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Comment by mdoms | Hacker News Reader

I consider the Kindle one of the most underbaked products I have ever used, and it staggers me that no one seems to care. Earlier iterations were truly ground-breaking, so we gave them a break on the details. But we've been at this for 12 years now, the product really should have matured more.

I'm not talking about the state of E-ink, but the usability of the Kindle device itself. I current use a latest-gen Paperwhite but I've owned almost all of them. The current one, in my opinion, is a huge step backwards in lots of ways from earlier iterations. The touch screen is appalling and has no place on an E-ink device. The software is incredibly bad. There's so much scope there to surface useful information on the home screen but there's nothing of value there - I can't even see more than a couple of books in progress, much less find something I may want to read later. It's just astoundingly bad.

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The kindle could have been the best, no clue what happened but development just seemed to completely stall. It's sad because the vast majority of consumers don't even realize there are incredible advances being made to E-ink displays, they never see it.

Last summer I was sitting in a library and had noticed the person across from me was using an E-ink device I had never seen before. I showed the person my kindle and asked if they like their device more or less than mine. I vividly recall the woman's eyes light up with excitement as she handed me the device and pen she was holding. Perfect written text on an e-ink device the size of a paper notebook with what felt like an almost identical weight to my kindle. Stunning! She told me how she had been using it exclusively for note taking and the battery life was fairly comparable.

I wish I could recall the name of the device but I think it was something by Sony. I couldn't help but be stunned though, Amazon is completely missing the opportunity with these devices and I feel bad for the people who will continue to purchase their obsolete products.

Maybe it was a Remarkable [1] ? A new version is coming out soon.

[1] https://remarkable.com

I used it initially for sometime but then slowly fell back to the iPad. I mean the comparison between an iPad and Kindle/Remarkable isn’t fair, but if a tablet is the go-to form-factor for books and note-taking, I’d stick to the iPad.

There was a time when e-ink seemed pretty compelling versus a tablet for certain uses, but that gap has shrunk to the point where it's hard to justify another special purpose device. I do have a Paperwhite in addition to an iPad but honestly don't use it very much. don't want to travel with yet another device and the iPad is actually a much better reader if the book isn't just flowing text.

Tablets are too large and heavy for use cases that eink readers can fulfill. Nobody's going to hold up an iPad one handed over their head while lying in bed. Months of battery life make them more of a book than a tablet will ever be.

They're also so small and light I don't even question putting them in a travel bag.

In the tablet vs laptop for travel I'm going to go laptop every time. So laptop + Kindle.

For a short trip, I'll sometimes take laptop and Kindle. But, especially for long plane trips, I can't comfortably use a laptop and a tablet just gives me a lot more entertainment options. (It's also sometimes useful for taking notes by hand.)

And to another comment, yes the Kindle is small and light but it's something else I need to keep track of so I tend not to bring laptop + tablet + Kindle. (And I've never been able to make an iPad work for me as a laptop replacement.)

My backpacks have these real small pockets for notepads still. Kindle just goes in there. On really long trips (Australia for a month) I bring all 3. Well actually I also brought my Switch, NC headphones, monster battery, and work laptop (loaner 13" mb) as well as personal. I had to pay the extra fee on carry ons on Jetstar (and it did get weighed).

Really tablet is just crappy movie watcher or smaller webpage reader. Having all this was good since on that trip my SSD de-soldered itself from my motherboard on my Laptop, forcing me to use USB Sticks and turn it into a $3200 chrome book.

I basically equate the kindle to a charging or backup set of wireless earbuds in weight.

If Sony then perhaps this: Sony DPT-RP1/B 13” Digital Paper https://www.amazon.com/Sony-DPT-RP1-13-Digital-Paper/dp/B072...

reMarkable would perhaps fall in the same category (eInk readers which are miles ahead of Kindle) https://remarkable.com/

As far as I can see, that device costs around $1000 (can't see the exact price on the page you shared because I'm not in a country that Amazon deliver to). I would expect it to be much, much better than a kindle when it costs four times as much.

The 10" one seems to cost $380 or so.

Sony Digital Paper costs around $700 for 13.3"; Kindle Oasis $270 for 7". Considering Amazon's scale they can easily bring 'Sony's type' of reader price down considerably if they choose to make such device.

https://gizmodo.com/sonys-beautiful-e-ink-tablet-made-me-fee...

