
Marco's eReader Roundup (Kindle 4, Kindle Touch, Nook Simple Touch, Kobo Touch) - martingordon
http://www.marco.org/2011/12/02/kindle-touch-vs-nook-simple-touch-kobo-touch-kindle-4
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lpolovets
I'm surprised to say this, but I _like_ the Kindle ads. I have an ad-free
Kindle and I got the ad-supported version for my wife (she was on the fence
about getting a Kindle at all, and knowing it was cheaper compelled her to
finally get it). The ads are pretty great! As the blog post says, they are
unobtrusive and only displayed when the Kindle is off. More importantly,
though, they are sometimes useful. The first few ads that I ended up clicking
on were "$5 off any Amazon purchase" and "Buy any one of these 100 bestselling
business eBooks for $1." Yes, there are ads that have nothing to do with
Amazon or books, but the fact that I occasionally see an ad that makes me go
"Wow, I will use this!" is pretty unexpected and pleasant. If my Kindle 3 ever
breaks, I plan to replace it with the ad-supported version.

~~~
WalterBright
I bought the Kindle DX and was actually disappointed that it didn't serve ads.
Instead, it puts ugly pictures of dead authors as the screensaver.

~~~
SWengineer
I bought the DX for the large screen so I can read programming books and pdfs
on e ink. I like some of the artwork, esp the one of the fish. I think the
kindle 4 smaller devices have more contemporary screen savers.

~~~
berntb
I really want to get a DX, but the page switch time scare me. It would be hard
to browse code, etc. How does this work for technical books?

(Also, I'd be fired if I sent internal pdf documents off for conversion... :-)

~~~
WalterBright
I bought the DX in order to read PDFs on it. No conversion is necessary - just
attach a USB cable and drag-n-drop the PDFs to it. The page switch time is
fine.

The only real downside is you can't "flip" through the pages. Reading a book
sequentially works fine, any other way is a pain.

I got the DX at the $250 special Amazon had for it last Monday. The price is
back to $379.

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dprice1
I wish the review (or the accompanying ecosystem review) had considered the
freedom/openness of each device. To me that seems like the #1 concern I would
have with a reader for content I value over the long run.

It has seemed to me that the Kindle is the device with the most lock-in
whereas the Kobo has the least (it uses Adobe's DRM scheme, which at least has
a tool which lets you move your content from device to device). I'm less sure
about the Nook.

Second, it has never really been completely clear to me what would happen to
my content were one of these companies to go out of business. Any thoughts?

Finally, since the review mentions periodicals, I think it would be great to
review the periodical retention policies of the devices. I have a friend who
has a Kindle and complains bitterly about its periodical retention scheme--
about how it always wants to age out (and remove) old issues of a magazine
(which you have to tediously disable issue by issue), and how, once gone, you
can never regain access to periodicals you once had. Want to re-read that New
Yorker from last year on the upgraded Kindle you just got for Xmas? You
can't...

[Posting as a non-ereader owner who keeps trying to figure out which one to
get; I have used my phone as a client with Kindle and Kobo stores]

~~~
lpolovets
I resisted the Kindle for a long time because of the DRM/openness issues that
you mention. They idea of not being able to share books, to not "own" what I
had paid for, etc. really bothered me. Last year, someone bought be a Kindle
for Christmas, so I figured I may as well give it a try. The Kindle quickly
became one of my most cherished possessions.

Some observations:

1) Yes, the DRM sucks, philosophically speaking. I would even pay a little
more just to get DRM-free versions, but unfortunately that's not an option
(yet?).

2) Over time, you save money on books. A dollar here, two dollars there; it
quickly adds up. Pretty soon, even if you ever had some book removed from your
Kindle, you would have saved more than enough money to just go buy the
physical copy.

3) That said, the horror stories about books getting removed (like the ironic
'1984' fiasco from a few years ago) or accounts being locked are extremely
rare. Out of millions or tens of millions of Kindle owners, there are only a
handful of stories about people being screwed by DRM.

4) Because of the convenient form factor, the ease of taking the Kindle
everywhere I go, and the ease of buying books (a double-edged sword), I read
2x as much as I used to. In 2010, I read just under 40 books; for 2011, I'm on
track for about 70. For me, this alone makes the Kindle worth it, regardless
of DRM.

5) You can have several Kindles under one Amazon account. This means my wife
and I can buy 1 book and read it at the same time on our individual Kindles.
That's pretty sweet.

6) As others in this thread have mentioned, you don't have to buy books
through Amazon. That lets you potentially sidestep the DRM issue depending on
the availability of what you like to read.

So yes, in theory, DRM sucks, and I would happily pay higher prices to truly
own everything that I purchase. In practice, the cons of DRM are outweighed by
everything else.

