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Comment by techmonk | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with his statement about the Kindle Fire not having built-in support for .mobi files. I am currently reading Land of Lisp in .mobi format on my Kindle fire with no problems. The one quirk I did notice is even though I uploaded the .mobi file to the books directory, the book shows up in the Docs view. It seems only books purchased directly through the Kindle store are allowed to show up in the Books view. I generally like my Kindle Fire but I do find some of the on screen buttons require multiple presses to respond, particularly the back button. Hopefully this will be fixed in a software update.

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I was puzzled by that too, but from what I've read there's a tag defined in the Mobipocket format that specifies whether something is a "book" or a "doc". Previous Kindles (and, apparently, a lot of ebook generation software) ignore this, but the Kindle Fire does not (possibly "doc" is the default if the tag is not present -- unclear on this). You can supposedly fix the tag using Calibre, but I haven't bothered. Now that I know where they are, it doesn't really bother me.

I don't think the criticism wrt AVI is appropriate, either. I wouldn't have expected it to play AVI, and in fact am somewhat surprised that anyone is still using that as a distribution format. As a format for editing, it's somewhat understandable, but it's not the best choice for media distribution/consumption and hasn't been for quite a long time. Why would you expect a random Android device to play an obsolete/obsolescent proprietary Microsoft format?

I like the Fire, personally. It's not going to replace my iPad or eInk Kindle, but it sure is handy for reading in bed.

AVI is still the major format for non-HD videos from the torrent sites...

If you tap quickly (bouncing your finger off the screen) it tends to work fine. I believe the issue is that it is TOO sensitive, especially in regards to thinking you are trying to drag something.

If it let me install 3rd party keyboards and it solved the touch-sensitivity issues I'd keep it definitely. As it is, I'm very close to returning it. I'm hoping for a nice custom rom at this point.

Yes I agree I find the fire to be suitable for most of my needs i.e. reading, surfing the web, and listening to music. Most of the problems I have are software related and those can be easily fixed with an update.

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