Paperwhite Disgust

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Why isn't it a good idea? I mean, obviously one should not ONLY store them in the Cloud (you should have them backed up on your PC, too), but what's the problem with Cloud storage as a mechanism to facilitate easy downloading?

I'm not a big fan of it either. Personally, I think they will get everyone used to the idea of storing things there and then start charging for it. In addition to that, Amazon knows quite enough about me from when I visit, comment or buy things there. They don't need to know that I might be buying things somewhere else and when I do, I'm sure as heck not going to "store" them on their little cloud. Let them guess whether or not I shop elsewhere for books.

Just as an example, right now they don't have a lot of insight into whether or not SCRIBD is a popular model--why? Because I don't read SCRIBD books on my kindle. I'd actually like to, but that is a different story. The point I'm trying to make (probably badly) is that data is valuable and I don't wish to give that data away just because they have a convenient cloud.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Rizla

I'm pretty shocked at the lack of formatting options on the PW2.

1) There are very few fonts available. Fortunately it includes Caecilia, but it there is no bold option. The condensed font is much lighter than the bold version of this font.

2) Enforcement of margins. I like to use ALL the scree to read on. Very poor that a book cannot formatted to use all the screen.

Crap really. Fortunately the device can be jail-broken. But the PW2 is heavily dumbed-down device. I would still consider getting one as it can be jail-broken.

Regarding the space issue, 2 GB is okay for simple text books. If you're using image-based books (comics and pdf) you'd have a problem. Obviously that's not what the PW is designed for. It is designed for a very narrow application. Each to their own. Not for me.

Caecilla on the Kindle only comes in one font family which the Kindle then did does to add some weight to and to make the condensed version from. One thing I do dislike is that Amazon closed the USE_ALT_FONT loophole to get to have custom fonts.

As for the margins, I know on the Touch and PW1, you can use negative margins in the p class for. KF8 to get rid of the margins. The PW1 works well with a left/right margin of -40 and the Touch is good with -30. If you like, I can make a KF8 book that has -40 L/R margins for you to try on the PW2.

One thing that is a bother is the larger line height the KF8 code forces. You cannot make it any smaller other then modifying a font's metrics to force it to have a smaller line height. I've done this with my version of CharisSIL. Because the Kindle uses different numbers in the metrics then ADE, we can have one font family that works well for ADE and the Kindle. I'll embed my new hinted CharisSIL along with the negative margins and post in this thread for anyone who wants to test it.

As for the small amount of memory, that's just being cheap on Amazon's part.

[TechniSol]

I'm of the opinion that keeping memory minimal contains cost, makes the cloud services more valuable and/or paves the way for charging for the storage on a recurring basis rather than paying once for your own memory or allows the cloud makers to mine for data. Which categories are read most, are they re-read, do most people collect by genre or are they eclectic, ad nauseum...

[crossi]

The cloud wouldn't be quite so bad if it wasn't for the stupidity of the kindles being set up so that in order to remove a book from your device you first have to remove it from it's collection then remove it from the device. When you want to read it again you have to search through a hundred or so pages of archive, download it to your device and then put it back into it's proper collection(s). Too many steps. After going through the trouble of organizing all my books into collections I don't want to have to keep undoing and redoing it over and over again. Sort of makes collections pointless.

[joblack]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Why isn't it a good idea? I mean, obviously one should not ONLY store them in the Cloud (you should have them backed up on your PC, too), but what's the problem with Cloud storage as a mechanism to facilitate easy downloading?

You are giving Amazon (and consequently the NSA) information on the e-books you're reading.

What you read is what you (or your character) are.

Do you really want to give so much personal information to the NSA?

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by joblack

You are giving Amazon (and consequently the NSA) information on the e-books you're reading.

What you read is what you (or your character) are.

Do you really want to give so much personal information to the NSA?

I am not a cloud fan but I gave up on the idea of hiding information on my preferences years ago. I use credit cards and shop online at times. If someone really wants to know chances are they can find out esp. government and big business.

I rely on my anonymity as being part of a large amount of people whose data is being stored/analysed and my lack of gullibility to targeted advertising as a minuscule amount of protection and my basic law abiding nature. Not that that will work if anyone is out to get me, but neither will cloud avoidance either.

One can conceivably be off the grid if one spends a lot of effort and avoids a lot of conveniences like bank accounts, regular jobs, buying anything on credit or making expensive purchases, having long time friends or calling home to mother. The list could go on and on.

To much effort for me to expend on what I see as a futile exercise.

Helen

[jandrew]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

One can conceivably be off the grid if one spends a lot of effort and avoids a lot of conveniences like bank accounts, regular jobs, buying anything on credit or making expensive purchases, having long time friends or calling home to mother. The list could go on and on.

I make all online purchases with gift cards that I purchased with cash, and I set up dummy user accounts with one time email addresses via an anonymizing offshore service for every purchase, with shipping to a trusted third party mail drop.

