I agree smaller is more convenient but then a bigger screen is nice in so many ways. Guess it is whatever is most important to you.
That said the Skiff is the size of a sheet of paper. Should easily fit into most any shoulder bag.
You are not allowed to have both, you must choose one over the other.
iPad is flawed on many levels. I’d steer clear if I were you (or anyone else for that matter).
Such a disappointment. :mad:
I will take the trouble to point out that the entry-level iPad is approximately the same price as the Kindle DX. So keep that in mind.
If you are only looking for an e-book reader and nothing else, the entry-level Kindle is probably a good low-cost option. But if you are interested in an e-book reader that can also replace your laptop for e-mail and light websurfing when you travel, then the iPad might be the way to go. If I had a Kindle (which I don’t), I would still need to take my laptop on week-end trips to conferences: with an iPad I could get by with just the one item.
Where I see the iPad being a good solution: suppose I go visit my relatives for a week with my two kids. Right now, for a long plane trip, I carry a portable DVD player for the kids to watch a movie on, I have a laptop that me and my wife will use to check their e-mails while away from home, and I bring books with me. An iPad could serve all three purposes. (I realize that the DVD player is redundant but it happens to have longer battery life than my laptop.) With that being said, I don’t plan on being an iPad, but then again I don’t have a Kindle either.
How long is the warranty on the Kindle? There’s a recently bumped thread in CS where someone dropped their 9-month-old Kindle, and ruined it. They didn’t seem to think it was under warranty still, which surprises me given it was less than a year old.
The basic warranty is a year, but i’m not sure it would apply in the case you describe anyway. Most warranties don’t cover accident and breakage. If i step on my MP3 player or drop my netbook and smash the screen, it’s hardly Sansa or Asus’s fault that they don’t work anymore, and i wouldn’t expect them to be fixed or replaced under warranty.
Greatest Kindle Resources Site Ever (maybe)
has many sources of books, shortcuts, tools, and much much more …
…
I received my Kindle as a gift; I enjoy it. While I can only skim material on a computer screen, I can read comfortably on a kindle. I assume that is because of the eInk, though the fact that I can hold the device in my hands may also have something to do with it.
Does anybody have experience with both a tablet PC and and eReader? Does reading efficiency improve with posture, or is it the backlighting of my LCD/CRT that slows me down?
I believe it was twice: 1984 and Animal Farm [cite]. Personally, the mere thought of someone else remotely deleting files from one of my devices bothers the heck out of me.
I’ve been fascinated by e-readers for a while. My eyes aren’t good enough to read an ebook on an iPod, but Sony’s looked good. When I read Nicholson Baker’s article about the Kindle last November, it pretty thoroughly turned me off. Far more proprietary than music on the iPod, yet everybody else in the industry was going toward open (or easily-licensed) formats. And the article compares the Kindle 2 very unfavorably with other e-readers.
Is this something that has changed? A friend who purchased a Kindle early on told me that there was a charge every single time he wanted to copy a non-Kindle file to his Kindle. At the time, I went to the FAQ on Amazon’s site and confirmed the information, but now, I can’t find it there. The charge wasn’t much (10 or 15 cents), but there was definitely a charge.
A couple of months ago, I attended an ebook seminar in Denver, when I set up my store’s new website. One of the things I have on that site (thanks to the American Booksellers Association) is about half-a-million ebooks. In the seminar, I was told that we could offer ebooks for every reader out there except Kindle. We have a long list of e-readers and formats, but the legal guy there said that Amazon was the only company that held out and wouldn’t let us provide ebooks that they could read.
If the ebooks we sell for Sony, Adobe, Apple, and so forth work on Kindles, I’d imagine this guy would have been the first to shout it happily. Amazon fanboys are no different from Apple fanboys or Microsoft fanboys. They’ll buy a Kindle without considering the options, and if the site infrastructure these guys built for us could make Kindle owners happy, we’d all make more money!
Here’s where I think the iPad will have an advantage. Most of today’s e-readers are black and white. Many of the technical books I read, and virtually all of the children’s books I read to my grandson are in color. From the same New Yorker article I referenced earlier:
Thanks for that information. As I asked GameHat earlier, has this always been true? If the Kindle can read PDF files natively, why do reviews say that charts, tables, diagrams, equations, and so forth are so commonly mangled? Or is everyone else using Kindles for text-only novels and non-technical material?
There was, and is, a charge if you want them to deliver the converted documents wirelessly to the Kindle. If you just want them sent back to you (so you can transfer them via USB), it is now and always has been free.
He was, shall we say, amending the truth in two different ways. First, the Kindle reads the NON-DRM e-book formats of virtually every reader made, among others, they support Mobi. So he was neglecting to mention that what the Kindle wouldn’t support was the DRM on the files, which they didn’t have to put there in the first place. Secondly, ANYONE can publish information to the Kindle via their digital distribution platform; they just have to be willing to split some of the proceeds with Amazon. So he was telling you the truth, except for the part where he was lying, which was all of it.
Yeah – essentially, if you want to use the service that only Amazon provides, by sending them a document by e-mail, they’ll convert it to Kindle format and deliver it wirelessly. Or you can do what ebook readers traditionally do and just copy the files from your computer, for free.
And Kindles will read DRM’d Mobipocket books just fine; you just have to give the store the PID for your Kindle, same as you have to give the store the PID for any other Mobipocket device when you’re buying a DRM-protected Mobipocket file. (Finding the PID for the Kindle requires running a tiny utility to determine it from your Kindle serial number, basically.)