Sony has the same scale. It's the scale of sales not manuf that dictates the price. Not sure if you remember the Kindle DX. It did not sell well but boy did I covet one.

I bought a DX. It's still a wonderful machine. I worry when the battery fails and it'll be gone for good.

I recently replaced the battery in my Kindle Keyboard (I love physical buttons). It was easier to replace than I expected, and after half a year of daily use, haven't noticed any issues with the battery.

There are probably at least a few good places to buy replacement batteries; I got mine from batteryship dot com. I have zero association with them except that I bought this one battery, and will probably buy a phone battery from them in the future.

Thanks for the tip!

The DPT-RP1 linked to is now discontinued, and has unfortunate reviews that seem to indicate the potential went to waste:

https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/sony-digital-paper-dpt-rp1

"Sony is creating a new version of their Digital Paper 13.3 to replace the aging DPT-RP1 that came out in 2017. It was supposed to be released this year, but the company made the internal decision in Japan to delay it until April or May 2020. Sony Japan primarily designs the Digital Paper and they do the manufacturing in China. The software experience is undergoing a bit of a tweak, due to professional feedback from their business customers in the US."

https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/next-generat...

[Edit]

Sony might be closing down the Digital Paper division

https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/sony-might-b...

Is it discontinued? I couldn't find it on Sony's site, only covers and accessories for it.

Same is true of goodreads. Amazon have their market lock now, it’s the IE6 phase now. (Except it was way easier to get people off IE6 than it will be to get them off the platform with all of their books.)

It’s the IE6 when it comes to rendering quality too. Zero support for any sort of standards, bugs everywhere you look, and it’s users complain bitterly if you don’t go out of your way to support their entrenched ways of working.

I use goodreads as well and find the UI/UX very old fashioned. The lag is astonishing as well. What are some issues you have with it?

The mobile app is horrible. It's a webview or something, and works like total crap on old devices. If you open a notification for a group discussion post, it tells you what the title of the discussion is--but not what group it's for.

As much as possible, I find myself interacting with Goodreads through calibre plugins; I've got a library with zero actual book files that contains an entry for every book in my library, and I mainly use that to browse my collection. Since syncing that list takes so long, my actual calibre libraries are also synced to Goodreads, as that's where I actually make my changes.

With Library thing's recent removal of library limits, I'm thinking more and more about abandoning Goodreads--except I don't know if there's a calibre plugin for PT, and I've spent so much time adding and updating book records for items in my goodreads library, which would have to be redone for LT.

FYI the mobile opera browser uses the webview and is superfast, but the Kindle app is all native code.

Kindle and Goodreads I think are both crap for the same reason: the goal is to kill the competition not make great products.

Amazon should never have been allowed to buy Goodreads.

The barrier to entry for an alternative to Goodreads isn’t exactly high. But does anyone care enough to do so?

The barrier is actually quite high. Sure, its easy to make a CRUD app that would aggregate ratings. The difficult part is to get people to use it instead of the leader. These are called network effects, and they are very hard to break.

This is why big social media sites have such high valuations. Any small group could develop an alternative to Facebook. However, the chances of that usurping them is almost zero. The same goes for Goodreads.

The barrier was not high. Now that it’s baked into Kindle (automatic sync, instant review, etc), Goodreads has a significant moat.

The problem with Goodreads is more than just an old-fashioned website. The community there, the whole "social" angle of the site, has been taken over by the same phenomena as on Amazon.com: publishers send free copies of their books to certain reviewers, who often don’t even actually read the book before writing their review, and then those reviewers exploit this attention to build up their own reputations as "influencers" and eventually monetize those reputations. Because their reviews have bright colours and image memes, and cliques support each other with mutual likes, those reviews show up at the top of any book listing.

If you are one of those reviewers who honestly reads and reviews books, then you can feel like your signal is lost in the noise of the shill reviewers. Also, for those who were initially interested in what their real-life friends were reading, the majority of those IRL friends will have dropped off the site over the years, either because of a natural attrition or because they have come to prefer snackable web content over books.

