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I just got a Kindle the other day (loving it so far, I like lying down in weird positions that do not work when you're holding a 1000 page book) and just have a couple questions regarding accessories: -This is the important question: should I bother with a screen protector? If yes, what brands and where can I buy them (my local Target only has screen protectors for the Kindle 2) -I like how the Kindle feels by itself when I'm holding it, so I'm just planning on getting a carrying case/pouch rather than the cases that the Kindle locks into, anything I need to know with these (I assume not, but I figure I'd ask) -Do skins make the Kindle any harder to hold or anything? I'm not planning on getting one anytime soon, but I might in the future.
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Jan 20, 2011 13:00
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| # ? May 17, 2024 02:42 |
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Screen protector is not important if you are careful. It your kindle is simply for lying around the house or bedside, and you have it in some kind of sleeve to prevent accidental damage, then you are fine. If you plan on taking it to the beach, or throwing it in a purse with no case, then by all means, get a protector.. Any plastic cover for the screen will make the screen slightly less clear (in the best case) and awful for the worst. You get what you pay for in screen protectors. But honestly, I'm mega careful with my electronics, so I never get them. But if I had even the slightest scratch on my screen it would drive me insane. As for the Kindle being more expensive then the hard cover, I saw one of these the other day too. What are these publishers smoking? Edit: On a side note, I called amazon regarding my unlit cases. Hardly had to even say anything before they were crediting. I purchased 2 of the cases, one for myself and one for my wife. At the end of the call, I was reimbursed and credited a total of $120.99. People wonder why I wanted a Kindle over a Nook. Nothing beats amazon's policies and customer service. I also attempted to shrink-wrap the terminals on my case, but in the end it was too thick to get in the slots. More research needed 
FidgetyRat fucked around with this message at 14:52 on Jan 20, 2011 |
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Jan 20, 2011 13:55
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FidgetyRat posted:As for the Kindle being more expensive then the hard cover, I saw one of these the other day too. What are these publishers smoking? I would imagine that the publishers' rationale (besides subsidizing print book costs) is, "Ah yes, with an ebook you get more functionality, therefore it is more valuable, and therefore you pay more!  " Of course, as consumers, we're wondering why prices are higher when costs are actually lower. And arguably the extra functionality (space, weight, searchability, etc.) is outweighed by forgoing the first-sale doctrine (i.e. ability to re-sell or give away the book).
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Jan 20, 2011 15:11
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Publishers are even more backwards than the music and television industries combined. It'd be nice to see some of them actually wise up a bit though.
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Jan 20, 2011 15:22
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Fuzzy Pipe Wrench posted:Publishers are even more backwards than the music and television industries combined. It'd be nice to see some of them actually wise up a bit though. Unfortunately publishers and the book market seem to have successfully trained most of their customers that the pricings are ok.
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Jan 20, 2011 15:23
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manguero posted:I would imagine that the publishers' rationale (besides subsidizing print book costs) is, "Ah yes, with an ebook you get more functionality, therefore it is more valuable, and therefore you pay more! Rationale is this: Publishing a new book has fixed costs, same for ebook as hardcover, except physical printing, shipping and warehousing. So, the discount is, lets call it $3 (this argument is bullshit, but that's their argument). They still sell the ebook at same or higher cost because, a) market will bear it, and b) ebook sales will eat hardcover sales if priced lower, and hence lower profit. This ignores the fact that for the user, the ebook has lower value. Ease of use, yes, but a) you don't own the book, you own a license to read the book, and b) you can't sell/donate/loan the book when you're done. The argument that the costs of production are the same dies when one considers that paperbacks are sold for (now) $9.99. Assuming that the costs of production (typesetting, copyediting, editing) are the same as for the ebook, the ebook should be cost of paperback, minus print/ship/warehouse. So, an ebook can be sold at profit for paperback minus costs. That assumes that publishers make a profit on paperbacks, of course.
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Jan 20, 2011 15:32
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The publishing companies have the one chance that the music and movie industries never had, which is to create a legal marketplace before the medium has caught on. And instead they're loving it up. Oh well, it's nice to know that they're going to be out of business in 10-20 years.
