I've spent 16 years working for major niche publisher and am a bit addicted to eReaders. Every time threads like this appear here I see lots of people that have no idea that there is a whole world of devices outside Kindle and Amazon. Here are some of the more interesting devices current out there in the market:
Onyx Boox Note 2: 10'' e-ink screen, Android 9.0, touch and wacom digitizer: https://onyxboox.com/boox_note2
It can be used for school/uni/research. Its large screen and notetaking features pair well with annotating fixed-layout formats such as PDFs.
I have some strong opinions about Amazon and its eBook business. I really like their tech but their business practices are not aligned with what I want for myself as an author. I have moved to Kobo for my personal eReader and am using a Kobo Forma which is their answer to the Kindle Oasis. Even though the Oasis hardware with its metal usage feels much more premium than the Forma with its flexy plastic shell, the device is much more open than the Oasis and it is easier for me to use it both as a reader and as an author. I live in the UK and Kobo through its partner Overdrive -- which it owned up until not long ago but I am not sure they still do -- allows me to borrow books from local libraries. I have a couple library cards from different library consortiums and that gives me a lot of catalogs to search and borrow from. Synchronizing with Pocket is also a godsend, every time I see a nice article here on HN that I think deserves more attention and care, I just send it to Pocket and read it from the Kobo in a nice park.
Anyway, this is just some pointers to those here that never experienced ebooks and ereaders outside Amazon. Yes, Amazon brings a lot of value to the table, especially for the readers, books tend to be cheaper in Amazon but that is due to its monopolistic practices and thug tactics. Kindle is not where the innovation is happening, other devices have better hardware and better software, other companies have healthier ecosystems.
Rant ahead : the color PocketBook looks nice, but I'll be harsh: their website is atrocious. There is a loading animation that takes seconds to run every time you click anywhere. You can't easily find any relevant information. The "where to buy" page simply doesn't work at all and display no stores, even in Switzerland, their home country. It seems impossible to discover the price of the products, too.
This is one of the worst site I've visited in years, really. It's plain terrible, obviously the nice look and animations were used to sell the website to clueless executive that never browsed the website, it's painful to watch such a train wreck. This site is a sure way to lose potential customers forever.
Regarding ebooks, I have a strict policy of buying only ebooks without DRM. That strictly limits what I can buy, but I'm adamant (some SF, and that's about it). DRM is evil and must die. So I can't use either Kindle hardware nor app. Plus I religiously use only opensource/free software whenever possible.
As much as the Boox is great, they have a lot of GPL issues. Plus the kernel they are using is very very closed sourced. Sounds like FUD, but I am generally quite wary of companies in China that do this
Was just gearing up to type this. Onyx is a known GPL abuser and won't get a cent from me unless and until they fix that. Chinese company or otherwise, the FOSS community is clearly going to have to help support GPL when the courts can't or won't.
That sucks! Well, there are other notetaking e-ink devices out there which I hope are compliant with the GPL. ReMarkable is good for notetaking but I have heard it is not much use for actual reading. There is Supernote and Bouye Likebook which support notes as well. I'm not sure of their license compliance though, all I'm saying is that there are other options for those wanting that kind of device.
I am not a lawyer, so take this with the grain of salt it needs.
Can’t the FSF or other entity file an injunction against the company from selling in other countries by filing the lawsuit with said countries? Based on copyright infringement/licensing infringement (not sure here it would fall)
Again, Not a lawyer, but I feel like corporations have done this in the past
I couldn't find the buy page anywhere to see its price(from India); Is it Geo-locked?
Then, I came from Google to PocketBook's INT site with IN page - https://www.pocketbook-int.com/in/products which seems to have only older products and the buy page lists a single dealer here who doesn't seem to sell that product anymore.
I'm not taking this as a general case, but maybe this explains why not many people are familiar with non-kindle e-book readers nowadays, Someone 'even in India' can order the latest kindle(with their WiFi pre-configured[1]!) while unknowingly tapping a button in the Amazon app when in sleep; Okay there was slight exaggeration, but Amazon commands such a market position now that the linked 16 years ago story looks like gremlin which wasn't fed after midnight 'then'.
My issue with both: color e-ink refresh times are atrocious, and the other ebook reader doesn’t support color, a non starter for me unfortunately.
Otherwise they look very good! Hopefully the tech keeps improving so we can have good color e ink displays that support sketching like the second tablet
Edit: I take it back, this[0] version of the android powered sketch able e ink reader can be used with outside input, which gets me over the issue of no color.
I think I might pick one of these up if I don’t find good software for the iPad Pro that can do this well
The issue for me is that devices seem to all be touch, rather than have buttons. The eink lag isn’t suited to this as touch without immediate response is not good.
I’d prefer buttons.
I don't have first hand experience with eReaders with pen digitizers. I've played with some devices owned by friends but I never had a device like that, which is quite odd considering I was a Apple Newton user, then iPAQ, and now my machine is a Surface, so I am all about pen computing. I know that someday I'll get one of those e-ink devices with pen support but I can't really recommend or talk about them besides telling you that they exist and some people really like them. One thing I've noticed is that note taking tends to be available in larger screen sizes. I think that is done so that using the device with fixed-layout media is easier. Most people who are doing annotations are doing it on top of PDF files from what I can tell.
As for smaller devices, I really enjoyed the Kobo Mini, all it missed was a frontlight but it was a device that came out at the same time that those features were moving from premium ereaders into budget ereaders. That device is discontinued (even though mine still works fine) and I recommend small devices for anyone reading fiction, people reading non-fiction, especially technical programming books should be better served with larger devices. Reading wrapped source code in a small device sucks.
I have been looking at a small device from Onyx but from what I have learned here is that Onyx appear to be a GPL violator, so I can't really recommend them even though they make very interesting devices. I think that between them, pockebook and Bouye there is a lot of action happening. Oh and there are multiple Chinese e-ink smartphones in the market, which might be tempting to some people but feels like "too early" for me.
