Amazon: New Kindles Selling at Record Rates | Hacker News Reader

Amazon: New Kindles Selling at Record Rates

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45 pointscharlief53 comments

Ah, the psychology of price points. Let us all take note of this when we decide how to price our products and/or services. People are now perceiving that the value that this device delivers is significantly higher than it's price.

Amongst my group, I'm known for my near hatred of Amazon's Kindle (not the ecosystem or apps, just the devices) due to their shoddy typography, but even I've caved and ordered one of the new ones. They're cheap enough now that, I think, anyone involved in writing/publishing needs to keep a good eye on what Amazon's up to. For writers, the Kindle (ecosystem) is rapidly looking like it could become their equivalent of the App Store.

I was pretty anti on the Kindle as well--I don't like the idea of my book running out of batteries--but the cheaper price (plus, for whatever reason, graphite) had me within one-click of buying one the other day. Right then I read a very convincing case that it will drop below $100 in time for xmas (http://www.slate.com/id/2263787/pagenum/all/). FYI.

The battery life on e-Ink devices is phenomenal. They only draw power when redrawing the page. You can literally go weeks between charges.

(genuine question) don't the wifi/3G draw power? or is your 'weeks' assessment including normal wireless use?

Oddly, i feel must less strongly about Amazon's hold over the the platform the Kindle represents than i do about Apple and its hold over the music platform iTunes represents. Irrational? Probably. Uneconomnical? maybe (i buy far fewer books than i do albums/audiobooks). I can't fathom why but i just somehow feel like, when i've read a book, the ideas it containws stay with me and become mine whereas an album is something that perpetually stays somehow external (apologies for the airy-fairieness of that: i'm not sure how to express it but i feels like a difference thats significant for me and i'm curious whether anyone else feels the same).

Only when you're getting new books over Whispernet. And if you'd loaded up on reading material and were off on holiday, you would just leave it off.

I don't see the iPad and Kindle being direct competitors esp. since Kindle is really just software; an iPad is a "Kindle" with a couple of clicks on the App Store (there are Kindle clients for BlackBerry, etc too) and Amazon makes the same money regardless of what physical device they deliver the file to.

It is vaguely annoying having both iBooks and Kindle apps tho' I've not yet forgotten which one had a particular book in!

Oh. Yes, that would seem blindingly obvious wouldn't it? OK, I'm an idiot (in my defense, i've been awake since before 4am this morning. Be gentle with me).

Isn't technology wonderful that our biggest issue is which app we have to launch to read the best that the literary world has to offer (and Dan Brown novels :-).

With a Kindle 2, I found that I only get the 3 weeks of battery life if I leave the radio disabled. So I only enable the radio for a few minutes when I need something. With the radio enabled continuously, battery life reduces to a few days. But the newer Kindle might be better in that regard.

... but Kindle books are DRMed and iTunes music isn't.

  but Kindle books are DRMed and iTunes music isn't.

...anymore. iTunes books have DRM. iTunes music had DRM for years. DRM is the way you get big media to shift business models. Without DRM they'll happily forgo the new revenue stream and die slowly. So you first concede on the DRM point and restrict content just to begin the transition to the new model. 10 years after Napster major labels finally allow (most of) their music to be sold DRM-free. Print publishers will get there too.

Oh, I completely agree. The earlier post was specifically talking about "the music platform iTunes represents" so I didn't understand what the comparison there was and how it ended up with happier feelings toward Kindle.

Only if you're buying them from Amazon. There are plenty of wonderful texts available in the public domain, and already formatted for the Kindle: http://manybooks.net/

That's actually why I placed my order: I won't abide by the DRM, which will force me to read older works to get value out of the device. A goal I've had since reading a quote dubiously attributed to Einstein: "Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else."

I love my Kindle.

Not because it's the best, prettist, most elegant way to consume books, but because it's the best, prettiest, most elegant way for ME to consume books, based on the currently available options.

I find myself reading more since I've gotten my Kindle, and for the price point, if I decide in a year that I DON'T like it, it's not a major loss (plus has some decent residual value).

I completely agree with this. I'm also reading more, which in and of itself makes it worth having. I recently went on a trip to Europe, and the free 3G was invaluable, since we didn't always have a good source of internet.

It's getting to the point that, were I to have to choose between losing my iPhone and losing the Kindle, I'd rather lose the iPhone, even though it costs 3 times as much to replace. It makes me that irrationally happy.