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Jan 20, 2011 15:32
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My theory was that the kindle editions have Amazon taking a nice chunk of the profits while the paper editions pretty much go completely to the publisher. so when a new book comes out, jack up the kindle prices so people prefer the paper and the publisher gets most the cash. I don't see this kind of behavior lasting long, especially when eBook services like Kindle and B&N are allowing authors to directly publish cutting out the publisher entirely. The authors even get a much larger cut this way. Anyway, does anyone have suggestions for alternate kindle cases? I really really loved my unlit case, but really shouldn't keep using it due to possible ill effects on the kindle, and I don't really want the lit case. Unfortunately, from what I saw by looking myself, the other cases were either weird (I don't want a built-in stand) or have poor build quality. FidgetyRat fucked around with this message at 15:51 on Jan 20, 2011 |
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Jan 20, 2011 15:49
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FidgetyRat posted:My theory was that the kindle editions have Amazon taking a nice chunk of the profits while the paper editions pretty much go completely to the publisher. As someone who sells an ebook through amazon, I can tell you that exactly 70% of the money goes to the seller for individuals. I'm betting that the big publishers get even more.
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Jan 20, 2011 15:58
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If you keep the book price at $9.99 or lower and agree to let the book be sold on all devices that can take Kindle books, you (the publisher), get 70% of the book price. If you don't play along with Amazon in that way you only get 35% of the book price. Which of course means you'd have to charge $19.98 or more for a book to get as much money as you would at $9.99
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Jan 20, 2011 15:58
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We all think eBooks should be cheaper, because there are less costs involved, but that's because we're hopeful consumers. It's far more likely that the publishers are charging what they think the market will bear, which they much prefer when it comes to deciding on retail prices. When it came to paper books, this was all right with me because I just bought all of my books used, but now that I have a Kindle and don't want to buy paper books any more, I have to focus on older books. Not that I'm complaining - you can't argue with a nicely formatted and chronologically ordered complete collection of Sherlock Holmes for £0.75, even if all but the last book are free on Gutenberg.
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Jan 20, 2011 16:03
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That reminded me of another question: which collections of H.P. Lovecraft and Mark Twain are good on Amazon? Reading reviews, it sounded like some of them have really bad problems with formatting and spelling. I don't care if I have to spend a couple bucks more for something done more professionally.
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Jan 20, 2011 17:45
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Twitch posted:That reminded me of another question: which collections of H.P. Lovecraft and Mark Twain are good on Amazon? Reading reviews, it sounded like some of them have really bad problems with formatting and spelling. I don't care if I have to spend a couple bucks more for something done more professionally. for public domain stuff, check the mobileread.com catalog. forum members there vet the books for formatting and spelling/ocr errors.
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Jan 20, 2011 18:14
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Twitch posted:That reminded me of another question: which collections of H.P. Lovecraft and Mark Twain are good on Amazon? Reading reviews, it sounded like some of them have really bad problems with formatting and spelling. I don't care if I have to spend a couple bucks more for something done more professionally. Bearing in mind you can get this all for free elsewhere with a little work, http://www.amazon.com/Lovecraft-Collection-Biography-Bibliography-ebook/dp/B00328I21G/ref=pd_sim_kinc_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2 is $4, has good formatting a nicely done table of contents, has been proofread, and has all the Lovecraft stories and poems available.
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Jan 20, 2011 18:17
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fishmech posted:Bearing in mind you can get this all for free elsewhere with a little work, http://www.amazon.com/Lovecraft-Collection-Biography-Bibliography-ebook/dp/B00328I21G/ref=pd_sim_kinc_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2 is $4, has good formatting a nicely done table of contents, has been proofread, and has all the Lovecraft stories and poems available. A couple of ratings complain about this one, I assume they're wrong?
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Jan 20, 2011 19:13
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Twitch posted:A couple of ratings complain about this one, I assume they're wrong? The negative ones seem to be complaining about the grammar for no reason I can think of and one of them claims that "the" is written "ye" every time in the second story, which isn't true either. I have it, and I don't see any problems outside occasionally seeing someone's name spelled two different ways.
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Jan 20, 2011 21:27
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maxnmona posted:The publishing companies have the one chance that the music and movie industries never had, which is to create a legal marketplace before the medium has caught on. And instead they're loving it up. Speaking of loving up the legal market place - has anyone noticed that many Amazon e-books have some to many typographical errors.
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Jan 20, 2011 21:28
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BrainParasite posted:Speaking of loving up the legal market place - has anyone noticed that many Amazon e-books have some to many typographical errors. That is because they literally want to punish you for not buying a hard copy.
