Kindle, and other E-Book Readers

“Anyone have a Kindle?
How do you like it?
Is the 6" screen really big enough?

I could see a Kindle under my Christmas Tree this year.”

“i heard there were other players out there better than the Kindle. I can't remember what they are presently :( The thing I dind't care for about the Kindle is...well its not a book, but also there was something I hated about how to turn the page. I looked at one at B&N...oh its also sorta heavy for backpacking...that is the only reason i'd want an electronic book....backpacking ;) lol.”

“A friend of mine, from London, absolutly loves his kindle. Recently, on Facebook, we had a long discussion about the pro's & con's. I am old fashioned and love books, but he is all for the kindle. I could connect you with him on FB, if you like. He's a stand-up-comedian, so I think you two would get along nicely. He is Italian. My friend. Not the kindle. Didn't you say your family has connections to the mafia?”

“i heard there were other players out there better than the Kindle. I can't remember what they are presently :( The thing I dind't care for about the Kindle is...well its not a book, but also there was something I hated about how to turn the page. I looked at one at B&N...oh its also sorta heavy for backpacking...that is the only reason i'd want an electronic book....backpacking ;) lol.

Reading a book on an electronic device is like wearing a condom...it's just not natural.”

“Nigal, it may not be natural, but sure is safer. I mean, wearing a condom. Not sure about the kindle.”

“Hell I'm wearing one right now! Can't be too safe.”

“Of course.
There is one safety issue to consider - one can't get paper cuts when using a kindle.”

“Give me the good old fashion paperbacks..you can stuff em' in your back pocket, throw them if don't like the author, use the pages for toilet paper in emergencies and use them for fire tender if the need presents itself..besides all that..they're less expensive and don't need to be recharged.”

“True. I want to see how one uses the kindle as emergency toilet paper.”

“I went in with my sister and parents and bought my nephew a Nook (Barns and Noble's E reader) for his birthday this fall.

The main reason for going with that one over the Kindle was the Nook worked with EPUB and PDF formatted documents where as the Kindle only worked with AMZ documents. This means you can only get books from Amazon to read on the Kindle where as you get books for the Nook from other sources such as Google Books or public libraries. You cannot download books from Amazon for the Nook.

Over all the two reads are pretty much equal. The 6" screen is the same size as most paper backs. The Eink screen on the readers looks just like paper and is very easy on the eyes unlike lcd screens. The screens are not back lit, so you would need a reading light to use them in the dark. Another nice feature is you can increase the font sizes on the text to reduce eye strain. It is nice to potentially have an entire library at one's finger tips. Good old fashion ink on paper books still have their place and the ereaders won't replace them any time soon. At least I hope not.”

“I was a dedicated palm PDA user. One of the things I used it for was to read books, magazines and reference material. This was for work and pleasure. Palm stopped making PDAs and I don’t use a cell phone so I now use an Ipod touch (AKA Ipad nano). I use it as a reader as well as a PDA and music player. It has disadvantages compared to a paper book but to tot along all the material I have on the pod I would need a hand truck. And I have taken it backpacking. I wouldn’t use an electronic device that was only for reading.”

“you can get the Kindle app for Blackberry, Android and Iphone...I am going to get it as soon as its available for my phone.. it will be a nice alternative. But I agree with mtngal, i wouldnt buy a dedicated reader...the ipad would be a better buy than the kindle imo.”

“oh and how the hell do you not have a cell phone??”

“Most cell phone use is to make up for lack of planning. I have email access with the Ipod anywhere wifi is available. I plan in advance and make independent decisions when needed. I love seeing people in the grocery store calling someone to find out which brand of corn they should buy. That and my business does not depend on the phone.”

“My wife has bugged me for a year to get her a Kindle. I kept resisting, with arguments like her laptop had a far bigger (and backlit) screen, and she could get apps to do the same thing. She got an electronic coupon to buy one cheaper than used prices, so she finally won. A Kindle is on the way right now.”

“I've been reading on-line books from my laptop, and it's less than great.

A dedicated e-reader designed just for that purpose makes a lot of sense to me. The only thing I'm not happy with is being tied to only one store's format.

Lumber, thanks for the Nook headsup. I'll check it out.”

“hahaha...I hear ya...I love my cell phone, the convenience of it. We gave up the home phone bc we always use the cell...Chili has to have one for work, so it just works...”

