First e-reader choice from a picky engineer

[HarryT]

In all honesty, I don't think you can claim that all Voyages are made to break at 1 year old from the fact that yours did. There are an awful lot of people here (including me) whose Voyages have not broken.

[BretSingleton]

Kobo & Kindle are pretty awesome e-readear if you guys are planning to buy.

[Agama]

Originally Posted by cement

Aside from those last two points, I'm OK with using Calibre to remove paragraph spacing and stuff. I plan to manage my books there anyway.

There is an excellent plugin for calibre to extract an ePub directly from Amazon's azw3 format, called KindleUnpack (see https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=171529) and this gives a great initial ePub. The extract preserves stylesheet names without introducing any calibre conversion style names.

You may find that these epubs require no tweaking or only minimal tweaking to suit you needs.

[darryl]

Originally Posted by Agama

There is an excellent plugin for calibre to extract an ePub directly from Amazon's azw3 format, called KindleUnpack (see https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=171529) and this gives a great initial ePub. The extract preserves stylesheet names without introducing any calibre conversion style names.

You may find that these epubs require no tweaking or only minimal tweaking to suit you needs.

Personally I almost never have to tweak a converted epub and I suspect most other people don't either. But each to their own. There are certainly many people for whom their enjoyment of a good book is ruined by a bad epub.

[aemacleod]

Originally Posted by cement

On the news front, it's pretty cool that the Kindles allow you to subscribe to things like the New York Times, etc. But maybe not things like The Economist?

That's all cool for subscriptions, but honestly on the Kobo if Pocket support works as well as I can imagine, then I can visit NYT or Economist articles in a Chrome incognito window and just save them to Pocket. Then I don't really need actual subscriptions on the ereader. At least you have the syncing ability of Pocket, but no real browsing on the Kobo (let's ignore the web browser on the Kobo...). And of course, all the other things from my Pocket list will just be there. That seems huge.

Regarding newspapers: calibre's Fetch News is your friend. I am a fan of The Economist and have read it on my Kindle (Paperwhite previously, Voyage currently) for a few years now. The Amazon subscription service is convenient and generally formatted reasonably well (a few spa ces get thrown into the middle of words now and again, but otherwise okay), and it auto-delivers each Friday morning.

The downside, from what I recall reading about Amazon's model (maybe has changed, but knowing Amazon, probably has not), is that they take a pretty big cut (30%) and only give the money to the newspaper, not your information. So, if you subscribe through Amazon, The Economist doesn't know you exist (I still get renewal invitations occasionally) and only gets 70% of your subscription price. I believe it's like this for most of newspapers and magazines.

Considering that calibre's Fetch News works with The Economist and most major newspapers, I am going to subscribe to The Economist directly and cut Amazon out. The Fetch News copy of this week's Economist is large identical to the one that Amazon pushed to my device, aside from minor formatting differences. The only thing that's missing from my perspective at the moment is an automated push-to-device functionality in calibre. I am currently using send to Kindle with no hiccups.


I bought a Kobo Glo HD recently (it is currently in a UPS facility in Buffalo, NY). I do not know how Kobo handles magazines, but I suspect that they don't have anything as organized as Amazon's POBI file extension, which makes jumping around to different sections and skipping articles much easier than a straight table of contents.

Another note: as you mentioned using the public library. The Kindle does not support 3M Cloud Library. This is especially funny given that Overdrive is owned by Kobo's parent company Rakuten. Here in NYC, the NYPL uses both Overdrive and 3M Cloud Library, and a very large number of library books I want to read have not been available in the Kindle format as a result. Depending on what services your library uses, a Kobo will likely give you more library book choices.

[Dr. Drib]

Originally Posted by ElektroDragon

Look, here is what happened:

1) First Voyage was a launch unit. It kept rebooting on its own on an almost nightly basis, for absolutely no reason...for months. FW updates didn't help. Really aggravating when reading at night then it rebooted to full brightness on you. After 2 months of this, Amazon replaced it free of charge.

