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

(www.aboutamazon.com)
572 points bookofjoe | 10 comments | 16 Oct 24 13:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.827s | source | bottom
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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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1. 110jawefopiwa ◴[17 Oct 24 02:11 UTC] No.41865784[source]▶
> IMO, the Kindle is the premium e-reader when it comes to look and feel. It's just a fantastic experience.

Interestingly, I switched from Kindle to Kobo because it was lacking various basic features that made it not feel premium.

* Kobo epubs can show "pages in chapter" progress so I know how much longer there is until a nice stopping point, while Kindle only shows "minutes left in chapter" which is functionally useless.

* Kobo had blue light blocking night shift before Kindle Paperwhite (I think both have it now?)

* Kobo had a convenient feature where you slide your finger along the side of the screen to change brightness, instead of having to go into multiple menus to do this.

It's possible these things have been remedied, but especially the chapter progress thing put such a bad taste in my mouth that I never wanted to touch Kindle again.

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2. MBCook ◴[17 Oct 24 02:43 UTC] No.41865952[source]▶
The kindle hardware is pretty good in my opinion, though they make choices I don’t like.

The ecosystem is amazing and unbeatable.

The software was fine on the original Kindles (well, I had a keyboard), and despite gaining a few features is largely the same since 10+ years ago.

But don’t worry, they added ads to the device that they used to sell you books and they’ve managed not to speed it up one bit!

3. ghostpepper ◴[17 Oct 24 03:17 UTC] No.41866112[source]▶
> Kindle only shows "minutes left in chapter" which is functionally useless

The kindle recomputes your reading pace as you go, so unless you prefer to do that math in your head and track your own pages-per-minute moving average, I don't see how it's functionally useless

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4. KTibow ◴[17 Oct 24 03:29 UTC] No.41866166[source]▶
I think they're saying that it doesn't show any info like page numbers
5. mmahemoff ◴[17 Oct 24 04:55 UTC] No.41866529[source]▶
I always find Kindle's "minutes left" too low for some reason, so I have to ignore it. I'd find it simpler - and easier to make progress - if it just showed pages read/remaining within the chapter. Absent that, I am often having to go through the distraction of using the overview feature to figure out where I am in the chapter.
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6. bald ◴[17 Oct 24 05:21 UTC] No.41866649{3}[source]▶
If you tap on the minutes left text in the lower left corner of your screen, it will cycle through pages, minutes left in chapter, section and blank
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7. mmahemoff ◴[17 Oct 24 07:57 UTC] No.41867390{4}[source]▶
I do use that, but what I want is some idea of progress or pages remaining within the chapter.
8. dingnuts ◴[17 Oct 24 14:24 UTC] No.41869977[source]▶
how can it calculate that when I don't turn off the Kindle when I get distracted?
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9. pantulis ◴[17 Oct 24 14:38 UTC] No.41870103{3}[source]▶
Well if you get distracted easily, then the "minutes left" will be accurate ;)
10. lukewrites ◴[18 Oct 24 20:15 UTC] No.41883056[source]▶
I should probably post on MobileRead with this question instead, but I wondered if you might have insight into this issue I've been having with my Kobo.

I've noticed that when I read on my Kobo I run into issue with ebook files. When I use Calibre to send .epub files I'll have lots of reliability issues; books will freeze up, pages won't turn, whole sections of the book wind up being unreadable, stuff like that. Having Calibre reformat books in the kobo epub format seems to help some, but I still have page turn issues from time to time.

Have you see any of this behavior before? As far as I'm concerned this would be the perfect ereader if it were just more reliable.