~~~
tspiteri
_2) Over time, you save money on books. A dollar here, two dollars there; it
quickly adds up. Pretty soon, even if you ever had some book removed from your
Kindle, you would have saved more than enough money to just go buy the
physical copy._

With the Kindle, I started to buy books more often, as they take no physical
space. So even if they are cheaper per unit, I am spending more, not saving
money.

~~~
lpolovets
Touche. =)

I guess it depends on what you are measuring. In terms of absolute spend, I
agree that I spend more on books than I used to. However, given that I'm
buying more books because I'm actually reading more, my "per-book spending" is
a little lower.

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duck
_On the Kindles, the ads aren’t intrusive, and if you get an ad model and
change your mind later, you can just pay the difference and get the ads
removed. So it’s not much of a risk to just get the ads._

This is the first time I have heard this... you would think they would market
that ability more.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
Kindle is dangerously close to having too many models. Customers are becoming
confused. I was at a Best Buy and I overheard a couple looking at a Kindle.
This Best Buy seemed to only have the Special Offers models. The couple was
asking for the ad-free version, and the employee wasn't giving them a sure
answer. He _thought_ that after you buy the Special Offers version it would
ask you if you wanted to remove them for the addition $30. I'm a super nerd
and even I don't know if that is true (I suspect not).

There are a couple of problems here: Amazon is allowing retailers to carry
part of the line. Radio Shack has even fewer choices (mine didn't have the
Touch at all). But worse, they have too many choices, and the retailers aren't
able to (or are failing at) educate their employees on the devices. That
couple I saw is going to be pissed if they take the device home and aren't
able to remove the ads.

On the flip side, it encourages people to just buy from Amazon.com where you
know what you're getting.

~~~
duck
Unrelated to the Kindle, but regarding too many models - I wanted to get a new
Dremel tool last week and looked online, but for the life of me I can't figure
out what the difference is between all of them and their site is terrible at
comparing models. Because of that I stopped looking for one and just realized
why when I read your comment.

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joebadmo
As a 3rd gen Kindle owner, I don't really see how this product/experience
could be meaningfully improved until color, full-motion, hybrid
reflective/backlit screens (like Pixel Qi and Mirasol) are good and cheap.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi>

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interferometric_modulator_displ...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interferometric_modulator_display)

~~~
tikhonj
I agree. I'm sure you could get _some_ improvement over the Kindle 3, but it's
already as good, if not better, for reading novels than a paper book. Any
improvements in that direction would be, at best, marginal.

However, there is _one_ thing that could really be improved: typography. The
default setup is not particularly good for English text--manageable but subpar
--and is even worse for Russian. It's still readable, but they do not wrap
long words with a hyphen leading to an annoyingly ragged margin.

If they fixed the typography, the experience would be even better. I know this
because I took several of my books and reformatted them using LaTeX (I had
_way_ too much time on my hands :)), which does wrap words and generally
produces a much better-looking result. The LaTeX books were significantly
easier to read than the Kindle ones--I think they were even a little better
than what I expect of most paperbacks. However, they also take up more space
and take more effort to make.

So, since my only issue can be fixed by changing the ebook format, and isn't
much of an issue at that, I think its safe to say getting an ereader now would
be a good bet.

~~~
joebadmo
I totally agree with you on the typography, though at this point I've gotten
used to it.

Could you elaborate a bit on your reformatting? Does typesetting it in LaTeX
make each page a fixed width? Do I understand correctly, then, that you
wouldn't really be able to resize the text?