“I have had a Kindle for about a year now. I use it everyday on my train commute. For my uses, e-ink is far superior to an LCD screen. What is fun and interesting about having an e-reader device is the ability to browse books just as if you were in a book store, but you can do it anywhere you have cell phone coverage. Also, I don't mind reading news clips on my Blackberry, but I would never think that I could actually read novels on it like I do on the Kindle.

I am not sure how long it will take by buying from Amazon at the Kindle price vs. paper copies to cover the price of the Kindle itself (it was a gift to me anyway), but I can tell you my amount of reading has gone up since owning it. And that alone is worth the price of admission for me.

Since it was a gift to me, I can not tell you if I would have chosen it over a Sony or the Barnes and Nobel version, but I can tell you having a version with cell coverage (not just wifi) is definitely worth it to me.”

“I've read that the Kindle does not have a user replaceable battery. What do you do when the battery dies from to many charge cycles, as all rechargeble batteries do?

The Nook is looking better and better.”

“you get an iPad”

“I went to Best Buy to look at eReaders, and got to play with all three units I was considering. I liked the Nook better than the Kindle. The iPad was just to big to put on your chest while in bed and read for hours.

They had sold all their $150 Nooks or I would have bought one.”

“I'm loving my new Nook e-reader.

I found a nice source for free Science Fiction books.

http://www.baen.com/library/”

“is it tough to get used to reading a screen as opposed to print?...what's the weight of these compared to a book?...i have a hard time envisioning "curling up with a good plasma screen"”

“I have the Kindle app on my phone, so convient. If you have a couple of minutes to kill, its right there where you left off. Good for checking in here too.”

““is it tough to get used to reading a screen as opposed to print?...what's the weight of these compared to a book?...i have a hard time envisioning "curling up with a good plasma screen"”
thriftyhiker
3:28:09 PM
12/14/10

The main place I read my Nook is in bed.

The screen size is about the same as a paperback and the text on the screen is very readable (eInk), and you can adjust the font size to whatever you want.”

“I've read that the Kindle does not have a user replaceable battery. What do you do when the battery dies from to many charge cycles, as all rechargeble batteries do?

The Nook is looking better and better.”
Stovie
7:10:46 AM
11/29/10

From my understanding you need to send it to Amazon to get the battery replaced. Actually, getting away from the Kindle would be good for me to get through a few of the paper books that I have been waiting to read. The battery has not been an issue with me for the year that I have had it. I assume I will get at least another year or two out of it before the battery issue is something I need to deal with.

I played around with a friends iPad for a few days and I can definitely say that e-ink is 100x better than an LCD screen for reading books.

The Nook may be better than the Kindle version that I have, but that is the nature of tech products (newer/better). I will continue to enjoy the Kindle for a while and maybe I will get something different within the next year or so if it seems worth it.

BTW, I did not mention the cover I have for the Kindle. I bought an Oberon leather cover for it as soon as I received the Kindle. I have received lots of questions and praise for the cover. Oberon has some pretty cool designs. This is the one that I have.



”

“I'm thinking of getting an e-book, but I'm waiting for the price to come down and for them to have more gigabites and rams.”

“Eventually there will be convergence between these and tablet computers, but for now they are readers, not computers.

I have emailed my wife through Gmail from my Kindle before when I left my phone at work. It was kludgy, but it worked. I can also read and respond on Trailtalk. Not that I would want to on this device, but it is possible.

The Kindle is a very low-power use device and that is one of its great appeals. I do not usually leave the broadband connection on. With it off, I can read for a couple weeks without needing to charge it. Only needing to turn it on when I need to acquire a new book.”

“that's a cool cover hub...anyone hear the report on NPR the other day that talked about these things having cell antenna's in them that transmit information back to the company about what you're reading?”

“I have not heard the report you mention Thrifty. Would not suprise me if it was true.

The cover I showed should probably last several (geez, maybe 50 or 100) years under normal use.”

“Nice cover.”

“so that they can track if you read something you didn't pay for.

sneaky on their part, but prolly wise - on their part.”

“There is a whole lot of stuff for free or real cheap, old stuff. I think I paid 1.99 for all the works of Thoureau.

I like the phone app as opposed to the kindle for the battery reason. My phone has replaceable, so I can carry extras. My wife has a regular Kindle, so she can share stuff between it and her phone. I can't read her books on my phone, that kinda sucks.

The Kindle uses a 3G signal to load books, no monthly service, it just comes with the device.”

“http://www.amazon.com/

The Kindle Fire might be for me.”

“It does look interesting, but I hate Amazon's cloud music player.”

