Kindle

[Granville Kuosonsavath]

Not as healthy on your eyes anyway to be staring at a screen all the time as would be a real book.

 

[CopperBrompton]

not if you got them from the lib'ry.

Depends how much you value your time. How many trips to & from the library to borrow 350 books?

 

[CopperBrompton]

Not as healthy on your eyes anyway to be staring at a screen all the time as would be a real book.

It's epaper, not a computer screen. Uses real ink.

 

[Granville Kuosonsavath]

Depends how much you value your time. How many trips to & from the library to borrow 350 books?

If they invented a device whereby you didn't even need to do the reading, and the feeling you got from having read it was instead just projected straight into your brain, would you buy that as well?

It's epaper, not a computer screen. Uses real ink.

"epaper" - Marketing guff.
Uses real ink - bollocks. How can it possibly. Ink is a liquid dye that has stained the page. It can't then move from one part of the page to another on the whim of an electronic command.
You've clearly fallen hook line and sinker for the claptrap they've made up and printed on the box to counter people's concerns about eye health.
All they've done is dimmed the backlight, rendered the canvas in "papaya whip" and used a slightly grainy font. Nowt special.

 

[CopperBrompton]

Uses real ink - bollocks. How can it possibly.

Google is your friend. The short version is that 'bubbles' of ink are electrically charged and sent either to the upper layer of the screen, where they are visible, or the bottom layer of the screen, where they are not.

All they've done is dimmed the backlight

Except for the small matter of there being no backlight to dim ...

 

[Keith Oates]

Ben, don't feed him, he's just come back and is being a twit, as always!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[rusky]

Don't feed the :troll:

The wife has got to be the biggest technophobe there is & she loves the Kindle!

 

[Granville Kuosonsavath]

Google is your friend. The short version is that 'bubbles' of ink are electrically charged and sent either to the upper layer of the screen, where they are visible, or the bottom layer of the screen, where they are not.


Except for the small matter of there being no backlight to dim ...

Even if it's a lower light output it's still an electronically powered screen.

The trouble is the reason you believe the twaddle the money men have come up with to get you to part with your hard earned is because you always WANTED to in the first place. Confirmation bias, you see.

You only needed a little nudge to convince yourself of a reason to buy what is effectively just a big pda with very limited software and extremely low processing power.
PDAs have come on in leaps and bounds recently and what with the new android and what not the chinese probably need some way of getting rid of all the old chips that are, in relative terms, now shite, and would otherwise be obsolete if they couldn't think up a better way of getting people to buy them.

When new words ("epaper") have to be invented to justify spurious claims, you know it's because if they used real words they would be argued with.

Ask yourself this - if this "epaper", "eink" technology was not just marketing guff then why aren't they using it in normal computer monitors?

 

[Granville Kuosonsavath]

Ben, don't feed him, he's just come back and is being a twit, as always!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

yeah i 'spose you're right Keith he is being a bit of a silly old twit isn't he

 

[MacB]

Getting away from the, e-readers are crap, side, as this is a thread about Kindle and those interested, I was still wondering if anyone had a resource indicating what books are available, or what aren't?

I'm getting keener the more I read about this, knowing me this could mean anything from a couple of weeks to two years to make my mind up. But would love to read more detail on others experiences.

 

[CopperBrompton]

Even if it's a lower light output it's still an electronically powered screen.

Quite a lot lower power, said output being in fact zero.

Ask yourself this - if this "epaper", "eink" technology was not just marketing guff then why aren't they using it in normal computer monitors?

Ah, I understand now: you don't see a need for ebooks because you don't read at all.

 

[rusky]

There are 2,535,582 books & texts available here to download for free http://www.archive.org/details/texts

If something's available in electronic form (pdf, doc, txt etc) then you should be able to read it on ebook readers.

 

[Keith Oates]

Getting away from the, e-readers are crap, side, as this is a thread about Kindle and those interested, I was still wondering if anyone had a resource indicating what books are available, or what aren't?

I'm getting keener the more I read about this, knowing me this could mean anything from a couple of weeks to two years to make my mind up. But would love to read more detail on others experiences.

Like you I was interested but didn't know what it was like and what selection of books were available. Eventually I downloaded Kindle for PC which is free and this opened up access to the Amazon site and showed you what is available (and it is huge). However in my case I'm not able to download any Amazon e-books here in China so I Googled e-books and found a whole host of sites were you can download books, some are free and some you have to pay to get and the good thing is that a lot, if not most of them can work on Kindle for PC. Whether you can also download them on an actual kindle e-reader, I don't know. However it has really wetted my appetite and so I've decided to get a Kindle e-reader but I'm still not decided which one to actually buy at the moment.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[marinyork]

Format isn't an issue. The excellent Calibre software will convert from anything to anything. I had a load of ebooks in PDF format which I converted in Calibre to Mobi format to read on my Kindle. (The Kindle reads PDF too, but Mobi is much more flexible, allowing you to choose the font size, etc.)

Yes, obviously, as I've already tried to get at where I've looked there some of those available in other formats from particular sources that seem to be exclusive are far too expensive - approximately 3-4x typical kindle price. I regard this as a serious problem. There are plenty of epub books with more reasonable prices and it's quite interesting say that WHSmith is cheaper than 3 other well known/high street sources. Do you have some view for a place with the widest range of books in epub?

Getting away from the, e-readers are crap, side, as this is a thread about Kindle and those interested, I was still wondering if anyone had a resource indicating what books are available, or what aren't?

I'm getting keener the more I read about this, knowing me this could mean anything from a couple of weeks to two years to make my mind up. But would love to read more detail on others experiences.

What sorts of books are you looking for MacB? SF books? You can easily browse what's available on kindle format. The problem is the stats I believe have a fair bit of overlap. What apparently happens with particularly classics is that I think a lot of conversion went on by individuals so there are only some titles listed on their site. You can of course get them from other sources or kindle do an all in one version of their works (for a small cost). If the dates are accurate a lot of Terry Pratchett's works only became available in kindle format in late 2009 and early 2010. Imho history stock of books on kindle and some places selling epubs is exceptionally poor.

 

[MacB]

I was more thinking generally, the news, pdf, etc functions are appealing, but was just curious about stuff not available, have read mention of authors refusing to let their work go on e-format...bit snotty if you ask me....I'll keep nosing into it myself.