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Comment by onidj | Hacker News Reader

Having used an early kindle and a recent kindle, they are incredibly similar. One of the main innovations of the new models appears to be adverts you have to pay to get rid of.

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Also gradually phasing out support of formats like mobi, in such subtle ways that if you open a mobi file you cannot go back to the library, but have to cold-reboot your device...

My current kindle is my third one, and is the last. I will never ever pay for a kindle to Amazon, due to its user hostility.

Oh, and also you cannot move ebooks between accounts, even not with a lot of friction, eg. support tickets, which would be a fair way to game piracy and unwanted lending, which was some inconvinience for me in a situation. Not a huge monetary loss for me, rather a reminder that when you pay to Amazon (or Valve, or any other contemporary DRM-burdened vendor) you are only leasing...

It's what I hate the most: I can't lend a book to my wife to talk about it.

Just US and UK have family accounts.

Minor nit: Steam doesn’t require DRM. That is left up to the game publisher.

My kindle from 2012 used to have ads you needed to pay for to get rid of. It was sold as separate product with or without ads at a time. I had one with ads.

I keep it offline in airplane mode permanently from 2016 and haven't seen a single ad in a long long time.

I have a similar one and I never bothered to pay to get rid of the ads or keep it in aeroplane mode.

The ads are only shown while it's off, they're static black and white images, and 99% of the time they're for books. Totally unobjectionable.

If they were in the actual UI and for stuff like cars and perfume I might mind, but they aren't so I never cared.

> The ads are only shown while it's off, they're static black and white images, and 99% of the time they're for books. Totally unobjectionable

Speak for yourself. Aside from the principle, some of us don’t want to be advertised to in the comfort of our own home/bed/while we’re camping or whatever. Ads don’t have to be actively flashing, spaz-inducing insanity to be objectionable.

Not to mention that by definition an ad like this WILL be seen and attended to, even if only momentarily. That in itself is also objectionable.

Customers have proven they'd rather pay less for the option to see ads. As long as you can pay for an ad-less experience, I see no problem with it.

Considering how difficult it is now to buy a TV without ad-infested “smart” software, I think we should all be grateful for the opportunity to pay to remove ads.

But what a sad world we live in…

There are cracks for older firmware and others for newer. You can have it online and adfree with a little forum reading.

You'll get a new ad if you take it online again, but they only persist for about a month or so before falling back to the generic 'read books' amazon ad.

I have my 2016 one setup without a password so when I open my cover the device unlocks, so I never really even see the ad unless I try.

I just realized I like how the ads in my paperbacks have been there for decades.

The fact that having ads on a product designed for reading is so dystopian. A great new term has recently entered the lexicon to describe this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

I'm reading a book by Asimov at the moment, printed 1989. The first page is an ad for a Robert Silverberg book adaptation of the Nightfall short story. Pages 2-3 are ads for other Asimov books. The last 5 pages are an excerpt of Edge of Eternity. And the final page is an advertisement for Voice of the Planet, a "5 episode TBS miniseries starring William Shatner and Faye Dunaway"

Have you never read a magazine or a newspaper? Ads have been in products designed for reading for your entire life.

And it’s an ad on the lock screen, not an ad interrupting your reading. I buy the ad free versions though.

Actually, the old Kindle had physical buttons, which I find more ergonomic when reading in bed

That's what your nose is for. (I'm quite skilled at advancing or going back by gently tapping the kindle against my face. It helps that I'm very nearsighted so it's kind of already there)

Same here. I read your comment from two inches away lol

Really wish my 1st gen Paperweight had split forward and back buttons on the right side.

But then I also understand that'd increase the price by 10% and only help right handed people with weak hands so... c'est la vie.

> But then I also understand that'd increase the price by 10% and only help right handed people with weak hands so... c'est la vie.

You can... turn them upside down to become a left-handed device. That way you can be weak-handed with either hand!

Only way to get buttons that are comfy on both sides would be to flip it screen out. That doesn't seem like a very useful position to hold a reader in though.

If you turn it upside down the left hand buttons will be way too high on the reader

The Oasis solves this - buttons are in the middle. Since you tend to not use the back page button much, it works pretty well.

I was skeptical of the "lopsided" design at first but it grew on me and is what I'd prefer in future devices from here on out.

The original Kindle keyboard had perfect page turn buttons and it’s been downhill ever since, though the Oasis is livable.

There are newer ones with physical buttons.

There are but it's discontinued. There is no current generation model with page turn buttons.

damn - didn't realize they discontinued the Oasis, rip

The "library" UI has also gotten radically worse over time (in my family there is a 3G, an early Paperwhite, and a relatively recent base model, and each has a worse and sparser UI than the last). The pages turn faster though, due to improved display/display driver tech.

And meanwhile the webapp's library UI doesn't even let you filter by read status.

> adverts you have to pay to get rid of

Those have been around since day 1 afaik - my second gen kindle had them over ~12 years ago

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