Throughout the years I have used almost every single Kindle device all the way up to the Oasis, Kobo Mini and Forma, Nooks, and Odyssey rebranded devices. From that list you can see that I kinda married my choice of device with having some sort of large bookshop behind it. Kobo is the main competitor for Amazon, Nook had B&N behind it, and the rebranded Odyssey device had a large Brazilian shop backing it. I never owned those independent devices that were not being sold without a book distribution channel bundled with it. That was because I really hate Adobe Digital Editions and will go back to pen and paper before using that crap. Lucky for me many of the books I buy are being sold without DRM so I think that I'll soon be able to enjoy those more advanced and open ereaders in the near future. The Pocketbook Color is the one I'm currently interested in.
I think that the most important factor in chosing an eReader is first figuring out what you want to do with it. If you're buying because you're an avid reader that will consume a ton of fiction, the most important aspect becomes not the device but where you get your books from. In this case I'd recommend a Kobo mostly because I think that Rakuten is a better company for the publishing industry than Amazon and want to see more competition. Kobo devices are as good as Kindles. The only feature from the Oasis that I miss in my Kindle Forma is Audiobook support. Having to go to my phone to listen to my Kobo audiobook sucks.
If you're buying directly from the publishers with non-DRM epubs then you can use anything you like (except the Kindle, you can still use it but it require some hops). In this case it is good to checkout what those independent vendors are selling.
If you're interested in buying your first e-ink device, I'd recommend you pick a cheap entry level offer. Don't go spend a lot in a premium device such as the Oasis or the Forma without actually knowing if such devices are for you. I'm OK paying a ton to have multiple premium devices because not only I fancy myself as an author but because books are an integral part of how I see myself and experience the world. Since my younger years all the way to my current 40s, books have always been a constant source of knowledge and happiness for me, so I can burn some money towards devices that makes such experience better.
Some non-Amazon brands you might want to check out:
* Rakuten Kobo: I consider them Amazon main rivals. I really enjoy "Kobo Writing Life" achievement system which gamifies your reading experience; Overdrive which lets me borrow books from my local libraries; Pocket integration that allows me to send articles from the web to my device. https://kobo.com
* HiSense: is making ereaders and e-ink smartphones.
Barnes & Noble still selling Nooks and Amazon of course has Kindles. Aliexpress has a ton of devices as well, mostly running unlocked Android, but the experience of using such devices might not appeal to you as they tend to be a bit half-baked in terms of UX.
One of my favorite "readers" is Holloway's. It's not an e-reader, and while they do support those formats, their online in-browser reader is amazing. I wish e-readers evolve past just recreating the book format (with the added convenience of easy downloading and storing of multiple books).
This product might appeal to someone who hasn't had an e-ink reader. Many people wrongly assume the experience with a Kindle will fatigue their eyes the same as reading on their phone or computer. In fact, it's very easy on the eyes.
I haven't owned another e-ink reader, but I've had a couple of Kindles and they offer a lot more than just downloading and storing books (although vacation readers like me appreciate those features too).
- Built in "backlighting" which is actually coming from the sides of the screen. Easy to read in dark rooms or direct sun
- Change fonts and font sizes to suit your preference. Near sighted readers can increase the font size. Open dyslexic is available. Now they're allowing user fonts so you can bring almost any font to the experience.
No web app is going to be better than an e ink screen. Reading a book on your phone is hard on your eyes and reading book on your desktop is way too clunky.
Overdrive is great, I get most of my books this way now through the library. it does work with kindles as well, bounces through the amazon store where they give you a time limited kindle book. I definitely hate feeling stuck in amazon with the books I do own having drm on them
Any suggestions for an entire 'environment'? I read on my Oasis but also quite a bit on macosx/iphone/ipad and really enjoy the sync (when/if it is working).
I think you guys are missing the point of this Twitter thread.
Yes, the kindle itself is mediocre at best. Technically it’s got lot of issues, and I personally still prefer a physical book over it any day. But...
The thread was about being inspired. You can be inspired even while working on something that ultimately isn’t great. You can be inspired working with someone who has the reputation of not being the best boss. You can be inspired when you want to.
So while working on this mediocre device, which is pretty much the only way to consume books digitally, this guy loved every minute.
Do people here really think the Kindle is a mediocre product? This feels to me like another case of HN's 'no one will ever need Dropbox, you can just hook up the open-source libraries'.
Very much it, I can't say that anybody doing hardware for the first time would be anywhere close on "completeness" to what Amazon managed to pull out (probably with tons of advisers, and external experts, but still...)
I worked, work, and probably will keep working with tons of clients from Kickstarter/Indygogo space, and prime majority of them simply wrap up somewhere 6-9 months into the project because the "don't see the end to the tunnel," or realise that they picked a very wrong industry for easy money.
I viewed it as a story in how a great CEO realized that he needed to personally step in to drive and protect a program that could cannibalize their existing business. Similar story to Netflix’s video streaming over the CDs.
Yes. Same as Hastings kicking all the CD folks off his executive team. The CEO of a startup I worked at limited the head of his most proilfitable business unit to 15 minutes per month. It seemed insane to put the cash cow at risk. He was right though. He couldn’t grow the future without doing that.
You throw a lot of unsubstantiated shade in the guise of "getting" the real message.
> Yes, the kindle itself is mediocre at best.
Which eReader is better than the Kindle in the same price range?
> Technically it’s got lot of issues
Like what? I also prefer real book, though when I've used the Kindle, I've had 0 problems. The delivery over cellular works, it has very good battery life, is light and the display does what it's suppose to do.