This is actually what I was trying to get at: GoodReads could be so much better, but that would require the maintainers to care. And they don’t, because they’ve got the market lock and have moved into other things. Like Microsoft did with IE6.

Agree completely the broken community is much more important than the aged look of the website.

Perhaps it’s “done”. Overdoing products is a massive problem these days.

If you mean the kindle is not advancing because it's "done", no way. Objectively, it's a pretty terrible device. The reason it hasn't advanced is lack of competition.

I have one. It works flawlessly for me

This both is and isn't the case for me.

I read fiction on a Kindle oasis. Its fantastic. I can't think of a single improvement.

Its impossible for me to work with technical materials on the Kindle. Specs, tutorials, tech blogs, tech books. All are unusable because of resizing figures.

That’s always been the case for technical content. The form factor and the document structures are fairly unsuited to pocket devices. I use mine for fiction only.

I crank out the desktop for technical content almost universally. iPad doesn’t cut it either.

But at the same time I have actual physical books for very technical stuff. They are still easier to use.

The trouble is all the things you would need for reading technical material (large size, note taking, etc) would detract from what you need to read fiction.

They probably should be two different devices. Personally I'm waiting for the new Remarkable.

That's why I still have a Kindle DX. It's way out of updates and it's very slow, but it still works.

> I read fiction on a Kindle oasis. Its fantastic. I can't think of a single improvement.

I have one and I can. The case is too slippery. It's hard to operate one-handed while lying on the couch because it slips out of your hand. My old Kindle 3 is very easy to operate one-handed at any angle, no slipping.

Sync hasn't worked for me in months. Let's hope they start 'overdoing' the kindle any day now.

The answer is very simple

Amazon didn't want to expand on Kindle functionality because

1) They were scared people would stop reading books

2) They were scared of it becoming something they couldn't control

3) They have their heads up their asses and think they can make software and hardware better than anyone else when all they can make is stuff like Kindle and Kindle Fire Phone and other useless crap

you know how originally Steve Jobs didn't want an App Store on iPhone

That's what Amazon was like

They are control freaks

EXCEPT

they are useless at hardware and software as far as it comes to devices (Kindle Fire Phone is a good example of how bad, though Kindle is also devolving fast)

Also they can't make a good ecosystem because they screw over everyone they work with

You see it in AWS where they copied and cloned successful AWS companies

You see it in Alexa where they steal ideas from companies in the Alexa Fund etc

It was the same story in Kindle eInk App Store

We built apps for eInk and all the other developers who worked on its shared the same sentiment we did. None of the developers could believe how bad Amazon were at working with devs

It was the most godawful experience you could ever imagine working with anyone on anything

A) They were so bad at letting apps go out to customers they had to close down the app store

B) For every app that did well they started contacting other developers to clone the App

That's why you saw 2 of everything. One high quality version, and then a cheap clone because Amazon's mindset was to have 2 or 3 of everything that started selling well

So all the early developers who spent money and time on it, instead of getting rewarded, got screwed

C) I had an Amazon guy literally tell me on the phone - You've already made $200,000 this year. Why do you want to make more? Our development costs were not even covered with $200,000

D) We had one hit game in one area. Let's say (just as an example) card games. We had a separate card game pending approval, Game X. They kept delaying it

Meanwhile an Android developer contacted us saying - You guys have this card game. How is it doing? Because Amazon is contacting us saying card games are hot and asking us to make Game X

So, we put in the effort to do R&D and discovered card games were hot

And they stopped our READY FOR LAUNCH app in the same area (card games) and started contacting other developers to make that same app. It's the kind of stuff you can't even imagine a business partner ever doing to you

E) They kept one set of developers (ones who they thought 'had already made enough money') completely out of launch of the Kindle Paperwhite

So some of the people who invested in their Kindle eInk App Store, they Screwed over by purposefully keeping out many of them from the launch of the new device

What is crazy is they invited other developers to clone the same apps

Many of those were low quality devs from 3rd world countries who were asked to make clone apps. They found some unknown company from India (no disrespect, just implying that it was not some known game studio) to clone our card game app and launch for Kindle paperwhite (while our game was kept out)

So our apps were kept out of launch and meanwhile low quality knockoffs of our apps were sent to customers