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Jan 20, 2011 21:33
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I tried to shrink wrap the terminal on my unlit case, but to no avail. Even the thinnest shrink wrap I had was still too thick to insert back into the kindle. I watched a teardown of the kindle (which is very impressive inside btw) and my guess is that the positive terminal is the lower one. There seem to be 2 gold contacts down there in a sort of socket that it would brush up against. The top pin looks to just barely make contact with a solid metal post, I'm assuming ground. I figured I'd start by isolating the bottom pin since it was the largest and looked like the most important. I used some clear packing tape, and made a U shape, sealing the sides, then trimmed it back. It was thin enough to go into the kindle, and the tape is strong enough and surrounded on all sides so I'd hope it would be a good contact point with little chance of staying behind. Since it was just tape, I could allow a small strip to travel down the side of the pin as a fall-back to let me pull it out if for some reason it slipped off. I'll post back if I ever see another reboot. Most the times for me it's during travel, such as a pocket of my wool coat.
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Jan 21, 2011 01:37
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FidgetyRat posted:I tried to shrink wrap the terminal on my unlit case, but to no avail. Even the thinnest shrink wrap I had was still too thick to insert back into the kindle. Could you not just use a multimeter on each pin and see if there's a reading?
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Jan 21, 2011 03:37
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Wouldn't it be far easier to just use a non-metallic paint?
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Jan 21, 2011 05:22
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After briefly being distracted by the Sony Reader Daily Edition and it's touchscreen, I'm back to trying to decide between the Pocketbook Pro 902 and the Kindle DX. Has anyone here used a Pocketbook Pro? How good are they?
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Jan 21, 2011 07:28
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jassa posted:After briefly being distracted by the Sony Reader Daily Edition and it's touchscreen, I'm back to trying to decide between the Pocketbook Pro 902 and the Kindle DX. Has anyone here used a Pocketbook Pro? How good are they? Also, the KDX is nice, but Amazon is dragging their feet on updated firmware, ala K3. The PDF support and browser would be so much better with a K3 equivalent firmware, but Amazon isn't having it. My prediction is they have a KDX revision in the works and is close to being released, hence them stagnating on the older firmware... So, at the end of the day, I continue gravitating back to my K3. It's just the best compromise between all the ereaders (and I've owned most...nook, Sony, Libre, etc).
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Jan 21, 2011 08:55
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hotsauce posted:Also, the KDX is nice, but Amazon is dragging their feet on updated firmware, ala K3. The PDF support and browser would be so much better with a K3 equivalent firmware, but Amazon isn't having it. My prediction is they have a KDX revision in the works and is close to being released, hence them stagnating on the older firmware... They just released a new Kindle DX a month or so before the Kindle 3 - have you tried that one or just the original DX that didn't have a pearl screen?
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Jan 21, 2011 08:58
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Ghostnuke posted:Could you not just use a multimeter on each pin and see if there's a reading? I don't think it's a matter of standard conductance in every day use. The problem seems to be static, which can easily arc past the paint. I have a feeling the coating they put on just isn't thick enough. It's probably thick enough to prevent the gold contacts inside from touching the metal during standard use, but not thick enough (or has very very fine holes) to prevent a static discharge's arc from jumping through or around the paint. Vertigus posted:Wouldn't it be far easier to just use a non-metallic paint? It would just be easier if they didn't have a conductive material involved at all. Use some kind of resin instead, or make the ports wider so you can insert a thicker terminal which can either be plastic or a rubber-coated metal if required. I couldn't even get a heat-shrink over the terminals to fit inside the kindle it's that thin. FidgetyRat fucked around with this message at 13:55 on Jan 21, 2011 |
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Jan 21, 2011 13:53
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A few good links about ebook tech in O'Reilly Radar this week including ebook ISBN standards (why?)
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Jan 21, 2011 20:23
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FidgetyRat posted:It would just be easier if they didn't have a conductive material involved at all. Use some kind of resin instead, or make the ports wider so you can insert a thicker terminal which can either be plastic or a rubber-coated metal if required. I couldn't even get a heat-shrink over the terminals to fit inside the kindle it's that thin. Well obviously that's something Amazon needs to do. But it sounded like you're looking for your own solutions, so I'd pick paint over heat-shrink any day.
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Jan 21, 2011 21:58
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fishmech posted:They just released a new Kindle DX a month or so before the Kindle 3 - have you tried that one or just the original DX that didn't have a pearl screen? I had and returned the current KDX graphite with the Pearl screen. It was just too big and heavy. If you need it for PDF files, it's great, although here is where my frustration lies. The KDX is running old firmware (i.e. limited .pdf features and no webkit browser). This is what I meant by Amazon is dragging it's feet...