You can use your own fonts if you want to: http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle_Font_Hacks

I use their screensaver hack (with covers and images from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) and it has been completely stable and reversible.

I just wish flight attendants would stop making me turn it off for takeoff and landing.

Yeah, but remember, your Kindle is a much bigger threat to the navigation system than the 30 or 40 cell phones in people's pockets that they forgot to turn off. Plus, reading a Kindle might distract you in an emergency, which is why they don't let anyone read books or magazines during takeoff and landing either.

I was under the impression that the cell phone shutoff was to prevent the towers from freaking out about dozens of phones coming in & out of range at 650mph+.

I was under the impression that towers had some type of signal baffle to prevent reception from devices a certain number of degrees from the horizon.

I have no merit or citation to exert with this claim.

I've heard that claim but I'm unsure why airlines would inconvenience their customers for cell providers.

I have never been told to put down my book or magazine during takeoff or landing, or ever heard an attendant ask anyone else to.

Neither have I. That's why the flight attendants insisting that I have to put away my Kindle during takeoff and landing "to make sure I'm not distracted during these safety-critical times" is so absurd.

You should make a fake book cover that you can slide your kindle into. If you hide the bezel and only show the e-ink screen up flush with a page-cutout it just might work!

good luck!

I'm curious how well the Kindle renders tech/scientific books, with graphs, diagrams and formulae. I'd imagine the larger form factor of most printed technical books compared to fiction paperbacks to be an issue. I'd assume the 10" version does better than the smaller one.

I was just speaking to a friend of mine who is a EE/physicist who had just returned a Kindle DX two days ago. He got it specifically to read IEEE journal papers and found that it was unacceptable. His specific beef wasn't with the e-ink or the e-ink page turn speed but rather with the huge delay spent processing PDFs when you turned pages. In other words, page turn delays were no problem when reading a text only document, but when reading a PDF, they were really long, presumably because of the slow processor and an unwillingness to pre-rasterize pages.

I love my kindle, but for technical documents, I just print them out.

Interesting, thanks. As far as I can tell, it's possible to convert PDFs to the Kindle's native format, any idea if this improves the situation?

I've noticed the PDF delay on the iPad as well, although it's not sufficient to bother me. I'm reluctant to use the illuminated screen for extended periods of reading though, especially in the evening.

Sorry, I have no idea.

"Interesting, thanks. As far as I can tell, it's possible to convert PDFs to the Kindle's native format, any idea if this improves the situation?"

Yes. I use mobipocket creator [1] to convert pdf files to the mobi format. It's free and works pretty well for documents with one column. For papers with multiple columns (like those from journals) I use papercrop [2] to slice the pdf in smaller parts so I can read in my (non-dx) kindle 2.

[1] http://www.mobipocket.com/en/downloadsoft/productdetailscrea...

[2] http://code.google.com/p/papercrop/

edit: small fixes

Papercrop looks really intersting...does it store text as text within the output PDF or does it just convert chunks of the page to an image?

It just convert the chunks to an image (the final format is a PDF as well). The result is a little bit hacky, but it works. If your goal is to catch up with your reading pile, so it may work for you. On the other hand, if you need/want to go over every single detail (tables, formulas, etc), it may not work so well. As usual, YMMV.

[Actually, mobipocket creator seems to be not too bad at converting multi-column documents. The problems I had converting academic papers were tables and math, and not the fact they had more than one column]

Wow, thanks a lot. I was strongly considering purchasing a DX for exactly this, after trying a Nook and finding the screen to be too small for most PDFs.

I'd actually suggest that you try out a DX and see for yourself. I think they're free to return within the first N days. Or at least see if you can find other opinions by people who read sci/tech papers.

For all I know, my friend's particular field has really heavy journal PDFs that other fields might not have. If I was reading a lot of papers, the appeal of a DX would be so great that I'd want a second opinion before ditching it.

Returning the Kindle is probably fine if you're in the US, but for us in Europe it would be an expensive experiment. I doubt I'd get a customs & VAT refund, plus the postage is probably steep, too. I still don't get why they only sell it from amazon.com, not amazon.*. I might be able to eBay it off, assuming it's possible to sever the tie to my amazon account.

Thankfully there's no customs fee when you buy a Kindle from Europe, just VAT. Don't know about other territories.

I have a DX that I use for just that purpose (reading journals and textbooks).

Yes, the two column text runs a bit small, but I haven't had any problems. Check to see how well it works for you. The DX crops out borders on good copies of journal articles (if it's a scanned image sometimes scanning artifacts cause it to miss correct margins).