We literally had customers emailing and writing reviews complaining 'why is it not available for Kindle Paperwhite'

you might be talking about the Sony eReader

It was the first mainstream eInk based reader. Amazon takes all the credit but Sony did it first

All Amazon did was get lots of authors to offer free books and use that to get market share. Now everyone thinks Amazon invented eReaders and eBooks

Well, guess in a sense they did as history is written by the winners

Amazon is very good where it can get subsidies from the government (no sales tax, USPS special rates) or where it can make a platform and invite people in and later screw them over and replace them with someone else

AWS is pretty impressive

Sooner or later they are going to run out of affiliates/developers/companies/suppliers to screw over

You know, I've been reading books on my Kindle device(s) for probably 9 or 10 years now, on a monthly to daily basis, and had no idea there was an app store or apps for kindles.

Sony's original reader was crippled in many many ways. I considered buying one back in the depths of time before the g2 Kindle came out. The I used a g2, and bought it right then and there (while sitting at the bar at a Texas Roadhouse).

For context Sony's reader required a windows app. Kindle had whispernet.

I wasn't a huge fan of either company at the time but ended up working at both in the following years.

You really need to organize your thoughts better, I have no clue what you’re trying to say here but it sounds interesting.

I like my Kindle Paperwhite, but it's also a very frustrating product — slow, low-res, terrible UI, etc.

But my biggest complaint is that Kindle made books ugly. I love beautiful typography, and bad typography can ruin a reading experience. Reading Kindle books are like stepping back in time to low-quality mass-market paperbacks.

Using John Crowley's Little, Big as an example:

* Original print version: https://i.imgur.com/pLmQyja.jpg

* Kindle: https://i.imgur.com/xRu0eLo.jpg

* Kindle Cloud Reader: https://i.imgur.com/GDqCD9u.jpg

There's absolutely nothing stopping us from being able to render the book beautifully with the right font. In this particularly egregious example, they didn't even bother to include the ornamentations. That's one thing, but those underlined chapter headings? They didn't even try.

As I understand it, modern e-books are just HTML, designed to be reformatted to different screens. There appears to be limited support for fonts, and whatever Kindle uses to render text is awful.

Another frustration about the quality of the books is how a lot of older fiction is only available in very shoddily digitized versions that don't even use correct typography ("smart" quotes, em dashes, indented paragraphs, etc.).

You need a 300ppi display. Then you won't have a reason to complain about quality. The Paperwhite 3 looks amazing.

How does resolution address any of my complaints?

> very shoddily digitized versions

Funny you should mention that. I usually watch old movies with the closed captioning on, and it's clear the captioning isn't even proofread. Lots of times it will be a sound-alike word that doesn't fit in the sentence. Perhaps they employ non-native English speakers to type in the text.

I'm gonna disagree with you. I have a previous-gen Paperwhite and I absolutely love it. I love that it's a simple piece of technology. The touchscreen rarely causes me problems, and I even dropped it into a pool and after 2 weeks of drying it's still working fine.

I consider it a well-made piece of technology that Just Works. (actually, a recent software update changed something that required changing my muscle memory... wish I could disable updates!)

This seems to really be a pattern with Amazon. Their sweet spot is doing Zero to One by watching what goes off and then leveraging their size for a Second Mover Advantage.

Once something sticks to the wall, they are absolutely ruthless at getting it to product-market fit and commercial success, but interestingly enough, they stop there and all further development is merely iterative. They usually have some of the first decent and usuable products in any market, but tend to go for full commercial exploitation and pure maintenance mode from there.

Redshift used to be an absolute game changer for the Big Data market (I still remember their 1 TB for under 999$/month claim to this day), but Snowflake or BigQuery are just much better products this day and they never made the architectural shift from the client/server based architecture.

Prime Video is an absolute success story despite their awful interface, UX and crappy metadata, just because they got a grip on the hardware, smartly cross-sold it and bought / produced some good & free content.

I could go on and on, but it seems to be company core DNA to stop at 80/20. Whether that's a good thing or not, I'm still unsure.

Maybe because Bezos stops being involved and there is nobody inside the company who dares to change whatever Bezos has implemented?

