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 bought the DX for the large screen so I can read programming books and pdfs on e ink. I like some of the artwork, esp the one of the fish. I think the kindle 4 smaller devices have more contemporary screen savers.
I didn't anticipate how much I would come to prefer my DX to everything else. I do wish that screensaver (that isn't quite the right term) was at least somewhat customizable though.
I bought the DX in order to read PDFs on it. No conversion is necessary - just attach a USB cable and drag-n-drop the PDFs to it. The page switch time is fine.
The only real downside is you can't "flip" through the pages. Reading a book sequentially works fine, any other way is a pain.
I got the DX at the $250 special Amazon had for it last Monday. The price is back to $379.
It works quite well for reading books sequentially, even technical books. One problem I had is that their fixed width font is not the most readable in the world. For jumping back and forth, the experience is not great, but not completely intolerable either.
The DX (and I think also the other Kindles by now) reads pdfs natively, no need for a conversion service.
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.
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.
With the Kindle, I started to buy books more often, as they take no physical space. So even if they are cheaper per unit, I am spending more, not saving money.
I guess it depends on what you are measuring. In terms of absolute spend, I agree that I spend more on books than I used to. However, given that I'm buying more books because I'm actually reading more, my "per-book spending" is a little lower.
I've heard the occasional story of Amazon freezing a customer's access to his books because of unrelated issues with the account, like returning too many items. If I do get a Kindle, which I am currently thinking of buying, I will probably create a separate Amazon account solely for use with it.
So I guess we agree on most of these points: e-books are great; DRM, not so much. And I think most of what you've said would apply to all of the readers reviewed (not sure about #5).
My lament about the review (and many MANY others I have read) is that it seems to heavily review physical form factor, page turn speed, button design, et cetera. All of which are important to some degree. But I think that degree has been overemphasized and is a distraction.
Whereas really, when you adopt one of these (let's take sideloading, DRM cracking etc. out of the picture for the moment), you adopt at least:
- A physical device (covered extensively)
- A store infrastructure
- Its payment system & trustworthiness, flexibility, etc thereof
- Parental controls and/or spending limits
- The DRM scheme(s) for the content it provides (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Rights_Management#E-books)
- The license(s) under which the content is available
- The format of the content (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_formats)
- For periodicals: Access and deletion policies around back issues
- The ability of the provider to give you good prices and a wide range of titles, periodicals, etc.
- Provider policies about content sharing, family usage, et cetera
- The device's ability to integrate with public libraries
- The device's ability to integrate with 3rd party service providers (the review touches on this with respect to Instapaper)
- The set of formats the device will read
- Your ability to get content you paid for on and off of the device
And probably a bunch of other things I don't know about.
So to me, what is under-reviewed is the way in which consumers get to buy, trade, sell, borrow, lend, and use the content. That seems to me to matter much more.
I spent this year buying a lot of $7 Agatha Christie e-books on various e-book stores and reading them on the respective apps on my phone (which is psychotic because each app has its own horrible quirks). I came away wondering if I would have been better off buying the $10 paperbacks, just so that I can physically distribute these books. (Aside: US copyright law is not helping here: "Murder on The Orient Express" will not leave copyright protection until 2046, 112 years after initial publication.)
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.
Two thoughts: First, from a user experience perspective, it basically sucks. I can buy an e-book on the Kindle Store/Nook Store/Kobo Store while sitting on a train, while trying to fall asleep, on the beach, etc. So convenience and immediacy has clear and tangible value.
Second, from a business perspective, lots of people side-loading helps to create incentives for e-book retailers to create exclusive deals either with publishers or authors (clearly, there are other reasons for these deals as well). This happened last year (http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2010/08/agent-ama...) although to a lesser degree than Mr. Wylie would have liked. AFAICT, if I want to read the ebook for "The Naked and the Dead" (Mailer) my sole choice is to get it through the Kindle store.
Yes, you are right that you adopt a lot when you pay for the Kindle: the device, the store, the DRM, the acceptable formats, etc. A realization that helped me overcome by hesitation is that I don't have have to love every aspect of the ecosystem -- I just have to like it enough to value it at $100 for the device and ~$10/book. (And I do value the ecosystem that much). I would rather pay $200+$15/book for DRM free, but I would also rather pay $10 to read a book I don't "own" on the Kindle than pay $5 for a book I physically own because I prefer convenience to ownership. So even if Kindle eBooks were marketed as "You pay the same price as the paper copy, and after you read a book once we automatically delete it," I would still buy eBooks for the convenience and portability(except I'd view the purchases more like renting than buying).
So to me, what is under-reviewed is the way in which consumers get to buy, trade, sell, borrow, lend, and use the content. That seems to me to matter much more.
I am guessing we both agree that the #1 purpose of the Kindle is to read books. Where we might differ is how important the nonprimary purposes are: lending, trading, etc. I used to think they were important, but at one point I realized I was more interested in the "potential ability" to use those features than actually using them. For example, I wanted to be able to lend books to friends, and it really bothered me that I wouldn't be able to do that with a Kindle. But when I did the math, I realized that while I recommended books frequently, I lent them rarely (due to logistics of living in different cities, forgetting to bring a book when I'm meeting up with someone, etc.) Similarly, I used to resell my used books, and it bothered me that I couldn't resell a Kindle book, which means I could never recoup any monetary value from it. But then I realized that I spent a lot of time listing books on half.com, I rarely recouped more than 20% of their value, and the whole process was a giant pain. The alternative of just buying the eBook at a 5-10% discount no longer seemed like a bad deal -- even if I could not resell it.