> You can be inspired working with someone who has the reputation of not being the best boss
Haven't heard Jeff Bezos isn't a good boss. The Twitter thread has little negative things about Jeff as a boss / executive, the contrary actually.
the main point that most people miss is that you can deliver something mediocre and still beat the competition. your product doesn't have to be perfect, it has to be better than the competion.
Yes, inspiration, that's how these so called technology leaders trick us engineers in doing work for them, even, at times, to the detriment of society.
If you have something constructive to say, even if that something is a reason criticism, then say it; this comes across as condescending and dismissive.
I consider the Kindle one of the most underbaked products I have ever used, and it staggers me that no one seems to care. Earlier iterations were truly ground-breaking, so we gave them a break on the details. But we've been at this for 12 years now, the product really should have matured more.
I'm not talking about the state of E-ink, but the usability of the Kindle device itself. I current use a latest-gen Paperwhite but I've owned almost all of them. The current one, in my opinion, is a huge step backwards in lots of ways from earlier iterations. The touch screen is appalling and has no place on an E-ink device. The software is incredibly bad. There's so much scope there to surface useful information on the home screen but there's nothing of value there - I can't even see more than a couple of books in progress, much less find something I may want to read later. It's just astoundingly bad.
The kindle could have been the best, no clue what happened but development just seemed to completely stall. It's sad because the vast majority of consumers don't even realize there are incredible advances being made to E-ink displays, they never see it.
Last summer I was sitting in a library and had noticed the person across from me was using an E-ink device I had never seen before. I showed the person my kindle and asked if they like their device more or less than mine. I vividly recall the woman's eyes light up with excitement as she handed me the device and pen she was holding. Perfect written text on an e-ink device the size of a paper notebook with what felt like an almost identical weight to my kindle. Stunning! She told me how she had been using it exclusively for note taking and the battery life was fairly comparable.
I wish I could recall the name of the device but I think it was something by Sony. I couldn't help but be stunned though, Amazon is completely missing the opportunity with these devices and I feel bad for the people who will continue to purchase their obsolete products.
Same is true of goodreads. Amazon have their market lock now, it’s the IE6 phase now. (Except it was way easier to get people off IE6 than it will be to get them off the platform with all of their books.)
The problem with Goodreads is more than just an old-fashioned website. The community there, the whole "social" angle of the site, has been taken over by the same phenomena as on Amazon.com: publishers send free copies of their books to certain reviewers, who often don’t even actually read the book before writing their review, and then those reviewers exploit this attention to build up their own reputations as "influencers" and eventually monetize those reputations. Because their reviews have bright colours and image memes, and cliques support each other with mutual likes, those reviews show up at the top of any book listing.
If you are one of those reviewers who honestly reads and reviews books, then you can feel like your signal is lost in the noise of the shill reviewers. Also, for those who were initially interested in what their real-life friends were reading, the majority of those IRL friends will have dropped off the site over the years, either because of a natural attrition or because they have come to prefer snackable web content over books.
This is actually what I was trying to get at: GoodReads could be so much better, but that would require the maintainers to care. And they don’t, because they’ve got the market lock and have moved into other things. Like Microsoft did with IE6.
Agree completely the broken community is much more important than the aged look of the website.
It’s the IE6 when it comes to rendering quality too. Zero support for any sort of standards, bugs everywhere you look, and it’s users complain bitterly if you don’t go out of your way to support their entrenched ways of working.
The mobile app is horrible. It's a webview or something, and works like total crap on old devices. If you open a notification for a group discussion post, it tells you what the title of the discussion is--but not what group it's for.
As much as possible, I find myself interacting with Goodreads through calibre plugins; I've got a library with zero actual book files that contains an entry for every book in my library, and I mainly use that to browse my collection. Since syncing that list takes so long, my actual calibre libraries are also synced to Goodreads, as that's where I actually make my changes.
With Library thing's recent removal of library limits, I'm thinking more and more about abandoning Goodreads--except I don't know if there's a calibre plugin for PT, and I've spent so much time adding and updating book records for items in my goodreads library, which would have to be redone for LT.
The barrier is actually quite high. Sure, its easy to make a CRUD app that would aggregate ratings. The difficult part is to get people to use it instead of the leader. These are called network effects, and they are very hard to break.
This is why big social media sites have such high valuations. Any small group could develop an alternative to Facebook. However, the chances of that usurping them is almost zero. The same goes for Goodreads.
As far as I can see, that device costs around $1000 (can't see the exact price on the page you shared because I'm not in a country that Amazon deliver to). I would expect it to be much, much better than a kindle when it costs four times as much.
Sony Digital Paper costs around $700 for 13.3"; Kindle Oasis $270 for 7". Considering Amazon's scale they can easily bring 'Sony's type' of reader price down considerably if they choose to make such device.
Sony has the same scale. It's the scale of sales not manuf that dictates the price. Not sure if you remember the Kindle DX. It did not sell well but boy did I covet one.
I recently replaced the battery in my Kindle Keyboard (I love physical buttons). It was easier to replace than I expected, and after half a year of daily use, haven't noticed any issues with the battery.
There are probably at least a few good places to buy replacement batteries; I got mine from batteryship dot com. I have zero association with them except that I bought this one battery, and will probably buy a phone battery from them in the future.
"Sony is creating a new version of their Digital Paper 13.3 to replace the aging DPT-RP1 that came out in 2017. It was supposed to be released this year, but the company made the internal decision in Japan to delay it until April or May 2020. Sony Japan primarily designs the Digital Paper and they do the manufacturing in China. The software experience is undergoing a bit of a tweak, due to professional feedback from their business customers in the US."
I used it initially for sometime but then slowly fell back to the iPad. I mean the comparison between an iPad and Kindle/Remarkable isn’t fair, but if a tablet is the go-to form-factor for books and note-taking, I’d stick to the iPad.
