kindle and Kobo stores]
[+] [-] lpolovets|14 years ago|reply
Some observations:
1) Yes, the DRM sucks, philosophically speaking. I would even pay a little more just to get DRM-free versions, but unfortunately that's not an option (yet?).
2) Over time, you save money on books. A dollar here, two dollars there; it quickly adds up. Pretty soon, even if you ever had some book removed from your Kindle, you would have saved more than enough money to just go buy the physical copy.
3) That said, the horror stories about books getting removed (like the ironic '1984' fiasco from a few years ago) or accounts being locked are extremely rare. Out of millions or tens of millions of Kindle owners, there are only a handful of stories about people being screwed by DRM.
4) Because of the convenient form factor, the ease of taking the Kindle everywhere I go, and the ease of buying books (a double-edged sword), I read 2x as much as I used to. In 2010, I read just under 40 books; for 2011, I'm on track for about 70. For me, this alone makes the Kindle worth it, regardless of DRM.
5) You can have several Kindles under one Amazon account. This means my wife and I can buy 1 book and read it at the same time on our individual Kindles. That's pretty sweet.
6) As others in this thread have mentioned, you don't have to buy books through Amazon. That lets you potentially sidestep the DRM issue depending on the availability of what you like to read.
So yes, in theory, DRM sucks, and I would happily pay higher prices to truly own everything that I purchase. In practice, the cons of DRM are outweighed by everything else.
[+] [-] ansy|14 years ago|reply
But at the end of the day, I just write it off as an experience. I'm not paying $5 to own this book/song/software for eternity. I'm paying $5 to experience it for whatever duration it lasts. Much like paying $9 for a movie ticket to sit for two hours in a theater, I might pay $9 to read a book over several days on my device and possibly re-read it a few months down the road.
It's a different mentality. But it's one we regularly apply elsewhere without similar qualms. A nice dinner. A theme park ticket. A trip overseas.
I think the greatest argument against DRM is more anthropological than practical. It doesn't affect me that much at all today and now. But it would be sad indeed if future generations lost access to great works of the 21st century because of DRM.
[+] [-] tikhonj|14 years ago|reply
You can just buy ebooks outside of the Amazon store and load them onto your Kindle. Calibre is a perfect program for this--it helps manage your collection and converts the files for you. It's very good at converting epub to mobi--which makes sense; the formats are related--and is pretty good with other formats. Pdf is more difficult, but it does do a decent job sometimes. Other times it's a complete mess.
Thanks to Calibre, you are not really tied to Amazon for getting ebooks. If you do opt to use Amazon, you might have some issues, but I don't know because I haven't bothered. I also have no idea about periodicals because I don't read any. I basically use my Kindle to read random science fiction novels when I have free time.
The real advantage of the Kindle isn't in the market (as far as I'm concerned) but in the convenience and form factor. I've actually found it easier to read than a paperback, and it lets me carry a decent collection of books around easily. I suspect other ereaders are similar in that regard.
[+] [-] kghose|14 years ago|reply
I got the Kindle 4 for my wife and now I want one. I think the Amazon store is a little nasty (there is no "confirm" screen during purchases) and so on, but I think there are enough sources of ebooks other than Amazon.
Authors can now surely offer ebooks directly from their sites, instead of involving a middle man. I don't know why this hasn't taken off.
It would make for a nice return to the artisan age, where we bought stuff directly from the creators.
[+] [-] duck|14 years ago|reply
This is the first time I have heard this... you would think they would market that ability more.
[+] [-] MatthewPhillips|14 years ago|reply
There are a couple of problems here: Amazon is allowing retailers to carry part of the line. Radio Shack has even fewer choices (mine didn't have the Touch at all). But worse, they have too many choices, and the retailers aren't able to (or are failing at) educate their employees on the devices. That couple I saw is going to be pissed if they take the device home and aren't able to remove the ads.
On the flip side, it encourages people to just buy from Amazon.com where you know what you're getting.
[+] [-] jad|14 years ago|reply
Maybe Amazon thinks that if it is obvious, no one will pay up front to have ads removed, and getting more money at the time of purchase is more valuable than future ad revenue.
[+] [-] joebadmo|14 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interferometric_modulator_displ...
[+] [-] tikhonj|14 years ago|reply
However, there is one thing that could really be improved: typography. The default setup is not particularly good for English text--manageable but subpar--and is even worse for Russian. It's still readable, but they do not wrap long words with a hyphen leading to an annoyingly ragged margin.
If they fixed the typography, the experience would be even better. I know this because I took several of my books and reformatted them using LaTeX (I had way too much time on my hands :)), which does wrap words and generally produces a much better-looking result. The LaTeX books were significantly easier to read than the Kindle ones--I think they were even a little better than what I expect of most paperbacks. However, they also take up more space and take more effort to make.
So, since my only issue can be fixed by changing the ebook format, and isn't much of an issue at that, I think its safe to say getting an ereader now would be a good bet.
[+] [-] r00fus|14 years ago|reply
When you're on vacation, and want to buy a new book (hotel has wifi - but the wifi login page is has a very small button... good luck).
Also the page buttons are too easy to hit (for me), I tend to hit them while handling the Kindle in a non-reading manner (I can't always "sleep" the device before putting it down for example).
All in all, I'm pretty happy with the device, much easier for reading than an iPad.
[+] [-] wvenable|14 years ago|reply
I'm looking to get one of these for my wife for Christmas (Neither the Nook or the kindle are really available in Canada) but I'm not allowed to mess around with her devices. However I think having an e-ink Linux machine might be an interesting device to play with.
[+] [-] pasbesoin|14 years ago|reply
I don't suppose someone's already done something along these lines? (Just asking in case happenstance brings a knowledgeable reader past this comment.)
[+] [-] ComputerGuru|14 years ago|reply
Touch does not go well with e-Ink. The delayed responses are far more intuitively compatible with hardware keys. You can press, let go, and know what's going to happen. The tactile feedback makes up for the delayed UI response.
But with the Kindle Touch, I press.... and then I don't know if it registered or if it's just slow, so I press again and again. I think a lot of it has to do with the general sluggishness of the Touch models that the blog author mentioned - it's very, very noticeable. But the other part is just that at the end of the day, feedback is important. Either immediate visual feedback (a la iPhone, not Android - referring to how iPhone is programmed to "slide" on first touch whereas Android is programmed to give some room before switching screens) or immediate tactile feedback.
[+] [-] swanson|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pasbesoin|14 years ago|reply
Anyway, after spending a few seconds with them, my impression was that page turn on the Touch and 4 were about the same. If so, you could use your Touch experience as a basis for comparison.
EDIT: Reading his article, now. Apparently, I didn't spend enough time with them to form an accurate observation:
The Kobo Touch is the slowest at page-turns, followed closely by the Kindle Touch. In fact, my old Kindle 2 turns pages slightly faster than the Kindle Touch. I’ll come back to that in a minute.
[+] [-] _stephan|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zokier|14 years ago|reply
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3256317
[+] [-] emilepetrone|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flomincucci|14 years ago|reply