Hacker News Reader

Comment by acabal | Hacker News Reader

It's too bad that the Kindle is getting so much attention (even if some is negative, like this piece), when there are many other better options. I had a Kindle 3 until I bought a Nook Simple Touch, and the NST blows the K3 out of the water in every respect: build quality, software interface, reading experience and options. The only downside might be the in-store selection, but for geeks like us (and increasingly regular folks, thanks to Calibre) it's a simple matter to break Amazon's DRM and convert to Epub.

B&N has got to step up their game, because if sub-par products like the $79 Kindle keep stealing the limelight, they're never going to get anywhere.

View on HN

The Kindle has one feature that the Nook does not have: Electronic delivery of personal documents. You can't email a word doc or PDF to myname@bn.com and have it converted and delivered to your device. You have to save it from a computer, convert it, plug in the Nook, and copy the file over.

For book readers that might not matter. But it can be pretty attractive if you go beyond reading books by using something like Instapaper to "bookmark" articles throughout the day, then have them all automatically on the Kindle.

This can be the feature that makes a huge difference once you start to use it.

Yeah. Instapaper and emailing files, along with already having a large amount of Kindle purchases, are the reasons I've stuck with Kindle.

I also have Instapaper articles delivered to my Kindle. It's pretty awesome but it isn't a hard to implement feature - why don't they implement it?

I wish the Kindle (and ipad) could browse the shared file directories on my LAN. This is a glaring and inexplicable deficiency.

You can browse website and download files there. So you could set up a simple web server on your machine (since this is HN I going to assume this is easy for you!) and download files there.

It's great that you can browse Project Gutenberg on the device and download the Kindle formatted .mobi files directly and import them. It's like a Free (as in Public Domain) book shop!

Ha, yeah, I'd assume Walter Bright would be able to do that... :-)

But he shouldn't have to! We want him spending less time fiddling around with a home network and more time working on cool things like D.

This was the dealbreaker for me. I hate plugging devices in and use Instapaper a lot, so I chose the Kindle even though the Simple Touch looked nicer.

The best thing that I think B&N has going for it is their seemingly ongoing commitment to quality. I bought the original Nook shortly after its release and only recently decided to grab the NST to replace it (due almost entirely to simple gadget-envy). The Nook that I retired was a significantly better product than the Nook I originally bought. B&N continued to release relevant software updates for their original Nook for years. These weren't just bugfixes, but also major performance improvements, design improvements, and entirely new features. Basically, the Nook was, for me, the opposite of a disposable product because it kept getting better. That definitely built some brand-loyalty for me.

Read to the end. This is a very positive review of the new Kindle.

Keep in mind this isn't a review of the competition for the NST, which is the Kindle Touch. This is a review of the non-touch Kindle, which B&N has no competition for, espeically at a price that is $60 less.

Well, B&N is selling their remaining 1st edition Nook's at $89.

I want to literally get my hands on a Kindle and feel it (I've seen lots of them but never held one) to see if really has worse build quality than the flimsy NST. (I own an old but sturdy Sony PRS-505; other than wishing it were as fast as the recent Kindles or the NST, I have no complaints about it.)

the NST blows the K3 out of the water in every respect

No wireless, less space than a Nomad.

It does have Wifi, but not 3G (which I personally I think is overkill for a reading device). You can plug SD cards into it to extend the space, and with books weighing in at a few hundred KB, for the vast majority of people space isn't an issue.

Not to get too nitpicky here, but bookmarking twitter.com/longreads and reading excellent long-form articles on the go is an excellent Kindle use case. This was another selling point for me over the NST.

Poe's Law: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257...

My quote is from the Slashdot review of the announcement of the iPod (http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ip...). It's an example of where (usually) geeks fall into the trap of enumerating the raw engineering facts and think those raw engineering facts are what will decide the matter.

In truth, it's more than feature checklists. Marketing and social factors can play a large part in the success of a large product.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com