It's a bit crazy to me that algorithmic typesetting isn't a lot farther along
than it seems to be. Hyphenation doesn't seem like _that_ hard of a problem.
Am I wrong? I guess the demand just isn't really there?

~~~
tikhonj
Typesetting it in LaTeX makes it a PDF, so you could zoom in but it wouldn't
reformat. However, I can always recompile it at a different size on my
computer; I haven't ever wanted to change the font size of a book while
reading it.

TeX does automatic hyphenation, and a ton of other magic, so the technology
_is_ there. However, it might be too intensive for an ereader--it would
probably take too long and kill the battery life.

I also suspect there is not much demand--reading English novels on the Kindle
is perfectly fine. It _could_ be better, but you'd only realize if you read a
better book. Russian is more of an issue, but I don't think Russians make up a
big part of the Kindle market. I don't even know if it's sold in Russia.

------
wvenable
The Kobo touch seems pretty hackable -- it's very easy to root the device; the
firmware upgrades are just tarballs that overwrite files in the main partition
and it has a backup partition if you screw it up. There's some documentation
on mmapping the e-ink display and using ioctl to update portions of the
display.

I'm looking to get one of these for my wife for Christmas (Neither the Nook or
the kindle are really available in Canada) but I'm not allowed to mess around
with her devices. However I think having an e-ink Linux machine might be an
interesting device to play with.

~~~
pasbesoin
I have the version before the Touch -- the one where they added wifi. I'd love
to hack it just enough to get fixed width code examples to (mostly) fit the
display width. Or, better yet, to get it to support a landscape display of
ePub books (for the same reason).

I don't suppose someone's already done something along these lines? (Just
asking in case happenstance brings a knowledgeable reader past this comment.)

~~~
wvenable
The Wifi version is also hackable in the same way. You might want to google
"Kobo wifi hacks" and start looking around. Unfortunately, it's pretty early
in the scene and developers are still working to figure stuff out. I'm not
sure there are yet any workable apps written for these devices.

~~~
pasbesoin
Thank you for then nudge. It appears the platform is rather amenable, and an
initial look shows several potential options. Also, the existing firmware can
be fully backed up -- there appear to be multiple ways of doing this -- so
that borking can be undone, at worst by restoring the original firmware image
that resides on an internal MicroSD card.

Unfortunately, my initial editing of an individual ePub title to adjust the
font used for <code> was not accepted; I'll be exploring why, as I was
trivially modifying some apparently successful instructions for adding custom
fonts to e.g. support non-Roman language characters (Cyrillic, Chinese).

~~~
wvenable
I think I'll pick one up after Christmas (via Craigslist) for hacking
purposes. I've got a few simple app ideas well suited for e-ink. I think if
there's a good community going around this, it might be fun.

------
ComputerGuru
I have a Kindle Touch, and honestly, every day I wish I got the non-touch.

Touch does not go well with e-Ink. The delayed responses are far more
intuitively compatible with hardware keys. You can press, let go, and know
what's going to happen. The tactile feedback makes up for the delayed UI
response.

But with the Kindle Touch, I press.... and then I don't know if it registered
or if it's just slow, so I press again and again. I think a lot of it has to
do with the general sluggishness of the Touch models that the blog author
mentioned - it's very, very noticeable. But the other part is just that at the
end of the day, feedback is important. Either _immediate_ visual feedback (a
la iPhone, not Android - referring to how iPhone is programmed to "slide" on
first touch whereas Android is programmed to give some room before switching
screens) or immediate tactile feedback.

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swanson
Can anyone comment on the page turn speed of the non-touch Kindle4 vs the
Kindle3? I picked up a Kindle Touch thinking that the refresh speed would be
better than the 3rd gen model, but, like Marco, I didn't really find it to be
the case.

~~~
pasbesoin
I took a _very_ brief look at the Touch and 4 (ads version) while breezing by
them in a Target (I know -- and they had some Sony's and Kobo's as well; these
things are really going mainstream).

Anyway, after spending a few seconds with them, my impression was that page
turn on the Touch and 4 were about the same. If so, you could use your Touch
experience as a basis for comparison.

EDIT: Reading his article, now. Apparently, I didn't spend enough time with
them to form an accurate observation:

 _The Kobo Touch is the slowest at page-turns, followed closely by the Kindle
Touch. In fact, my old Kindle 2 turns pages slightly faster than the Kindle
Touch. I’ll come back to that in a minute._

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_stephan
Something important that Marco forgot: The Kindle Touch is the only Kindle
without landscape mode. I find that pretty annoying.

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zokier
Sadly the article doesn't address the issues with Kindle typography raised in
"Ebooks, you're doing it wrong" [1]

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3256317>

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emilepetrone
I own the Kindle 4 (non touch screen) and it is great. Works exactly as
advertised. As far as I'm concerned, that is all I need.

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flomincucci
I think this is the best article about ebook readers that I've read since...
well, ever.