Only the Kindle DX – the large-screen version – can read PDF files natively. Personally, I think you need a large screen like that to make PDF reading practical, at least when dealing with e-ink screens, so it doesn’t bug me that the smaller Kindles can’t. Reading PDFs on my Sony Reader is a nightmare. So I stick with a laptop or netbook if I want to read PDFs.
Emailing a 1MB .pdf file to your Kindle and having Amazon
convert it for you costs all
of 15 cents. Then again, they don’t appear to strip the
carriage returns so some
of the formatting looks like this. I knew that they didn’t
play nice with charts and
the like. I would have thought that they could have
removed the carriage ret-
urns. I guess that’s why they call the feature “Experi-
mental”. From Wikipedia:
Comparison of eBook Formats.
Some clarification on the 1984 issue, from what I understand: They didn’t just say “1984 has never been available for the Kindle. We have always been at war with Eurasia>”, the eBook in question turned out to be a copyright violation, uploaded to the Kindle store by a publisher who didn’t have the rights to sell or publish the book at all. The actual copyright owners called Amazon, Amazon removed it from their “Cloud” that everybody syncs their Kindles to online (all of those who sync them online), so when folks synced their Kindles, they synced the Kindles with the online bookshelves… which were now sans-1984 (double-plus-un-1984? Anyways). Folks who don’t sync their Kindles online (which raises the question "Why not just get a cheaper non-line eBook reader?) didn’t have the issue.
I want to say they credited the purchase price of the books back to the customers, but I can’t remember.
I have the Sony ereader touch screen. It’s a great device. The user interface is intuative and the battery life is impressive.
I’ve only seen one Kindle. From a user-interface point-of-view, the Kindle has one feature that I think I would prefer. I find myself holding the Sony in one hand or the other most of the time with my thumb resting beside the screen. I think the Kindle has its Next Page button right where my thumb would be resting, so I would not have to move my hand to turn the page.
With the Sony, I can drag my finger across the page in a “page turning” motion to turn the page. But, it does require moving one hand or the other.
I chose the Sony over the Kindle for one reason - the ebooks I purchase reside on my hard drive rather than on Amazon’s server. I realize that I’m guilty of 20th Century thinking, but I can’t help it. I didn’t want to build up an inventory of books worth thousands of dollars over the next few years only to have Amazon decide it was no longer a profitable line of business and leave me with nothing but the files in a proprietory format in flash ROM on the Kindle.
I spend a lot of my non-work time in places where there is no 3G coverage, so the wireless feature of the Kindle was of no added value for me.
I think all of the ereader devices are suffering from the same problem currently - lack of content. I know Amazon touts > 300,000 titles. I did notice, though, that the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin shows up about ten times when you search by subject. So, it may be that Amazon has 100,000 titles, with an average of 3 copies of each. 
I’ve not had a problem finding interesting things to read on the Sony ebookstore. I’ve not yet tapped into the public domain books available. So, I’m a long way from running out of things to eread.
However, when I’ve wanted to find a specific book, perhaps one I’ve read before and given away or a specfic author that I’ve read in the past and would like to read again, I usually come up empty. The ebookstores remind me of airport bookstores. They have the current bestsellers, a few self-help books, a few trashy romance novels, and that’s about it.
So, why I truly enjoy my ereader, until I can find an electronic copy of, say, half of the 300 or so books on the shelf behind me online, I don’t think any device is ready to replace the printing press yet. I thnk even the iPad is going to suffer from that, unless Apple can convince publishers to dig through their archive and re-release their older titles. Hey, they did it with iTunes.
Not any more; they updated the software for the small ones a couple months ago to add PDF as a native format. Admittedly you pretty much have to switch to the landscape view to see an 8.5 x 11 PDF at any usable resolution on a Kindle 2 (half a page at a time or whatever), but it does support it. Even the DX has trouble with letter-sized PDFs that have small print (it trims margins, but it does it very, very, badly, not trimming headers, footers, page numbers, or “specks” in scanned pages) because of the smaller-than-letter-sized display. One reason (the other one being faster search) that these specific types of documents are going to move to an iPad for me, when it becomes available.
The Amazon books aren’t in the Kindle’s storage? Can you explain this to me?
The books you purchase from Amazon are loaded into flash ROM on the Kindle. However, that’s the only copy of the file you have. Should your Kindle die, Amazon maintains the database information of which books you’ve purchased and will allow you to download them to a new Kindle.
That’s a great plan - as long as Amazon stays in business.
The plus side of that is that Amazon is doing your backups for you.
I paid 99 cents for the entire works of Shakespeare last week. All of the plays. All of the sonnets. Maybe one of the advantages of buying a Kindle now is that you can get so many things free or nearly free as an enticement. There are just enormous bargains in the category of “Kindle Best Sellers.”
One news report that I heard said that Amazon sold more Kindle books this Christmas than print books.
There are so many apps on a Kindle that there are books telling you how you can use it. One of the ho-hum features that everybody knows about that I really like is the ability to change the size of the print to large print. Also, Kindle has a text to voice reader – at least for the time being. You can choose a male or female voice. Both of them are just awful. It is all robot-speak. But for tired eyes or driving, it is so welcome.
I have the Kindle II and have been happy with the choice.
BTW, I’m certain that there will be some things that people will want to see in color when it is available, but for the most part, I prefer the printed word in black and white or shades of gray.
Like friend Tully Mars, I have a Sony PRS 505. I have all of my downloaded books on my computer. I have purchase a few , but there are many sites online that offer free ebooks. How does a Kindle deal with non-Amazon content?