“Battery life is only 8 hours vs up to 2 months on the eink versions.”

“just take a book to read. Plus the book can have a dual purpose. As you read it tear the pages out and burn them”

“I bought a refurb Kindle 2 a couple of months ago and I love it. The Fire is way more than just an e-book reader, so comparing the Fire to the Kindle is apples-to-oranges. Given the prices on other tablets I've seen, it might very well be the iPad alternative for those of use who hate Apple.”

“My wife has a kindle and she loves it. She has already downloaded hundreds of books and reads from it daily.”

“My Nook is still going strong.”

“The Fire is way more than just an e-book reader, so comparing the Fire to the Kindle is apples-to-oranges. Given the prices on other tablets I've seen, it might very well be the iPad alternative for those of use who hate Apple.”
bitpusher
9:56:48 AM
9/29/11

That's more why I'm looking at it. Not that I hate Apple, I'm just looking for something else.”

“I've been using a Kindle Fire for a few weeks now and am pretty happy with it so far. It's not an iPad (or so I am told) but it does everything I want for a lot less $$.”

“Why not just use a phone? My phone does everything a Kindle fire does and more at half the weight and has a removeable battery.”

“Well why shouldn't I just use a house phone, a tv with cable, a computer, a real book and a radio, lol?

Seriously though, I can't read a book on a phone (I'm old-ish) and I don't have the need for 3G (or whatever is it now) to justify the extra $30 per month per phone and I didn't want to sign another phone contract. I have WiFi at home, it's (WiFi) pretty much available everywhere now so a WiFi device is all I "need." The screen isn't a 42" Hi-Def but it's bigger than a phone screen so movie and tv streaming looks fine to me---as do web pages.
I didn't consider the weight because I didn't figure I'd take it hiking. But I might take it anyway.

I gave serious consideration to a new phone and a data package but just couldn't justify the cost. Same was true when considering the Fire vs the iPad.”

“I tried the opposite. I used a phone as a hotspot as my only home internet connection. It worked but not that well, Netflix used up much bandwidth.

My phone's screen is about 4.5" as opposed to 7" for the Fire, so not really a huge difference. The Kindle app is great! You can change font size, type and lighting to make reading easier. For me it's much simpler to have one device that does more than two inferior devices. I think my phone is also cheaper than the Fire. YMMV.”

“As Kindle Fire Faces Critics, Remedies Are Promised

By DAVID STREITFELD

The Kindle Fire, Amazon’s heavily promoted tablet, is less than a blazing success with many of its early users. The most disgruntled are packing the device up and firing it back to the retailer.

A few of their many complaints: there is no external volume control. The off switch is easy to hit by accident. Web pages take a long time to load. There is no privacy on the device; a spouse or child who picks it up will instantly know everything you have been doing. The touch screen is frequently hesitant and sometimes downright balky.

All the individual grievances — recorded on Amazon’s own Web site — received a measure of confirmation last week when Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert, denounced the Fire, saying it offered “a disappointingly poor” experience. For users whose fingers are not as slender as toothpicks, he warned, the screen could be particularly frustrating to manipulate.

“I feel the Fire is going to be a failure,” Mr. Nielsen, of the Nielsen Norman Group, a Silicon Valley consulting firm, said in an interview. “I can’t recommend buying it.”

All this would be enough to send some products directly to the graveyard where the Apple Newton, the Edsel, New Coke and McDonald’s Arch Deluxe languish. But as a range of retailers and tech firms could tell you, it would be foolish to underestimate Amazon.

Amazon sees the Kindle line of devices as critical for its future as a virtual store, and is willing to lose money on the sale of each one for the sake of market share. Once dominance is achieved, it plans to make money on the movies, books and music that users download directly from Amazon.

First, however, it needs to make the devices ubiquitous. Promoting them every day to its tens of millions of customers at the cheapest possible price will surely help. If Apple brought the notion of the tablet into the mainstream, Amazon is making it affordable.

The retailer says the Kindle Fire is the most successful product it has ever introduced, a measure of enthusiasm that reveals nothing; it has not specified how many Fires it has sold, nor how many Kindles it has ever sold. It also says it is building even more Fires to meet the strong demand. But, at the same time, it acknowledges that it is working on improvements.

“In less than two weeks, we’re rolling out an over-the-air update to Kindle Fire,” said Drew Herdener, a company spokesman.

There will be improvements in performance and multitouch navigation, and customers will have the option of editing the list of items that show what they have recently been doing. No more will wives wonder why their husbands were looking at a dating site when they said they were playing Angry Birds.