There was a time when e-ink seemed pretty compelling versus a tablet for certain uses, but that gap has shrunk to the point where it's hard to justify another special purpose device. I do have a Paperwhite in addition to an iPad but honestly don't use it very much. don't want to travel with yet another device and the iPad is actually a much better reader if the book isn't just flowing text.
Tablets are too large and heavy for use cases that eink readers can fulfill. Nobody's going to hold up an iPad one handed over their head while lying in bed. Months of battery life make them more of a book than a tablet will ever be.
For a short trip, I'll sometimes take laptop and Kindle. But, especially for long plane trips, I can't comfortably use a laptop and a tablet just gives me a lot more entertainment options. (It's also sometimes useful for taking notes by hand.)
And to another comment, yes the Kindle is small and light but it's something else I need to keep track of so I tend not to bring laptop + tablet + Kindle. (And I've never been able to make an iPad work for me as a laptop replacement.)
My backpacks have these real small pockets for notepads still. Kindle just goes in there. On really long trips (Australia for a month) I bring all 3. Well actually I also brought my Switch, NC headphones, monster battery, and work laptop (loaner 13" mb) as well as personal. I had to pay the extra fee on carry ons on Jetstar (and it did get weighed).
Really tablet is just crappy movie watcher or smaller webpage reader. Having all this was good since on that trip my SSD de-soldered itself from my motherboard on my Laptop, forcing me to use USB Sticks and turn it into a $3200 chrome book.
I basically equate the kindle to a charging or backup set of wireless earbuds in weight.
Amazon didn't want to expand on Kindle functionality because
1) They were scared people would stop reading books
2) They were scared of it becoming something they couldn't control
3) They have their heads up their asses and think they can make software and hardware better than anyone else when all they can make is stuff like Kindle and Kindle Fire Phone and other useless crap
you know how originally Steve Jobs didn't want an App Store on iPhone
That's what Amazon was like
They are control freaks
EXCEPT
they are useless at hardware and software as far as it comes to devices (Kindle Fire Phone is a good example of how bad, though Kindle is also devolving fast)
Also they can't make a good ecosystem because they screw over everyone they work with
You see it in AWS where they copied and cloned successful AWS companies
You see it in Alexa where they steal ideas from companies in the Alexa Fund etc
It was the same story in Kindle eInk App Store
*
We built apps for eInk and all the other developers who worked on its shared the same sentiment we did. None of the developers could believe how bad Amazon were at working with devs
It was the most godawful experience you could ever imagine working with anyone on anything
A) They were so bad at letting apps go out to customers they had to close down the app store
B) For every app that did well they started contacting other developers to clone the App
That's why you saw 2 of everything. One high quality version, and then a cheap clone because Amazon's mindset was to have 2 or 3 of everything that started selling well
So all the early developers who spent money and time on it, instead of getting rewarded, got screwed
C) I had an Amazon guy literally tell me on the phone - You've already made $200,000 this year. Why do you want to make more? Our development costs were not even covered with $200,000
D) We had one hit game in one area. Let's say (just as an example) card games. We had a separate card game pending approval, Game X. They kept delaying it
Meanwhile an Android developer contacted us saying - You guys have this card game. How is it doing? Because Amazon is contacting us saying card games are hot and asking us to make Game X
So, we put in the effort to do R&D and discovered card games were hot
And they stopped our READY FOR LAUNCH app in the same area (card games) and started contacting other developers to make that same app. It's the kind of stuff you can't even imagine a business partner ever doing to you
*
E) They kept one set of developers (ones who they thought 'had already made enough money') completely out of launch of the Kindle Paperwhite
So some of the people who invested in their Kindle eInk App Store, they Screwed over by purposefully keeping out many of them from the launch of the new device
What is crazy is they invited other developers to clone the same apps
Many of those were low quality devs from 3rd world countries who were asked to make clone apps. They found some unknown company from India (no disrespect, just implying that it was not some known game studio) to clone our card game app and launch for Kindle paperwhite (while our game was kept out)
So our apps were kept out of launch and meanwhile low quality knockoffs of our apps were sent to customers
We literally had customers emailing and writing reviews complaining 'why is it not available for Kindle Paperwhite'
*
you might be talking about the Sony eReader
It was the first mainstream eInk based reader. Amazon takes all the credit but Sony did it first
All Amazon did was get lots of authors to offer free books and use that to get market share. Now everyone thinks Amazon invented eReaders and eBooks
Well, guess in a sense they did as history is written by the winners
Amazon is very good where it can get subsidies from the government (no sales tax, USPS special rates) or where it can make a platform and invite people in and later screw them over and replace them with someone else
AWS is pretty impressive
Sooner or later they are going to run out of affiliates/developers/companies/suppliers to screw over
You know, I've been reading books on my Kindle device(s) for probably 9 or 10 years now, on a monthly to daily basis, and had no idea there was an app store or apps for kindles.
Sony's original reader was crippled in many many ways. I considered buying one back in the depths of time before the g2 Kindle came out. The I used a g2, and bought it right then and there (while sitting at the bar at a Texas Roadhouse).
For context Sony's reader required a windows app. Kindle had whispernet.
I wasn't a huge fan of either company at the time but ended up working at both in the following years.
If you mean the kindle is not advancing because it's "done", no way. Objectively, it's a pretty terrible device. The reason it hasn't advanced is lack of competition.
I read fiction on a Kindle oasis. Its fantastic. I can't think of a single improvement.
Its impossible for me to work with technical materials on the Kindle. Specs, tutorials, tech blogs, tech books. All are unusable because of resizing figures.
> I read fiction on a Kindle oasis. Its fantastic. I can't think of a single improvement.
I have one and I can. The case is too slippery. It's hard to operate one-handed while lying on the couch because it slips out of your hand. My old Kindle 3 is very easy to operate one-handed at any angle, no slipping.
That’s always been the case for technical content. The form factor and the document structures are fairly unsuited to pocket devices. I use mine for fiction only.