PDF speed has recently improved, though since the person above returned it just a bit ago, that was probably too slow for him. I was actually pleasantly surprised by the PDF speed. I find the speed to be consistent even with very large scanned-image PDF files (e.g. 300 page book with each page being an image, rather than vector text). Journal articles tend to flip pages only a tad slower than native ebooks.

The most recent firmware version for the DX (2.5) has finally introduced PDF zooming and panning, which has worked for me pretty decently though I haven't had to use it much (once zoomed in to read fine print on a graph)

Aaand that's been my experience.

found that it was unacceptable

That has been my experience as well. Not only is pdf rendering slow on the Kindle, but it doesn't have high enough resolution to display a paper legibly in the common two column format that most journals use. You can jump through some hoops and in some cases reflow the paper. I didn't try it, but it looked like a hassle.

The iPad has much better rendering speed, but it also lacks the resolution to legibly display a two column article, as one would see it on paper.

It would be wonderful if I could carry around my entire collection of journal articles on a tablet, but the display technology just doesn't seem to be quite there yet.

The DX does reasonably well if you can handle smaller fonts. I've had no difficulties with mine for computer science papers.

It doesn't handle math formulae very well. Not sure if this is a short coming of the AZW format or what at this point. It's hard to find information on whether or not there is an easy work around.

The day one of these things does Knuth's books perfectly is the day when I think they've well and truly won.

Its not good. I love my kindle, but for textbooks it kind of sucks. Granted I have the smaller one.

Formulae are ok from what I have seen, but graphs and charts are almost impossible to read.

Also its annoying because often times a paragraph on one page will refer to a graph on the next page and switching back and forth is very tedious.

Will someone please release an API so I can write a printer driver and we can print directly to our ebook readers already?

The APIs that have been available so far (AFAIK - someone please correct me) for any of the readers have been lackluster.

Some records are easier to break than others.

Of course, if I read more I'd probably have one by now, at $190 for the free 3G model it's very tempting.

Relatedly, has anything come of the SDK?

> Relatedly, has anything come of the SDK?

No, still waiting on that - I applied something like 6 months ago and haven't heard a peep. Maybe Oracle is making a mess of things (it's based on Java ME).

I'm really curious to hear about these new kindles... I'm very tempted. No more paying to import books to Italy!

Relatedly, has anything come of the SDK?

Two apps that I'm aware of, a hangman app and a "find the words you can make out of this random block of characters". Nothing too ground breaking, but it's gotten me thinking about some reader-centric style apps, including things that pull references or quotes from a users' Kindle library.

Not available worldwide, by the way. URLs:

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=93450

http://www.kindlepost.com/2010/08/free-games-on-kindle.html

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003P37FW0

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003P38AAG

Slow refresh rate of e-ink (1.35 Hz), limited contrast and shade resolution, no touch screen yet and a book-centric context make the immediate scope of apps a lot less varied than say the iPad. Better colour gradience, resolution and refresh rate means a greater variety of books, games and media. We'll see what happens as app development actually starts and matures as future Kindle iterations come out. Kindle's future success is tied to E-ink's viability in cost versus quality and right now, one could only guess beyond reading and reference-type apps.

I think E-Ink is exciting in the sense of how little power it consumes in static display. The Kindle 3 supposedly lasts up to a month if the wireless radio is turned off. Lowering e-ink cost regardless of the quality combined with a few solar panels here+there, and the technology's use cases in advertising, retail, consumer, and corporate stuff etc go up drastically.

Having ordered several weeks ago, I am anxiously awaiting it's arrival. The wifi only version was a nice move and the price point is really attractive.

I wonder why they still don't sell to Russia and over 100 other countries. Copyright issues?

Setting up Whispernet with local cell providers would also probably be a bottleneck.

Would be interesting to know whether Amazon is outselling Apple for eBooks on the iPad.

I'd probably bet that they are. I use the iPad exclusively for my eBooks and 80-90% of my non-free books are on through the Kindle app.

Exact same situation with my wife as well as a few others we know.

Primary reason I haven't purchased a kindle: no way to lock the page orientation. I borrowed one from a friend and tried reading on the beach; the damn thing kept flipping around so I couldn't read it. Such a trivial thing to add, but lacking in the iphone as well.

I'm assuming you were using a Kindle DX (the others don't auto-rotate). But anyway, you can lock the orientation:

http://thekindle.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/screenrotationd...

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