That said, for me lending and trading are distant seconds to reading. I'm sure there are many people, possible including you, who view those things as a very close second to reading. In that case, maybe the Kindle and other DRM-laden readers are not for you.
Finally, regarding your point that circumventing the Amazon store sucks: you're right. But part of the point is to figure out how much you value convenience vs DRM. If you hate DRM, then perhaps you embrace the extra effort required to buy books outside of Amazon. If you don't like it, but don't really care, then you just buy on Amazon. I think it's similar to how most people use Windows, a few people use Linux so that they can have more control/transparency, and then there's RMS who is happy to not use anything that is not GNU, even though 99.99% of the population thinks that would be a miserable (online) existence.
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.
Do books that you load on your Kindle with Calipre still get their metadata (read location being the main one I'd want) synced across Kindles/iOS/other devices?
No. Not even if you send it to your kindle via name_num@free.kindle.com.
But, Calibre is now much better at generating real TOCs and remembering their position when you go to/from sections & articles. The Economist (free!) and Reuters News auto-copy and delivery through Calibre are in quite good shape these days.
>No. Not even if you send it to your kindle via name_num@free.kindle.com.
This actually changed with a recent firmware update. I haven't bothered to update my kindle firmware to try it out, but personal documents should now be synced just like kindle books.
Edit: This hasn't come to the apps (iOS, android, et al) yet, but will be there in a few months supposedly.
I guess I should have clarified that I'd like to be able to use the device more-or-less as designed. Sideloading and conversion is nice but not something I want to do on any kind of regular basis.
That is to say: Yes, I can try to overcome cumbersome DRM by applying my own labor, but there is a cost to that. In my mind, that cost would count against the value proposition of the device.
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.
Unrelated to the Kindle, but regarding too many models - I wanted to get a new Dremel tool last week and looked online, but for the life of me I can't figure out what the difference is between all of them and their site is terrible at comparing models. Because of that I stopped looking for one and just realized why when I read your comment.
> 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.
Everything on the web points to the opposite. Ads in the long run are always more profitable.
Besides, nothing guarantees that the quality of the ads will stay the same. When I bought my Kindle 4 I reasoned they looked well now because the service is pretty new, but we'll start seeing all the abhorring ads we see on the web soon enough.
I would be stunned if the lifetime advertising revenue from a Kindle unit was higher than the price to turn the ads off. Isn't it much more likely to be purely a market segmentation thing? Sell the cheap version to the extremely price-sensitive, but get an extra $30 from those who don't really care about the price.
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.
I totally agree with you on the typography, though at this point I've gotten used to it.
Could you elaborate a bit on your reformatting? Does typesetting it in LaTeX make each page a fixed width? Do I understand correctly, then, that you wouldn't really be able to resize the text?
It's a bit crazy to me that algorithmic typesetting isn't a lot farther along than it seems to be. Hyphenation doesn't seem like that hard of a problem. Am I wrong? I guess the demand just isn't really there?
Typesetting it in LaTeX makes it a PDF, so you could zoom in but it wouldn't reformat. However, I can always recompile it at a different size on my computer; I haven't ever wanted to change the font size of a book while reading it.
TeX does automatic hyphenation, and a ton of other magic, so the technology is there. However, it might be too intensive for an ereader--it would probably take too long and kill the battery life.
I also suspect there is not much demand--reading English novels on the Kindle is perfectly fine. It could be better, but you'd only realize if you read a better book. Russian is more of an issue, but I don't think Russians make up a big part of the Kindle market. I don't even know if it's sold in Russia.
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.)
The Wifi version is also hackable in the same way. You might want to google "Kobo wifi hacks" and start looking around. Unfortunately, it's pretty early in the scene and developers are still working to figure stuff out. I'm not sure there are yet any workable apps written for these devices.
Thank you for then nudge. It appears the platform is rather amenable, and an initial look shows several potential options. Also, the existing firmware can be fully backed up -- there appear to be multiple ways of doing this -- so that borking can be undone, at worst by restoring the original firmware image that resides on an internal MicroSD card.
Unfortunately, my initial editing of an individual ePub title to adjust the font used for <code> was not accepted; I'll be exploring why, as I was trivially modifying some apparently successful instructions for adding custom fonts to e.g. support non-Roman language characters (Cyrillic, Chinese).
I think I'll pick one up after Christmas (via Craigslist) for hacking purposes. I've got a few simple app ideas well suited for e-ink. I think if there's a good community going around this, it might be fun.
It appears one can hack the ePub to change font settings and include an embedded TrueType font (maybe also other formats?), and the Kobo firmware will successfully process this.
I'm waiting for the battery to finish charging to see how Proggy Tiny Slashed-Zero looks. It may be too small, in which case I'll try one of the other Proggy variants, or Dina. (Both Proggy and Dina have TrueType implementations, although I'm uncertain how complete they are. I may have to look around for a better choice of a small-format fixed width font implemented in TrueType format.)
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.