I crank out the desktop for technical content almost universally. iPad doesn’t cut it either.
But at the same time I have actual physical books for very technical stuff. They are still easier to use.
The trouble is all the things you would need for reading technical material (large size, note taking, etc) would detract from what you need to read fiction.
They probably should be two different devices. Personally I'm waiting for the new Remarkable.
I like my Kindle Paperwhite, but it's also a very frustrating product — slow, low-res, terrible UI, etc.
But my biggest complaint is that Kindle made books ugly. I love beautiful typography, and bad typography can ruin a reading experience. Reading Kindle books are like stepping back in time to low-quality mass-market paperbacks.
There's absolutely nothing stopping us from being able to render the book beautifully with the right font. In this particularly egregious example, they didn't even bother to include the ornamentations. That's one thing, but those underlined chapter headings? They didn't even try.
As I understand it, modern e-books are just HTML, designed to be reformatted to different screens. There appears to be limited support for fonts, and whatever Kindle uses to render text is awful.
Another frustration about the quality of the books is how a lot of older fiction is only available in very shoddily digitized versions that don't even use correct typography ("smart" quotes, em dashes, indented paragraphs, etc.).
Funny you should mention that. I usually watch old movies with the closed captioning on, and it's clear the captioning isn't even proofread. Lots of times it will be a sound-alike word that doesn't fit in the sentence. Perhaps they employ non-native English speakers to type in the text.
I'm gonna disagree with you. I have a previous-gen Paperwhite and I absolutely love it. I love that it's a simple piece of technology. The touchscreen rarely causes me problems, and I even dropped it into a pool and after 2 weeks of drying it's still working fine.
I consider it a well-made piece of technology that Just Works. (actually, a recent software update changed something that required changing my muscle memory... wish I could disable updates!)
This seems to really be a pattern with Amazon. Their sweet spot is doing Zero to One by watching what goes off and then leveraging their size for a Second Mover Advantage.
Once something sticks to the wall, they are absolutely ruthless at getting it to product-market fit and commercial success, but interestingly enough, they stop there and all further development is merely iterative. They usually have some of the first decent and usuable products in any market, but tend to go for full commercial exploitation and pure maintenance mode from there.
Redshift used to be an absolute game changer for the Big Data market (I still remember their 1 TB for under 999$/month claim to this day), but Snowflake or BigQuery are just much better products this day and they never made the architectural shift from the client/server based architecture.
Prime Video is an absolute success story despite their awful interface, UX and crappy metadata, just because they got a grip on the hardware, smartly cross-sold it and bought / produced some good & free content.
I could go on and on, but it seems to be company core DNA to stop at 80/20. Whether that's a good thing or not, I'm still unsure.
Maybe because Bezos stops being involved and there is nobody inside the company who dares to change whatever Bezos has implemented?
Reading the tweets, it seems like Bezos made all the important decisions. If he is not around because he is focussed on other projects, who could do it instead? Judging by the story that Bezos didn't allow any pixel to be changed on the Amazon homepage, I can imagine that this is a pattern and whoever tried to implement a change doesn't dare to try it again.
Prime video seems to have fleshed out its content with a lot of old, obscure, niche documentaries. Fortunately, I like old, obscure, niche documentaries and enjoy watching them. Netflix seems to stick with only mainstream content.
From my experience at Amazon, products launch, and then the team starts building the next thing, and the previous thing only gets mandatory attention from then on. There was always just too much to work on to completely polish anything.
> The touch screen is appalling and has no place on an E-ink device.
It's okay, but it's also obvious they didn't put any buttons
into the Paperwhite to have a reason for the more expensive
model which does have buttons to turn the page(and nothing else
of value it seems).
I find my Paperwhite to be quite usable, but I agree that almost
everything could have been done better. I still don't get why
some ebooks I buy land on the Kindle immediately but some will
only download once I try to read them(which is super annoying on
vacation), I don't know why the library seems to be randomly
shuffled every time I look at it, and I don't know why it's not
possible to completely shut off the Paperwhite's backlighting.
A lot of little strange decision were made with that thing.
Idk, I can put all the books I have ever owned on it and read them, that's what it's supposed to do and it does it for 80 bucks. 99.99% of my time on the Kindle is spent reading a book, not fiddling with menus or on the home page.
On top of that they're well made and the battery lasts forever, i can't complain at all.
If that was the first-gen device, sure. But in comparison to older models, Kindle keeps regressing UX-wise. Before my Paperwhite, I owned the old keyboard version with no touchscreen, and it was much more useful as a device - it was easier to take notes, and it even made sense to use the built-in browser.
(Not that touchscreens are bad per se, but the responsiveness of the screens/whole OS on Paperwhite is bad.)
I have I think a 2nd gen Paperwhite and I feel like the main "problem" I have is that the reading experience is more or less perfect. It could be much faster and more convenient to shop for new books, but I rarely do that on the device anyway. But when it comes to reading a book, I am so used to the Paperwhite 2nd gen that I would pay a significant premium to get a like-for-like replacement than some new model.
I have a 2nd-generation Paperwhite that I haven’t used in a couple of years because it keeps slowing down a few weeks after booting. It also slows down immediately if I sideload more than a handful of e-book files. I switched to an iPad Mini and never looked back.
> It’s also possible that people who read on these devices aren’t tech savvy enough to care about how awful of an experience it is.
Absolutely.
Some people who don't quite "get" computers seem to find it
really difficult what they should expect from a device. They can
have a laptop that needs 5 minutes to boot and a broken mouse
that jumps to a random location on the screen once every minute,
and the only thing they'll complain about is that Windows
doesn't let them select a lot of files properly(because the
mouse jumps around like crazy).
The skit in IT Crowd with the "laptop from the exorcist" is
sometimes more accurate than one might like.
