Hacker News Reader

Comment by zippergz | Hacker News Reader

I suppose it depends on your priorities. For me, the value of instant delivery, searchability, zero physical space consumed, and near infinite portability far outweigh the value of lending, reselling or giving away. Maybe I'm selfish, but if I have to choose between something that works really well for me while I have it, and something that is easier to pass on to someone else, I'm going to go with the former. Having both would be better, but if I'm forced to pick one, it's an easy decision...

View on HN

I agreed with this point of view, having my entire library searchable & available while travelling was the selling point for me... until I received an email from Amazon saying my version of Kindle For Mac will stop working on September 15. And I can't run the new version, because the Macs I'm running Kindle on can't be upgraded beyond Mac OS X 10.7.

I have plenty of other devices so I'm not (yet) locked out of my library, and those Macs can be converted to Windows 10 (which does run the latest Kindle software)... but it reminded me it isn't a forever library. I need to make non-DRM'd archive copies of all my digital books if I want to be able to use them for more than 4 to 5 years.

> 4 to 5 years

well, it seems you can't even read them now.

You could probably use the kindle cloud reader for them, https://read.amazon.com/ probably not as good an experience but it's an option at least while you figure out what path you want

Zero physical space can be pretty important - I get that - but yeah, priorities.

Also, it drives me mad that families have to have some weird hacky system to share ebooks - either have all ereaders use the same Amazon/Kobo/Whatever account, thus messing up any recommendations, or DRM stripping, which is a pain.

The times I really want to read a book now the instant delivery is great, but I think there have only been 3 times in the something like 4 years that we've had an ereader in the house that I've wanted a book that badly and the ebook hasn't been available at a library.

Edit: I do wish physical books were searchable, and had a built-in dictionary.

Add to that the adjustable font sizes. I suppose I could have one set of glasses for computer work and another set for reading, but the adjustable font works just fine for me. And it sure is easier to lie in bed with a Kindle than a thousand page novel. I do wish it were easier to flip back and forth a few pages.

for me it is the opposite. i like to pay more for the physical book because i don't want a delay of over 1s while flipping pages.

i'd second that and add that having a physical book also makes annotating things a lot easier, at least than with my kobo. If I'm going to spend any significant time with a book, i prefer it being a physical copy.

That sounds like you've chosen poor hardware. I've not had this problem in five years (with the three different devices I use for ebooks, one being an e-ink reader)

so you seems to have a magical eink reader. most eink take 0.5s to clear and 0.5s to draw a full screen in most usable resolutions.

It's not really fast, but it's not a second, either. Just ran a quick test on a kindle paperwhite, repeatedly paging after I saw the page refreshed. 20 pages in under 14 seconds, and there was definitely lag time between the page being refreshed and my finger tapping again.

That said, the page turn lag bugs me, too. It's better on tablets/phone.

If your kindle takes more than about 200 ms to page turn, return it - you have a broken one.

(Unless maybe you're talking about one from 5 years or more ago?)

Sure but turning 200 pages looking for a specific illustration or caption in 2-3 seconds is something I very often do with physical books and is pretty useful for reference works.

Ok, that's fair.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com