2) Second Voyage was free of the rebooting. But lo and behold, right at the 1 year mark, I go to wake it from sleep, and the darn thing is completely frozen, stuck, dead. The e-ink screen was NOT broken on marred in any way, it had not been dropped or stepped on, etc. It was a perfect picture of the "screensaver". But the unit kept rebooting itself trying to resume. None of the reset procedures worked. The backlight would just flash on and off every minute or so as it tried to start. I tried charging it overnight, it was still stuck in the reboot loop in the morning. In desperation, I MAY have tried to flex the unit. At the time I did not understand anything about e-ink screen fragility, I just wanted the damn screen unstuck. A short while after doing that, I noticed the screen had finally unstuck itself..... into a pattern of corrupt lines along with a partial diagonal line that kind of looked like broken glass. So perhaps I may have been responsible for the screen "breaking" but the Voyage was dead and gone well before this!!

So forget screen fragility, the underlying quality of the electronics and/or software is TRASH on the Kindle Voyage, they are MADE TO BREAK right after warranty.

I'm so happy with the Kobo Glo HD that I bought two to replace both Kindles in the house. And it's NOT just because of perceived hardware quality, the Kobo is much more open and versatile than the tightly controlled locked down Amazon environment. (I ended up returning the Fire HD and Fire TV as well for similar reasons and am proud to be Amazon-free now.)

Look, here is the real truth:

Maybe for you, they're made to break.

The FACT is, you make an unsubstantiated statement that is ONLY backed up by YOUR experience.

Your statement that a Voyage "[is] MADE TO BREAK right after warranty" is PURE TWADDLE and UNSUBSTANTIATED NONSENSE.

Let's break out the tinfoil, fellow members, for we are about to be attacked....

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

Look, here is the real truth:

Maybe for you, they're made to break.

The FACT is, you make an unsubstantiated statement that is ONLY backed up by YOUR experience.

Your statement that a Voyage "[is] MADE TO BREAK right after warranty" is PURE TWADDLE and UNSUBSTANTIATED NONSENSE.

Let's break out the tinfoil, fellow members, for we are about to be attacked....

Do you want light or heavy duty tin foil?
For the record: my kindles are well out of warranty.

[ElektroDragon]

Originally Posted by Dr. Drib

Look, here is the real truth:

Maybe for you, they're made to break.

The FACT is, you make an unsubstantiated statement that is ONLY backed up by YOUR experience.

Your statement that a Voyage "[is] MADE TO BREAK right after warranty" is PURE TWADDLE and UNSUBSTANTIATED NONSENSE.

Let's break out the tinfoil, fellow members, for we are about to be attacked....

I don't attack venomous retards, I have sympathy for them.

[shalym]

Originally Posted by ElektroDragon

I don't attack <deleted>, I have sympathy for them.

...but apparently you DO attack mods.

I've owned many many eink Kindles--at least one of each model except for the Kindle 2. I haven't broken any. My sister broke one screen on a first generation Kindle by stepping on it.

I've never had any experience even close to what you had, but if I did, I would call Amazon for help, even if the device were out of warranty. (They will still help you, they just don't have to replace your device out of warranty, though sometimes they do anyway)

I think that the millions of people who don't have problems "right after warranty" outweigh the experiences of the *one* of you.

I'm not saying that your experiences didn't happen. I'm saying that your experiences aren't *normal*

Shari

[Dr. Drib]

Moderator Notice

ElektroDragon:
You are now suspended for seven (7) days due to your rude and offensive language. Your post will stand so that all our members can see how extremely offensive you are.

[darryl]

7 days is very lenient. I actually think an apology is called for.

[Dr. Drib]

Please get back on topic.

Thank you for your understanding.


Don
(Moderator)

[avid01]

Originally Posted by meeera

The first thing you need to know is to take anything you read or hear on Goodereader with a pinch of salt.

Details? What's you pet peeve?

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by avid01

Details? What's you pet peeve?

GoodEreader tends to make things up.

[robko]

Originally Posted by avid01

Details? What's you pet peeve?

Perfect and timely example: in their current article on the latest Kobo firmware they did a direct copy and paste out of a user post from here on Mobileread and tried to imply it was what Kobo said was new with the release (it wasn't from Kobo). No attribution to the original author, not even a paraphrased version, just cut and paste. Not the first time they have done something like this. That pretty much says it all but if you search on here you'll find lots more examples.

Note that in this case the information they posted was good information, but they have been known to take rumours or even explicit speculation (i.e. poster says they are speculating) in posts here and post it as fact or probable fact.