Exactly this. This also explains why most modern software has so atrocious UX, and why companies can get away producing hardware that can barely lift its own software. It's because non-tech-savvy consumers don't have a point of reference and a mental model to express what's wrong, and also don't have a choice other than to suck it up, or not have a device at all.
I actually think this is more of a problem with technical people overvaluing the importance of the technology and not caring enough about what their customer actually needs. They think that the technology is what matters. But technology is just a tool. It really doesn't matter how ugly, janky or suboptimal the technology is if it is a useful enough tool.
People want a cheap device that doesn't ruin the reading experience and has access to all the books they want.
What I think is driving this is the lack of competition. No-one is going to take on the Kindle. Not because they don’t think they couldn’t make a better device, but because the don’t think they could create a digital bookstore with enough titles to be useful.
There is actually competition to the Kindle, although you often wouldn't know it, reading "mainstream" US-centric forums such as HN.
Kobo offers a complete ecosystem similar to the Kindle, with bookstore, devices and syncing. There are a number of regional players as well in this space.
Then, of course, there are all the device makers that simply expect you to bring your own content.
> Then, of course, there are all the device makers that simply expect you to bring your own content.
Someone on hacker news talked about using syncthing for their ebook and I had to replicate it. it sounded so much more useful than my previous experience with ebook readers, the nook simple touch.
My quest to find an e-reader that supported Android 4.4+ and both headphone jacks and SD cards resulted in a likebook Mars.
Now I can use syncthing to sync my library...ebooks, PDF, and audiobooks, automatically in the background, no account needed.
I would have preferred to purchase a modern incarnation of the very first Kindle, with a headphone jack, SD card, and keyboard, but nobody makes such a device any longer, or if they do, it is so out of date that it cannot run syncthing.
I continue to be excited about the pine phone keyboard design, because from there it is only a properly sized e ink screen away from being a tiny e-reader with keyboard headphone jack and Linux!
There just isn't any good competition. As with anything else, lack of competition stifles innovation. Why should they spend engineer time on this when it sells just as well?
Apparently, Kindles are the worst in the terms of input latency and performance, but then this is also expected given their specification and the price point.
I agree with almost all of the above, except for the touchscreen. I had the Kindle Non-Touch 4 and used it from 2012-2019, and having the touchscreen was an amazing improvement in usability and QOL when using the Kindle. Makes navigating, creating collections etc a lot faster. Other than that, I wish they would show the Kindle more love!
The touchscreen makes the Kindle unusable with one-hand operation. I'm glad the Oasis went back (at least partially) to buttons, though the buttons are too small.
The Kindle 3 did buttons right. You don't even need to push the page advance/retreat buttons, just flex your palm holding the Kindle. Very nice.
I'm adding 2.4 Ghz WiFi only on a $250 device in 2019 and a browser which is permanently 'experimental'.
May be the browser is not being used by many hardcore Kindle users, but Hacker News on my Kindle Oasis is a delight to use(if the attached URLs went easy on JS, Looking at you TechCrunch); Especially when I was bedridden after a surgery and Kindle was one of the few devices which worked for my accessibility needs.
It feel having 'experimental' tag on the browser is like 'If you keep using this browser, instead of buying books from us, we'll pull the plug anytime'.
In the big tech companies it is much harder to make the case for incremental improvements to existing products than it is to take on new disruptive problems.
Depends on the company - in a company like Amazon where Jeff is constantly pushing the envelope - standing still is the best recipe for falling behind. And you can see a hint of this happening in the article itself - the person running Books is given the reward of commoditizing Books as the reward of doing a great job of running Books. All the glory is in delivering new bigger and better things to Jeff, not in incrementally delivering 10% year over year improvements on an existing problem. In fact in such companies it can become difficult for managers to attract and retain ambitious talent to work on "incremental" things.
What's the point of a dedicated e-reader instead of a phone or tablet with the brightness turned down? As a device category it will go the way of mp3 players and button phones.
I owned several kindles but my current one has been gathering dust for years and instead I just use the kindle phone app.
An e-reader battery lasts longer than a phone. Also, there are no temptations to constantly check news or social media (or even Amazon’s ecosystem: my Kindle has been in airplane mode since the very minute I unboxed it). I don't even take my phone into the bedroom because it is a proven source of distraction and poor sleep, but a Kindle allows me to do some long and productive reading at night or when I wake up in the morning.
> We added a keyboard for search (this was a mistake, but it was worth a try).
I have a keyboard kindle. The keyboard is not a mistake; it's great. I wish other kindles had kept it.
(The keyboard does feature a glaring mistake -- it doesn't have any number keys, despite the fact that its primary use is to type numbers. But the solution is to have number keys, not to get rid of the keyboard.)
I've got a kindle keyboard too. Very nice to have buttons to type with for search. What numbers are you entering, I can't recall doing that very often?
People keep saying "search", "search". But for me, no1 use case was making notes. Am I the weird one to make notes of my thoughts in books/articles as I read?
I liked the keyboard kindle, it was the best. Touch really sucks and it's makes one constantly anxious of not touching the wrong spot on the screen. Having dedicated buttons for actions makes it more predictable
"Don't believe the institutional no" "Just because someone else has failed does not mean it's not possible"
So here's the part where we ignore basically all legitimate advice and the experience of others? Then are we using judgement, or hubris? If there is some artefact of new technology that changes the nature of the opportunity, then that's not so much 'ignoring' advice, it's contextualising it i.e. 'well it failed before, but ink screens are now cheap'. Etc.
>3/ Cannibalize yourself. Steve Kessel was running Amazon’s media business in 2004 (books/music/DVD’s). Books alone generated more than 50% of Amazon’s cash flow. Jeff fired Steve from his job and reassigned him to build Kindle. Steve’s new mission: destroy his old business.