Reading the tweets, it seems like Bezos made all the important decisions. If he is not around because he is focussed on other projects, who could do it instead? Judging by the story that Bezos didn't allow any pixel to be changed on the Amazon homepage, I can imagine that this is a pattern and whoever tried to implement a change doesn't dare to try it again.

From my experience at Amazon, products launch, and then the team starts building the next thing, and the previous thing only gets mandatory attention from then on. There was always just too much to work on to completely polish anything.

Prime video seems to have fleshed out its content with a lot of old, obscure, niche documentaries. Fortunately, I like old, obscure, niche documentaries and enjoy watching them. Netflix seems to stick with only mainstream content.

> The touch screen is appalling and has no place on an E-ink device.

It's okay, but it's also obvious they didn't put any buttons into the Paperwhite to have a reason for the more expensive model which does have buttons to turn the page(and nothing else of value it seems).

I find my Paperwhite to be quite usable, but I agree that almost everything could have been done better. I still don't get why some ebooks I buy land on the Kindle immediately but some will only download once I try to read them(which is super annoying on vacation), I don't know why the library seems to be randomly shuffled every time I look at it, and I don't know why it's not possible to completely shut off the Paperwhite's backlighting.

A lot of little strange decision were made with that thing.

Idk, I can put all the books I have ever owned on it and read them, that's what it's supposed to do and it does it for 80 bucks. 99.99% of my time on the Kindle is spent reading a book, not fiddling with menus or on the home page.

On top of that they're well made and the battery lasts forever, i can't complain at all.

If that was the first-gen device, sure. But in comparison to older models, Kindle keeps regressing UX-wise. Before my Paperwhite, I owned the old keyboard version with no touchscreen, and it was much more useful as a device - it was easier to take notes, and it even made sense to use the built-in browser.

(Not that touchscreens are bad per se, but the responsiveness of the screens/whole OS on Paperwhite is bad.)

I like the first keyboard model. The experience was just right when using it.

I have I think a 2nd gen Paperwhite and I feel like the main "problem" I have is that the reading experience is more or less perfect. It could be much faster and more convenient to shop for new books, but I rarely do that on the device anyway. But when it comes to reading a book, I am so used to the Paperwhite 2nd gen that I would pay a significant premium to get a like-for-like replacement than some new model.

I have a 2nd-generation Paperwhite that I haven’t used in a couple of years because it keeps slowing down a few weeks after booting. It also slows down immediately if I sideload more than a handful of e-book files. I switched to an iPad Mini and never looked back.

Presumably, they’re making enough profit through Kindle that no one at Amazon thinks it’s worth investing in a completely new Kindle reader.

It’s also possible that people who read on these devices aren’t tech savvy enough to care about how awful of an experience it is.

> It’s also possible that people who read on these devices aren’t tech savvy enough to care about how awful of an experience it is.

Absolutely.

Some people who don't quite "get" computers seem to find it really difficult what they should expect from a device. They can have a laptop that needs 5 minutes to boot and a broken mouse that jumps to a random location on the screen once every minute, and the only thing they'll complain about is that Windows doesn't let them select a lot of files properly(because the mouse jumps around like crazy).

The skit in IT Crowd with the "laptop from the exorcist" is sometimes more accurate than one might like.

Exactly this. This also explains why most modern software has so atrocious UX, and why companies can get away producing hardware that can barely lift its own software. It's because non-tech-savvy consumers don't have a point of reference and a mental model to express what's wrong, and also don't have a choice other than to suck it up, or not have a device at all.

I actually think this is more of a problem with technical people overvaluing the importance of the technology and not caring enough about what their customer actually needs. They think that the technology is what matters. But technology is just a tool. It really doesn't matter how ugly, janky or suboptimal the technology is if it is a useful enough tool.

People want a cheap device that doesn't ruin the reading experience and has access to all the books they want.

What I think is driving this is the lack of competition. No-one is going to take on the Kindle. Not because they don’t think they couldn’t make a better device, but because the don’t think they could create a digital bookstore with enough titles to be useful.

Maybe a tablet maker will one day add a second, e-ink screen to the back of the tablet and run the Kindle app on it.

There is actually competition to the Kindle, although you often wouldn't know it, reading "mainstream" US-centric forums such as HN.