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Jan 21, 2011 23:03
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Is there anything that'll use RSS/Mangle to automatically sync manga that I specify onto my Kindle3? I could write a script, but definitely  if there's already something someone has done.
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Jan 22, 2011 18:05
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I really would like to see ebooks go the way Blu-Rays are going right now. The biggest thing I don't like about Kindle is not having a physical book to put on my bookshelf. DVDs, CDs, etc, I don't care if I don't have the physical product...but it's nice to have a book. What I'd like to see is a bundle pack, like Blu-Rays that come with the DVDs in them. Buy the hardcover of a book and get the Kindle version for $5, or something like that. Of course then people could just sell the hardcover version once they get the Kindle one, but I still think it would be a reasonable solution.
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Jan 22, 2011 19:31
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It should also work the other way around, so that every time you buy a kindle book a hardcover copy falls out of the sky and lands on your head. In under 60 seconds! Seriously, "nothing to put on the bookshelf" is a relief for me.
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Jan 22, 2011 21:44
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Cray posted:It should also work the other way around, so that every time you buy a kindle book a hardcover copy falls out of the sky and lands on your head. In under 60 seconds! I both miss it and don't. Being a college student who moves into new apartments semi-frequently, though, not having loads of new books to pack will be a godsend.
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Jan 22, 2011 22:21
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Does anyone have a step-by-step guide to rooting a Nook Color. I've used the AutoNooter but, practically speaking, its the same as before. I can't get Apps via Market (which I believe can't be done; they have to be imported somehow), YouTube isn't working, etc. I'm sure I've missed several steps but Google gives me confusing and sometimes contradictory info.
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Jan 22, 2011 23:53
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Iron Squid posted:Does anyone have a step-by-step guide to rooting a Nook Color. I've used the AutoNooter but, practically speaking, its the same as before. I can't get Apps via Market (which I believe can't be done; they have to be imported somehow), YouTube isn't working, etc. I'm sure I've missed several steps but Google gives me confusing and sometimes contradictory info. This page should have the latest info. Market indeed works, however the youtube thing is persistent. You'll need to replace it with the one from this thread. Be sure to do the things listed under "Enable Market" in order to sign into your Google account.
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Jan 23, 2011 00:00
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I occasionally have issues with my Kindle's refresh rate. It seems that most of the time it's really fast to change pages, but every once in awhile it slows down to a noticeable degree. Sometimes it's a little slower which is bearable, but othertimes it's significantly slower, like over a full second to refresh. It seems to fix itself after awhile, but I'm wondering what's causing it in the first place.
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Jan 23, 2011 03:01
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Iron Squid posted:Does anyone have a step-by-step guide to rooting a Nook Color. I've used the AutoNooter but, practically speaking, its the same as before. I can't get Apps via Market (which I believe can't be done; they have to be imported somehow), YouTube isn't working, etc. I'm sure I've missed several steps but Google gives me confusing and sometimes contradictory info. go here do this. I have the market, youtube, the video player, etc. etc. etc. working. It's PUSH BUTAN simple, and took me literally ten minutes to do.
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Jan 23, 2011 03:05
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Original_Z posted:I occasionally have issues with my Kindle's refresh rate. It seems that most of the time it's really fast to change pages, but every once in awhile it slows down to a noticeable degree. Sometimes it's a little slower which is bearable, but othertimes it's significantly slower, like over a full second to refresh. It seems to fix itself after awhile, but I'm wondering what's causing it in the first place. Maybe I'm crazy, but I think it refreshes more slowly when it's really cold. I don't think I've ever had a refresh that was over a full second, though.
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Jan 23, 2011 03:48
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Ara posted:Maybe I'm crazy, but I think it refreshes more slowly when it's really cold. I don't think I've ever had a refresh that was over a full second, though. It most definitely refreshes significantly slower when it's cold. It recovers quickly if you get somewhere warm though.
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Jan 23, 2011 04:47
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Ara posted:Maybe I'm crazy, but I think it refreshes more slowly when it's really cold. I don't think I've ever had a refresh that was over a full second, though. That'd explain why my Sony device turned "so slow" the other day. It was cold when I touched it and I was wondering why it was refreshing at that rate.
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Jan 23, 2011 05:31
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Ah, I guess that would make sense. I guess it's typical of E-ink screens if the Sony also does it? It won't cause any damage to the unit when it's being used in those temperatures, right?
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Jan 23, 2011 08:08
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