- In 2015 Amazon's free cash flow was $529M [1], printed books contributed ~$250M to that
- In 2019 total ebook revenue in the United States $983.3M (overall and not only Amazon's). [2]
Was Kindle 'distraction' worth it? I love Kindle and eBooks but did Bezos really make the right call when Amazon was just about beginning to recover from the severe dotcom crash?
The touch screen could be improved, but probably hasn't been because it would raise the cost and it is good enough. Most other things about the kindle are pretty good, including wireless syncing the early use of an e-ink screen, both of which were contrarian and ahead of their time.
The software is just good enough, like most Amazon software, but it does stay out of the way if you stick to the happy path. I don't really want it to change, I turn of most of the 'features' they've added over the years, like highlighting or notes. I want it to do one thing well - present black text on a white page, and it has done that well for years.
For me the value of a kindle is that it is a cheap single-function device which performs that function very well. If I want to read, I read on the kindle by choice, because the screen is a vastly better experience for reading than an LCD. If it breaks, I buy another, because it's much better than any other device (including paper) for reading.
I agree. The original Kindle was revolutionary. But it's been completely stagnant since then.
The level of innovation to drive forward doesn't have to be that large. After a lot of time thinking about the problem, the sweet spot for me would be an e-reader that combines:
* CBR/CBZ/EPUB support
* MicroSD slot for expandable storage (or 32 GB+)
* Yellow backlight
* Robust enough software
* No Android or web browser to speak of (I want a focused device without distractions) (but maybe Pocket Casts built in, with a 3.5mm port or Bluetooth)
* 300 dpi
* 7.8 inch display
And a price point of US$150. Which seems to be impossible with a 7.8 inch e-ink display. If someone comes out with this device I will buy it instantly. The Kobo Clara HD comes seriously close and I love mine but it is on the verge of no longer being on sale.
I think I will just have to wait for the Android e-ink tablets to come down in price and deal with an absolutely ancient version of Android, which they all seem to have.
Kobo hardware was/is really good, I bought Kindles for my mum (the amazon store experience is easier for her) and Kobo's for myself and the Auro One was a fabulous piece of hardware.
I know, I love it. It's there, but it's so bad that it's not keeping me from the eBooks for any appreciable amount of time, the actual intent behind the device.
The removal of the physical page turning button rendered one handed usage impossible if you want hold the kindle in your left hand. It is massively annoys me.
You only need to be able to reach about a 1/3 of the way over the screen to tap the part that changes to the next page. Takes a little time to get used to but I read left handed all the time.
Instead of tapping the left of the screen swipe from right to left and it’ll go to the next page. The UX on that is awful as it’s never mentioned, but it is very possible to read left handed.
Spot-on. While there is definitely a component of genius in Bezos' personality, for this exact reason, most of the - let's call them - guidelines, won't work for other people/projects.
Point in case:
> 7/ Set unrealistic expectations
This is a recipe for a disaster for the vast majority of the projects. One field that pops into my mind is videogames development - this attitude is one of the greatest and well-known problems.
The keyboard might have been a mistake but the jogwheel was the best possible input device for the two core tasks of menu navigation and text highlighting. I miss it a lot.
I worked in the Kindle division and got to see a lot of the prototypes being soldered and tested.
The most interesting one to me was the version that had a metallic case with over 1,000 holes drilled into it as a esthetic design feature. This made it unmanufacturable - Foxconn had to buy thousands of additional CNC machines just to drill those little holes.
If you're interested in reading about how physical items can be made unmfg., read about all the startups that request "Apple white plastic", which requires cleaning every machine in the factory to get bright white for just your run.
> They made a fairly useful gadget that sold well.
Perhaps a little bit breathless, but it was an amazing thing at the time. I remember buying one (a DX) from Malyasia, (because they weren't available in Australia), through a reseller (some company who bought stacks of them and resold them around the world). It was a talking point for a long time - people would ask me about it on the train etc. I still have it and still marvel at its amazingness occasionally.
Edit: remembered some more - laptops at the time had awful battery life, this thing could carry thousands of books and last weeks from one charge. I could download any book (mostly) instantly, before that I'd order books from the states, they'd take weeks to arrive and cost a fortune. It was an amazing thing.
>Perhaps a little bit breathless, but it was an amazing thing at the time.
I bought the first kindle and I thought it was great but "amazing" is a bit much. E-readers already existed, Amazon's main selling point was their catalog and aggressive pricing. I mean the Sony Reader predates the Kindle and is technically fairly similar AFAIK: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Sony_Rea...
On top of that e-paper readers so far have effectively been a fad, conventional smartphones and tablets have taken over pretty dramatically. Paper books are also going nowhere. So the impact of the Kindle is negligible when compared to something like the iPhone, that completely changed the standard for a mobile phone.
>On top of that e-paper readers so far have effectively been a fad, conventional smartphones and tablets have taken over pretty dramatically.
Yeah. I like my Paperwhite well enough for certain uses but I'm not even sure I would replace it if it broke tomorrow. And I'm a little surprised at the degree to which people have stuck with physical books even when it's just flowing text. I'm at the point where a new book means a book I have needs to be donated. I'd much rather books that are just text are digital. But then, in normal times, I'm traveling most of the time.
E-books really haven't ended up being that much of a revolution and certainly dedicated readers are not.
Somebody would have created an ebook if not for Amazon. They were just well placed to do so, but they didn't invent any of the technology or concepts.
Much like Apple and touchscreen phones, or Tesla and electric cars. The might have advanced the tech by a couple of years but they were profiting off the inevitable.
IIRC from the Everything Store there was some conjecture that the Amazon "read the first chapter" feature paved the way to mass digitalization of books. So they were well positioned to launch with decent selection and ramp up faster than if they relied on the pace of distributors.
If any amazonians from around that time could confirm that would be cool...