Kobo offers a complete ecosystem similar to the Kindle, with bookstore, devices and syncing. There are a number of regional players as well in this space.

Then, of course, there are all the device makers that simply expect you to bring your own content.

> Then, of course, there are all the device makers that simply expect you to bring your own content.

Someone on hacker news talked about using syncthing for their ebook and I had to replicate it. it sounded so much more useful than my previous experience with ebook readers, the nook simple touch.

My quest to find an e-reader that supported Android 4.4+ and both headphone jacks and SD cards resulted in a likebook Mars.

Now I can use syncthing to sync my library...ebooks, PDF, and audiobooks, automatically in the background, no account needed.

I would have preferred to purchase a modern incarnation of the very first Kindle, with a headphone jack, SD card, and keyboard, but nobody makes such a device any longer, or if they do, it is so out of date that it cannot run syncthing.

I continue to be excited about the pine phone keyboard design, because from there it is only a properly sized e ink screen away from being a tiny e-reader with keyboard headphone jack and Linux!

There just isn't any good competition. As with anything else, lack of competition stifles innovation. Why should they spend engineer time on this when it sells just as well?

I think for the reasons mentioned in the tweets we are all commenting on.

I just don’t understand why Paperwhite is so sluggish compared to Kindle Touch. It’s just objectively worse for no apparent reason.

Anyone has any insights into it?

Dan Luu has some insight into it:

https://danluu.com/input-lag/

Apparently, Kindles are the worst in the terms of input latency and performance, but then this is also expected given their specification and the price point.

My problem is that Kindles of late are slower than earlier Kindles, not against non-E Ink devices.

(I have the Kindle Oasis 2)

I agree with almost all of the above, except for the touchscreen. I had the Kindle Non-Touch 4 and used it from 2012-2019, and having the touchscreen was an amazing improvement in usability and QOL when using the Kindle. Makes navigating, creating collections etc a lot faster. Other than that, I wish they would show the Kindle more love!

The touchscreen makes the Kindle unusable with one-hand operation. I'm glad the Oasis went back (at least partially) to buttons, though the buttons are too small.

The Kindle 3 did buttons right. You don't even need to push the page advance/retreat buttons, just flex your palm holding the Kindle. Very nice.

I'm adding 2.4 Ghz WiFi only on a $250 device in 2019 and a browser which is permanently 'experimental'.

May be the browser is not being used by many hardcore Kindle users, but Hacker News on my Kindle Oasis is a delight to use(if the attached URLs went easy on JS, Looking at you TechCrunch); Especially when I was bedridden after a surgery and Kindle was one of the few devices which worked for my accessibility needs.

It feel having 'experimental' tag on the browser is like 'If you keep using this browser, instead of buying books from us, we'll pull the plug anytime'.

I was satisfied to send the books to the kindle, and then on the device, page back and page forward.

I agree about the touchscreen, I'm really happy with just page back and page forward.

In the big tech companies it is much harder to make the case for incremental improvements to existing products than it is to take on new disruptive problems.

But the opposite could be argued as well? Taking on a new disruptive problem is a huge risk, and big corps are generally risk averse...

Depends on the company - in a company like Amazon where Jeff is constantly pushing the envelope - standing still is the best recipe for falling behind. And you can see a hint of this happening in the article itself - the person running Books is given the reward of commoditizing Books as the reward of doing a great job of running Books. All the glory is in delivering new bigger and better things to Jeff, not in incrementally delivering 10% year over year improvements on an existing problem. In fact in such companies it can become difficult for managers to attract and retain ambitious talent to work on "incremental" things.

What's the point of a dedicated e-reader instead of a phone or tablet with the brightness turned down? As a device category it will go the way of mp3 players and button phones.

I owned several kindles but my current one has been gathering dust for years and instead I just use the kindle phone app.

I share a bed with my partner, and even the paperwhite is nearly too bright on its lowest setting for her. A tablet on low is a total non-starter.

An e-reader battery lasts longer than a phone. Also, there are no temptations to constantly check news or social media (or even Amazon’s ecosystem: my Kindle has been in airplane mode since the very minute I unboxed it). I don't even take my phone into the bedroom because it is a proven source of distraction and poor sleep, but a Kindle allows me to do some long and productive reading at night or when I wake up in the morning.

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