Kindle.

[amused]

It's not the kindle this the problem, it's the one-click ordering. Talk about crack cocaine...

Yeah, but so amazing. One click and ZOOM it's on the device! I buy MP3s for my Droid phone the same way. It's only $0.99...... click.

[Tero]

My son had the 80 dollar version, I think it died in a year or less. But he is out of the country so I cant send it back.

[rasetsu]

I've got the Nook (the original one), but I do have the Kindle app on my tablet and cell phone. One day I hope to get the Nook Simple Touch with Glowlight so I can read in the dark.

I really dug e-Ink, but none of the e-Ink readers support landscape mode, and sometimes formats things weird. (A single column pdf converted to two columns for example.)

The lack of landscape mode was a dealbreaker for me.

[orpheus]

I don't want a Kindle. I want a Candle. Different device altogether.

[SteveB]

My dad wants a Kindle for Kwissmas. The option to have bigger fonts is a huge appeal for someone of his age.

[orpheus]

My dad wants a Kindle for Kwissmas. The option to have bigger fonts is a huge appeal for someone of his age.

You know, there used to be an app called Stanza. The best e-reader for iOS. It was great, and one of the things that was so good about it was that you could customize the viewing experience to a huge degree. Bigger choice of fonts than any other similar app; and you could make the text much bigger than even the biggest most such apps will allow. It handled pretty much any format as well, except Kindle's.

Amazon bought it and decided to phase it out. They don't support it any more. You can still get the app via iTunes, but any support now comes from an ad hoc community of die hard fans. Amazon has washed their hands of it. It's stupid of them, really: since it didn't do Kindle files, it wouldn't compete with Kindle. Since it handled everything else so elegantly, it would have been a great thing for Amazon to sell as a separate item. But someone there made a business decision that sucks. Sigh.



edit: clarity, Ollie, clarity. Hmph.

[SteveB]

My dad wants a Kindle for Kwissmas. The option to have bigger fonts is a huge appeal for someone of his age.

You know, there used to be an app called Stanza. The best e-reader for iOS. It was great, and one of the things that was so good about it was that you could customize the viewing experience to a huge degree. Bigger choice of fonts than any other similar app; and you could make the text much bigger than even the biggest most apps or e-readers will allow. It handled pretty much any format as well, except Kindle's.

Amazon bought it and decided to phase it out. They don't support it any more. You can still get the app via iTunes, but any support now comes from an ad hoc community of die hard fans. Amazon has washed their hands of it. It's stupid of them, really: since it didn't do Kindle files, it wouldn't compete with Kindle. Since it handled everything else so elegantly, it would have been a great thing for Amazon to sell as a separate item. But someone there made a business decision that sucks. Sigh.

Are you saying Kindles don't have font-biggening capabilities?

[orpheus]

Out of curiosity, I just checked, and W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz is available for Kindle. (Maybe some of his other novels are too, but I didn't look very far.) I'm very curious about this, because scattered throughout his novels are many curious black and white photos - some illustrative of the plot; others harder to explain; all of them somewhat cryptic. Evidently Sebald snapped the photos with cheap cameras, had the film developed at a neighborhood shop, and would then take the pictures to a photocopy store to make black and white copies, playing around with contrast, sharpness, etc., all to get the exact right look for each one.

Anyway, I'm interested to find out how they look on a Kindle. How they compare to the ones in the print version. If someone wants to read the Kindle version, please let me know! (It's a pretty magnificent novel, incidentally, so it certainly wouldn't be wasted time or money. Sebald is the real thing.)

[orpheus]

My dad wants a Kindle for Kwissmas. The option to have bigger fonts is a huge appeal for someone of his age.

You know, there used to be an app called Stanza. The best e-reader for iOS. It was great, and one of the things that was so good about it was that you could customize the viewing experience to a huge degree. Bigger choice of fonts than any other similar app; and you could make the text much bigger than even the biggest most apps or e-readers will allow. It handled pretty much any format as well, except Kindle's.

Amazon bought it and decided to phase it out. They don't support it any more. You can still get the app via iTunes, but any support now comes from an ad hoc community of die hard fans. Amazon has washed their hands of it. It's stupid of them, really: since it didn't do Kindle files, it wouldn't compete with Kindle. Since it handled everything else so elegantly, it would have been a great thing for Amazon to sell as a separate item. But someone there made a business decision that sucks. Sigh.

Are you saying Kindles don't have font-biggening capabilities?

No, I'm sure they do, although I don't know how much it can embiggen. I may have been unclear; I was really only comparing Stanza to other readers for the iPhone. (Kindle does have one of those, actually, and it's ok. But not very good compared to what Stanza was. The nice things about the Kindle iphone app is that you don't have to have a Kindle device to use it - but if you do, then it will sync across devices: if you stop reading at page 46 on your Kindle and then later open up the same book in the iPhone Kindle app, it will open at page 46. That's pretty cool.)

[SteveB]

All right, that's good.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

The best thing I found about the Kindle is that, if they go wrong, the after-sale help service is simply OSSUM! They just sent me a new one and asked me to post the old one back - no fuss, no excuses, no bullshit.

Oh, and download Calibre. It's a program that converts any other ebook file formats to the kindle standard .mobi. Essential if you intend acquiring books through... less obvious routes...

[rasetsu]

The best thing I found about the Kindle is that, if they go wrong, the after-sale help service is simply OSSUM! They just sent me a new one and asked me to post the old one back - no fuss, no excuses, no bullshit.

Oh, and download Calibre. It's a program that converts any other ebook file formats to the kindle standard .mobi. Essential if you intend acquiring books through... less obvious routes...

I haven't had much luck converting ebooks with calibre. They convert, but they end up formatted like shit.

What's the name of the DRM stripper? I've got that around somewhere....

[Cormac]

I don't want a Kindle. I want a Candle. Different device altogether.

You could use your Kindle as a candle I suppose...

[Animavore]

The best thing I found about the Kindle is that, if they go wrong, the after-sale help service is simply OSSUM! They just sent me a new one and asked me to post the old one back - no fuss, no excuses, no bullshit.

Oh, and download Calibre. It's a program that converts any other ebook file formats to the kindle standard .mobi. Essential if you intend acquiring books through... less obvious routes...

I downloaded that yesterday as it happens. It messes up the formatting from .pdf though. I heard you can tinker with settings to fix it but... Could you be arsed?

[Xamonas Chegwé]

The best thing I found about the Kindle is that, if they go wrong, the after-sale help service is simply OSSUM! They just sent me a new one and asked me to post the old one back - no fuss, no excuses, no bullshit.

Oh, and download Calibre. It's a program that converts any other ebook file formats to the kindle standard .mobi. Essential if you intend acquiring books through... less obvious routes...

I downloaded that yesterday as it happens. It messes up the formatting from .pdf though. I heard you can tinker with settings to fix it but... Could you be arsed?

Yeah, it can really fuck up PDFs - mainly cos they tend to come in a lot of different layouts - but it does a pretty good job with EPUB files.