Could be, there were other ebook readers around at the time, but it was Amazon that integrated it with the business of buying books and made them cheap. So, yes, eventually some one would have done it, but by then the iPad may have been around, would a kindle have been viable, after the iPad? hard to say.
My issue with it is the same as with anyone trying to reverse engineer Steve Jobs' work -- you probably can't cargo-cult greatness. Take: "everyone told him it was a distraction, he ignored them" and "set unrealistic expectations". These are terrible pieces of advice in the general case, and what's more, I can't imagine that they're advice that Bezos himself follows very regularly. However, in these specific cases, he was right, and he won big.
he might even have been "right", just won. so many "successful" products/services won despite the complete clownness of their founders.
sure, probably there are some small degree of correlation (and maybe even some kind of causal influence) between being a hard to work with hard worker (eg being a stubborn visionary who can kind of execute their vision), but that's probably due to how the world is currently set up, those are not universal rules of success. they worked in those scenarios, but might be completely maladaptive in others. (Eg Theranos trying to fake it till making it was a big no-no, but Uber sort of hit gold with it in the US.)
> He talks as if his work revolutionized the world and Jeff Bezos is a god among men.
I read the Tweets as an appreciation for Bezos’ vision, specifically acting on a non-consensus prediction at a moment when the core businesses was struggling.
The Kindle ecosystem includes the store and the reader apps, not just the e-ink reader. New business models that cannibalize existing core businesses are non-trivial to implement in a large company.
I've read quite a few posts on the thread and all I got is "Jeff did this,Jeff did that.Jeff is amazing,Jeff is cool. Jeff is brilliant.Jeff,Jeff,Jeff..". Of course he was pushy and demanding to get the results,but come on,give some credit to others too.
One key takeaway I have from this story is that the core skill of making a business and making it work – is critical and different from the “business idea” itself. It means that if you are a good “businessman”, you can start a new business in a new field, and possibly succeed. That’s why we see so much “pivoting” and forays into new ideas. Here Bezos and Amazon jumped into two completely new things they hadn’t done before: the Kindle, and AWS. And they succeeded! You don’t have to stick with what’s familiar, easy, or what’s your “area of expertise”. You can jump into new stuff, new project, completely new & innovative endeavors, and very well possibly succeed!! So HAVE HOPE!!! That’s my takeaway from this!
The basic stuffups in the GUI are astronomical. Try author search. Sorry.. we just do what we do. Yes you typed john le Carre but it suits us better to show you authors LIKE John le Carre.
The story is about a creative response to Apple's decimation of the music industry's business model. It signalled the time had come to bring digital distribution to books, and Bezos was one of the few in the business to realize that. I'll agree that the hardware never satisfied, but while I'm sure it's been a disappointment to many, it certainly has not stopped the trend nor has it hurt the kindle project much.
> Jeff fired Steve from his job and reassigned him to build Kindle. Steve’s new mission: destroy his old business.
Fun fact for trivia night: Steve, after he returned from his sabbatical, would go on to head the Amazon Go division. Some amazingly diverse set of leadership roles over the years for him. His Kindle portfolio was handed over to Dave Limp, an ex-Apple executive.
Yes, there's definitely a bit of survivorship bias going on here. The lesson isn't to compete with yourself, or ignore all of your advisors, or trying to pivot your business model after a crash etc etc. There are plenty of businesses who have failed doing all these things. I suspect that Jeff Bezos had a vision, and these are more side effects rather than the reason for its success.
I loved how older paperwhite wasn't flat. I mean the border was risen-up.
Modern paperwhite and oasis have their screen hidden behind layer of think transparent plastic. You don't feel like your are staring at actual paper anymore
Fun fact: the original Amazon Echo has a significant amount of Kindle software in it, developed by the same branch. The later releases switched to Android for no particularly good reason...
the bit about 100k books at launch at 9.99 could have been dumping no? He makes no mention of the publishers coming to an agreement on such a low price. Usually e-books like that are 19.99 iirc.
The publishers were not happy, sued in combination wither other tech companies, and introduced agency pricing as a response. A story with no heroes or winners.
I had a prs-900 (sony daily reader). I remember at the time comparing it with the Amazon alternative and the Sony one being way better in both how open it was, features and speed.
Pocketbook Color: yes, a color e-ink device for about $200: https://pocketbook.ch/en-ch/catalog/color/color-ch You can see the Pocketbook color reading comics here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkufktAQC_E&t=0s which beautifully demonstrates its colour capabilities.
Onyx Boox Note 2: 10'' e-ink screen, Android 9.0, touch and wacom digitizer: https://onyxboox.com/boox_note2 It can be used for school/uni/research. Its large screen and notetaking features pair well with annotating fixed-layout formats such as PDFs.
I have some strong opinions about Amazon and its eBook business. I really like their tech but their business practices are not aligned with what I want for myself as an author. I have moved to Kobo for my personal eReader and am using a Kobo Forma which is their answer to the Kindle Oasis. Even though the Oasis hardware with its metal usage feels much more premium than the Forma with its flexy plastic shell, the device is much more open than the Oasis and it is easier for me to use it both as a reader and as an author. I live in the UK and Kobo through its partner Overdrive -- which it owned up until not long ago but I am not sure they still do -- allows me to borrow books from local libraries. I have a couple library cards from different library consortiums and that gives me a lot of catalogs to search and borrow from. Synchronizing with Pocket is also a godsend, every time I see a nice article here on HN that I think deserves more attention and care, I just send it to Pocket and read it from the Kobo in a nice park.
Anyway, this is just some pointers to those here that never experienced ebooks and ereaders outside Amazon. Yes, Amazon brings a lot of value to the table, especially for the readers, books tend to be cheaper in Amazon but that is due to its monopolistic practices and thug tactics. Kindle is not where the innovation is happening, other devices have better hardware and better software, other companies have healthier ecosystems.