Amazon reveals first color Kindle, new Kindle Scribe, and more

We had books, but then we thought, what about screens. Then we had screens but we thought, what if screens were more like books. Then we had book screens and we thought, what if the screens we made to look like books were more like screens.

Next up: a kindle with physical pages, each page is a screen!

Similarly, I saw someome on social media yesterday post about buying "Monopoly Go" boardgame at the store. The box says "Based on the popular mobile game".

The joke was the same, we had a board game, then we made a mobile video game based on the board game, now they are selling a board game based on the video game that was based on the board game.

I get the joke, but color has been present in books (manuscripts, before the invention of the printing press, even) basically since their inception, many centuries ago, so just adding color wouldn't make these devices more similar to screens as much as it would make them more akin to... well, books. Just look at these marvels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminated_manuscript.

It might also fold!

Come to think of it, a foldable Kindle would be very nice! And not just because it has the format of a book.

The portability of a Paperwhite combined with the note-taking ability of a Scribe… there’s probably a market for that.

Edit: also, holding the device semi-opened, hands on its back, seems much more comfortable than holding it by the bezels as we currently do.

Well... Yes, we'd ideally like the best attributes of both at once. What of it?

Color was present in cave paintings.

In this case there's the extra meta joke with Monopoly originally being created to show how capitalism is bad.

Sorry but this is a bad take. The active light on "screens" is stimulating, causes eye strain and keeps you awake. The two technologies are not the same.

This again! Kindles have lights, too. On my old Paperwhite, the light could not be turned off. Although it could be dimmed, my iPad's backlight can be adjusted to be much dimmer than the Paperwhite's is capable of.

Reading code and documentation with an eink screen is tantalising. I have no interest in lugging around tomes and tomes of manuals anymore. When I was in uni and school I'd regularly lug around 15kg+ of textbooks. I love buying physical books but the freedom and flexibility of having ink-like screens is still a bonus.

Especially for things like reading contracts which I find miserable on a screen

Here's a book a little closer in time to the invention of books: https://cdn.britannica.com/25/83825-050-F8826674/Anubis-Egyp...

> I get the joke, but color has been present in books (...)

That's like saying confortable cars have been present since their inception, and then present as a example a royal coach.

True, you technically had colors in books. Just like you had books with hardbacks with gold inlays. The fact is that the bulk of the books being published were not color books because that costs a premium to make and moreso to buy. Hence the default stabilized in softcover books with B/W print on flimsy paper.

With e-readers you do not get higher production costs, and you can just download your books and benefit from that. Some ebooks even ship with high resolution images where you can zoom in all you want or need.

The Kindle's light is much more diffuse than the iPad's though, much closer to just having a reading light on, which you'd need anyway for a physical book.

> The portability of a Paperwhite combined with the note-taking ability of a Scribe… there’s probably a market for that.

There are already erasable notebooks that allow you to scan your notes and send the document to a storage of your choosing. Even BIC sells one of them.

The dialectics of e-ink

That's a perfect summary of the strange evolution we've had with reading devices!

Honestly, my only use-cases for a color eBook reader are comic books and House of Leaves. And I'm not sure if a 7" screen is really big enough for comic books (pretty sure on my Nexus 7 it was better to read comic books half a page at a time in landscape mode than a whole page in portrait).

100% not a book as it's not movable.

Might be a scroll or a codex, but it might even be on a wall.

Where exactly in parent's post are cave paintings mentioned, instead of explicitly just books and screens, whose specific relationship is what the tongue-in-cheek comment is about? Your post makes no sense, other than trying to be a "gotcha!" one and failing at it.

The Kindle's light comes from a ring of linear LEDs that goes through a plastic sheet called a diffuser -- same as the light from an iPad. In the iPad the diffuser is behind the image whereas in the Kindle, it is in front of it, but why is that better or "more diffuse"?

>much closer to just having a reading light on

First of all, that contradicts the evidence from my eyes, but second of all, even if it were true, you'd have to persuade me that reading an old-fashion paper book with a reading light is any better at helping me get to sleep at night than reading from an iPad. I'm not buying that one either mainly because a reading light is going to throw more light onto the ceiling, where of course it gets reflected down again, and neuroscientists know (and the Scandinavian tradition "knew" in practice decades ago) that light from the top of the field of vision is more disruptive to sleep than light coming straight into the eye or from the sides or bottom of the visual field.

The eReader manufacturers have done a great job of marketing the alleged benefits of their front lights, even though they’re simple LEDs like everything else. I look for any actual studies on the subject every couple of years and come up empty.

(I do prefer an eReader over a tablet, but I don’t think the light is magically better.)

It's a bunch of sheets of paper, or more likely part of a scroll. You can see the grain clearly in the image.

> it's not movable

I don't know what to say here. This is obviously false. Why did you say this?

What do you think is the difference between a "book" and a "codex"? Why do you think ancient texts are divided into "books"?

it can definitely be turned off, at least in models from the last many years. other than that the"screen"causes no more eye strain than a book

Oh my bad, definitely movable then, thought it was a wall.

According to wikipedia:

"The codex (pl.: codices /ˈkoʊdɪsiːz/)[1] was the historical ancestor format of the modern book. Technically the vast majority of modern books use the codex format of a stack of pages bound at one edge, along the side of the text. But the term "codex" is now reserved for older manuscript books, which mostly used sheets of vellum, parchment, or papyrus, rather than paper.[2] "

I would say a codex is a book yes, you are right there. The defining characteristic for me is the binding method, the flippable pages and the bookiness factor of the book.

That said, unbound scrolls that are scrolled into scrolls of scroll are definitely scrolls and not books.

So 2 to 1, gg.

"evidence from my eyes"

What are you a peasant?

Everybody knows that the modern scholar obtains information from the world through papers, either from google scholar or from the latest libgen domain.

More so when you realize that capitalism drove everyone’s attention capacity into the ground, so activities like a full-fledged board game or reading a book are things of the past.

The industry's got you covered:

<https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/readmoo-to-l...>

<https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/10/21361545/folding-e-ink-re...>

(I'm not even remotely saying this would be a Good Thing. I recently saw my first foldable smartphone. And it was broken.)