Amazon declines to say, but soon — probably in the spring — there will be an improved version of the device itself. One more shot is all the retailer will get, Mr. Nielsen said. “If that’s a failure, then the Fire is doomed to the dust pile of history.”

Despite Amazon’s silence on the matter, analysts have been estimating the company will sell from three to five million Fires this quarter. They are neither raising their estimates nor lowering them.

Amazon’s devotion to this product line is such that it has stripped down the original Kindle e-reader, reduced its price and begun to sell it through other retailers like Best Buy and Wal-Mart for $79, as well as prominently on its Web site. If Amazon had Apple-like margins, analysts estimate that the basic Kindle might cost $180.

According to calculations by the research firm IHS iSuppli, the $79 Kindle costs Amazon $84 to make. That sum does not include research and development, shipping or, with a third-party retailer, the wholesale discount. Add these up, and Amazon might be losing as much as $20 on every $79 Kindle sold at, for example, Best Buy.

For most hardware makers, that would be a recipe for corporate suicide. But once the device is activated in a buyer’s home, the losses stop and the consumption begins.

“What else are you going to do on this Kindle?” asked Andrew Rassweiler, senior director of teardown services at iSuppli. “Nothing. It’s a useless device unless you’re planning on putting books, a lot of books, on it.”

The Fire is trying to do much more than be an e-book reader, a function some say it does not do as well as the original Kindle. Slightly more than a third of the 4,500 reviewers of the Fire on Amazon have given it mixed to negative reviews, three stars or fewer. Of Amazon reviewers of the iPad 2, 22 percent have given three stars or fewer; for the original Kindle, that number is 11 percent. (There are a few caveats. At least some of the iPad reviewers bought not from Apple but from resellers, the real target of their ire. As for the original Kindle, after four years it has both a huge number of reviews — over 34,000 — and the advantage of being a known quantity.)

Many of the initial customers of the Fire seem to have bought it on a mixture of faith and hype. The striking thing even about some of the one-star reviewers is that they are regretful rather than angry. One review, couched as an open letter to Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, began: “I have spent thousands on your outstanding site. I own and love the original kindle. When asked about why I would buy a Fire when I had an ipad, I said that half of me wanted to just support your effort and that I believed amazon just did things right.” The reviewer is now recommending that friends skip lunch to buy an iPad.

Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, has been tracking the opinions as more reviews are posted on Amazon. Since Nov. 18, five-star reviews have fallen slightly, to 47 percent from 50 percent, he says. One-star reviews have held relatively steady at about 13 percent.

“I would have expected things to be even worse at this point,” Mr. Munster said, adding that initial buyers were usually the most critical. Pricing will save the Fire, he predicted. At $199 versus $500 for an iPad, “Amazon has a lot of air cover to have a B-level product.”

Mr. Nielsen, the consultant, disagreed.

The 7-inch Fire does a good job displaying sites optimized for smaller mobile devices, he said, but stumbles when it tries to show pages designed for 10-inch tablets. “Like squeezing a size-10 person into a size-7 suit,” Mr. Nielsen wrote in his report. “Not going to look good.” As for displaying desktop sites, forget it.

It is true that the device is only $199, but so what? “Look at your hand. Is it thin or fat?” he asked. “If it’s fat, you just know it’s going to be bad.”

The device does do one thing well, he said. Shopping on Amazon is a breeze. “If I were given to conspiracy theories, I’d say that Amazon deliberately designed a poor Web browsing user experience to keep Fire users from shopping on competing sites,” Mr. Nielsen said.”

“Sad to hear that so many people though they were getting an ipad or something else, lol. My only complaint is that I can't create email folders. (Yet.)

I just posted here with mine!”

“nonconformist, I was hoping you would post something on this article. when you see the Amazon ads they tend to make you think it will do the same as an Ipad.

So far are you liking the Fire or do you wish you had gotten the Ipad”

“The author of that hit piece is a dunce.

The Kindle Fire is not a tablet. it's a fancy eReader.”

“Well I did my research before and after it came out so I knew exactly what to expext and what the limitations would be. I'd call it either an e-reader-plus or a tablet-light. Or maybe better yet it's a smart-phone-e-reader hybrid. Nothing I read before or after it came out made me think it was an ipad. (Then again, I'm not sure what an ipad can do that the Fire can't.) So far it does what I expected it to do and I'm quite happy with it.

This IS the first version so I'm not surprised there are kinks or unhappy customers.”