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Comment by acjohnson55 | Hacker News Reader

It's sad that color e-Ink still seems to be nowhere within sight. It seemed for a while that Pixel Qi's hybrid screens were on the horizon, but I haven't heard much about that lately.

I personally love the e-Ink screen on my Kindle Keyboard 3G. I wish I could upgrade to the next generation, but Amazon has gone with the wisdom of the day and eliminated buttons from the newer generations of Kindles. I also wish I had a screen with high enough res to read PDFs comfortably. As it is, without the ability to reflow PDF text, paging through the document is an awkward experience.

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Kindle DX isn't good for this?

http://amzn.com/B002GYWHSQ

Direct link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002GYWHSQ

It's just expensive old tech at this point. It's ok, but the screens in the newer Kindles meant for reading are much better.

You've set up something for Amazon links that adds your affiliate link on the end? I don't mind affiliate links, but that's pretty sneaky.

That's not an affiliate link. Affiliate links are tag=, not ref=

Please get your facts straight before lambasting a guy providing a link.

Forgive me for making an incorrect assumption. Why provide the amzn.com link instead of the normal amazon.com link then?

And what is the ref= for?

I acquired this link from the Amazon icon used for sharing via email. I thought it would be looked upon more favorably than the long Amazon link in my address bar. Sorry for giving offense.

Oh right, I didn't know. So I guess the "ref" is for Amazon's own use. Wow did I lose karma for a simple mistake.

Also saying they've set up something to add their affiliate link implies they own amzn.com, which to be clear is not the case. http://www.who.is/whois/AMZN

Too big! I've got good eyes, so I prefer a small, high-res screen. I love the size of the regular Kindle models

Kobo Aura HD is pretty good too - high resolution ~8" screen

The ECTACO jetBook Color 2 is color e-Ink: http://www.ectaco.com/jetBook_Color/

Here is a review of the first jetBook color. Haven't seen much on the 2nd model: http://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/ectaco-jetboo...

It's rather expensive, which would be my guess as to why it hasn't had a rapid expansion of market share.

After using both a Kindle Keyboard and a Kindle Touch, I much prefer the touch screen. I wouldn't mind having page turning buttons though.

Switching orientation to landscape makes most of my PDFs readable, at the cost of scrolling three times per page. It's not fun, but if necessary you can put up with it.

Is there anything that lets you "reflow" PDFs, so as to make them more readable on Kindles?

Yes, Amazon will do that conversion for you. It works OK, but I gave up on doing it for science white papers. Graphics are lost and it only works if the PDF is formatted the right way, so it was enough of a pain that I stuck to printing stuff out.

I use Readability to take web pages, get rid of pagination and beam the raw text to my Kindle, and I love it.

Only in the sense you can convert PDFs to native format through your Amazon account.

It works fine when you have a clean PDF with nothing but serial text (e.g. a novel).

Completely useless if your document is a less than perfect OCR job, if it has reasonably complex tables, math or non-Roman text (especially laid out in parallel with English translation). In other words, there's basically no way to read physics or Chinese philosophy papers from JSTOR with it.

Your average programming book might make it through okay, but might not. At the very least it's going to kill the indentation of any code samples (very bad for Python books).

yes, k2pdfopt does a great job of making PDFs readable on Kindles, etc.

I too am mulling over purchasing a new Kindle during an upcoming trip to the US, and am not wild about touch screens. Also, I'm quite sure that shortly after I buy the silly thing, they'll announce the new ones.

My advice: Get a cheap basic ereader. Turn off all the features you can(airplane mode works). Use Calibre. Every 2-4 weeks charge it and put books in it (not too many!). Forget about upcoming models. It's a book. You wouldn't care if a new edition of a novel came out with a different cover and font.

Mine is just for reading books (not articles, reports, emails, blogs, etc). When I pick it up, I relax. I read books. Completely different to the ADD experience of picking up my ipad. Strangely, I went back to reading fiction after buying it.

That's good advice, but I need it for work:

http://www.liberwriter.com

Funny you should say that; I would still buy one of the older models rather than buy from the current lineup. Maybe some surprise will come from the next Kindles that will change my mind, but I've evangelized the Kindle Keyboard 3G (it was once called the Kindle 3 with 3G) to my friends and family, as you get Internet access internationally without wifi.

It's amazingly handy while traveling to be able to read the news, check for important email, etc, without roaming. The current Kindles with 3G limit you to a small subset of the net, but the Keyboard is unlimited.

Yeah, I have one of those, and would miss that feature, although I've only really used it seriously once. See above/below, though.

I use the same and think it's pretty good. My only gripe is that the slots for where the cover/light connect aren't very sturdy. I have young kids who have bent the cover back many times and because the plastic is so thin at that point, the slots have cracked. You now have to jiggle the kindle around to get the light to turn on since the connection isn't good.

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