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

(www.aboutamazon.com)
572 points bookofjoe | 4 comments | 16 Oct 24 13:52 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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jjice ◴[16 Oct 24 15:04 UTC] No.41859903[source]▶
I own a Kindle Paperwhite (last gen, relative to this new one) and a Kobo Clara BW (purchase in the last 6 months). IMO, the Kindle is the premium e-reader when it comes to look and feel. It's just a fantastic experience. The issue is Amazon and how even if you want to put your own purchased ebooks on it, you have it send it through their servers. That tied with a few other privacy issues over the years led me to also get a Kobo.

The Kobo can run in a fully offline mode (called "side-load mode" or something like that) and I can transfer my ebooks directly via USB. I use the Kobo most of the time now since most of my reading lately has been independently published ebooks, but I still use the Kindle for books I purchase via Amazon directly.

With all that said, I personally think the Kindle Paperwhite is already the perfect size. It fits snuggly in my back pocket and strikes the perfect balance between screen size being large, but not too large to hold for my average male hands. I'd be a bit concerned about the size increase for my personal use case, but Amazon does a great job with the Kindle in general so I'd like to see some reviews.

As for the new Colorsoft, I'd really like to see some reviews. The color Kobos that came out earlier this year got some mixed reviews for colors, but I'm not sure if that's just the nature of color e-ink or not.

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thimabi ◴[16 Oct 24 15:11 UTC] No.41860022[source]▶
> The issue is Amazon and how even if you want to put your own purchased ebooks on it, you have it send it through their servers.

You can sideload your books over USB too, using Calibre for instance.

I own a few Kindle models and a Kobo Forma as well. The Kindles do have some quirks and bugs (e.g., disappearing books, issues with sideloaded fonts…). But my Kobo Forma’s battery completely died after a couple years of usage, and the device became completely unreliable. After that experience, I’ve resigned myself to live with the Kindle’s problems.

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htamas ◴[16 Oct 24 15:23 UTC] No.41860177[source]▶
My Kindle had this "bug" where my side loaded books randomly disappear. As a workaround, I have to keep it in flight mode at all times. Not a big issue since that’s what I would do anyway, but in case my Kindle would break, I wouldn’t think long to buy an alternative
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thimabi ◴[16 Oct 24 15:43 UTC] No.41860407[source]▶
You’re lucky. I’ve seen books disappear from my Kindle even in flight mode. I wonder what is behind such a persistent bug.
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freedomben ◴[17 Oct 24 00:34 UTC] No.41865283{3}[source]▶
> I wonder what is behind such a persistent bug.

At what point do we stop giving the benefit of the doubt that it's a "bug"?

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1. notatoad ◴[17 Oct 24 01:59 UTC] No.41865738{4}[source]▶
i'm not really sure what benefit you think they're gaining by breaking the less convenient, less user-friendly way to sideload books.

They're perfectly happy to let you email books to the kindle that you bought at other stores (or stole), as well as sync your progress with those books, backup those books to their servers, and generally have the full reading experience with all the benefits of the kindle ecosystem even if you didn't buy the book through kindle. If they didn't want to encourage the use of third-party files, surely they'd make it more difficult than a bug that randomly deletes books off some people's kindles sometimes.

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2. freedomben ◴[17 Oct 24 19:39 UTC] No.41873033[source]▶
The benefit (or potential gain) is that some people will just buy the book from the Kindle store to avoid the pain. I've seen that happen first-hand to my wife.

Also by emailing books or loading through their servers, they can still track and get that sweet sweet data/metadata that Amazon thrives on. When you sideload, you don't even have to connect it to the internet, which makes analytics more challenging.

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3. notatoad ◴[17 Oct 24 20:18 UTC] No.41873335[source]▶
okay, but this all still seems like a needlessly complicated conspiracy theory.

if they want people to buy books from their store, why do they make it so easy to not buy books from their store?

bugs happen. not every bug is part of jeff bezos' nefarious plan.

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4. jakub_g ◴[18 Oct 24 20:17 UTC] No.41883071{3}[source]▶
It doesn't have to be a nefarious plan to put the bug in, but once it's there, it's guaranteed to be in the very bottom of the backlog to fix it.