Except tinfoil --- I buy that in bulk with my personal credit card, shipped to my real address, and include at least three NSA trigger phrases in every transaction. I mean, you have to leave at least some data footprint, or they get real interested in you.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by mgmueller

I have 623 books on my Paperwhite 2 (all bought from Amazon, no side loaded content) and 9MB left (which I need, else notes and such don't work anymore).
I can't download my other 270 books.
The ones on my reader are standard textbooks, no space consuming comics or travel companions and the likes.
From the 270, maybe 100 are "big ones", with 30MB to 100MB.

Standard textbooks that are PDFs? What size do they average?

The 1100-3500 estimation is based on a reasonable 1MB-per-book estimate, which is a little on the large side... for books that are mostly text, which is where e-ink ereaders excel.

Anything larger than 1MB should probably be read on a tablet, unless it is simply one of those giant omnibus/collections that are tens of megabytes simply because they contain 50 books or so -- those are, technically, 50 books in one file.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by rcentros

To me it's stretching it a bit to argue that not being able to carry your whole library with you is -- somehow -- an advantage. To a lot of us it doesn't matter, but to those to whom it does, it's silly to argue that it's "ludicrous" to have the expanded memory necessary to take your books with you.

ludicrous is a relative term... I consider 32 GB, and the desperate need thereof, to be quite ludicrous. YOu may know what I am talking about already, ... needing to archive Wikipedia/Project Gutenberg in it's entirety, just in case, is not a valid cause for concern.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by conan50

I had a print book library of about 2,000 books. One of the things that greatly appealed to me was the idea that I could carry my entire library of ebooks with me. My "Reading Now" collection on the Kindle has about 100 books just in it. I'm never just reading one. I sample several at a time.
Here is my argument: The first Kindles had more storage for smaller size books. Now we have ebooks that have much more formatting and larger file sizes, but Amazon has cut the Kindle storage size in half. That is a problem for some of us. My wife reads just one, and only one book at a time, and I get that, but not everyone reads that way.

The Amazon AZW3 format is a pretty good equivalent to EPUB, and the second of the two (not half a dozen) Amazon formats is MOBI which is only supposed to be a fallback for older devices and non-updated books. There is also AZK (iOS app only) which is the Google Play books of Amazon -- some incomprehensible app format full of javascript -- as well as the Print Replicas which fulfill the same role as Adobe PDFs.

All three formats (AZW3, MOBI, EPUB) are roughly the same sizes. If books are bigger, it is because there is more in them (either text, images, or embedded fonts) and not because the format is intrinsically bigger. In act, my few ADE ebooks average 3-4X the size of my Amazon books, for no good reason -- a conversion in calibre makes it much smaller. Amazon seems to have higher standards for using space in ebooks wisely.

In short, books are no bigger than they used to, except in terms of how the authors/publishers make them... a problem that applies equally to every bookstore.

My bigger concern with Amazon right now is that they are, seemingly, pushing people further and further into their ecosystem. Prime is practically shoved down our throats now, and I see a day coming when anyone who really wants access to Amazon is going to 'need' Prime. Amazon uses a half-dozen different ebook file types. There really is no reason why they could not use Epub like nearly everyone else does. Finally, it is all about the Cloud. They honestly do not want you to have over a thousand books on your ereader. They eventually will want you to buy cloud storage from them. Same with Google to be fair. Like Amazon, you don't see sdcard slots on their tablets either.
Maybe I'm a control freak, but I would rather keep my ebooks on my ereader, and I've been rethinking the whole "locked-in" situation and trying to figure out where I want to invest, and why, when it comes to ebooks in particular, but also with movies and music. I think across the board there will be big changes as everything is eventually in the cloud and we will pretty much own nothing, and be paying rent on the things we do 'own'.
Rant over with :-)

Prime is not being shoved down anyone's throat. Please explain to me why I need Prime any more than I did 3 years ago. No old stuff is being made into Prime exclusives, only new features are being added to the Amazon ecosystem, and start off as Prime features. These are all also things that anyone else who does offer them charges membership fees for as well.

Amazon is fine with you having 1000 books on your ereader. This is possible with the PW1/2, and easily with the Touch/Keyboard which can hold about 3500.

At a certain point, they have judged that the vast majority of Kindle owners do not need the extra storage, based on the fact that they never use it, and have saved everyone money by lowering the cost of making Kindles, allowing them to keep charging the same low price after adding on new features (think frontlight) that people will actually use.

Don't keep all your books on your ereader. Keep them on your hard drive (dedicated storage exists for a reason) and merely keep the next few months worth of reading materials (taking into account lengthy TBRs, keeping favorites handy, eclectic tastes and being in the middle of 6 books at once, I manage to do precisely this) on your ereader. Rotate as necessary.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Rizla

I'm pretty shocked at the lack of formatting options on the PW2.

1) There are very few fonts available. Fortunately it includes Caecilia, but it there is no bold option. The condensed font is much lighter than the bold version of this font.

2) Enforcement of margins. I like to use ALL the scree to read on. Very poor that a book cannot formatted to use all the screen.

Crap really. Fortunately the device can be jail-broken. But the PW2 is heavily dumbed-down device. I would still consider getting one as it can be jail-broken.

Regarding the space issue, 2 GB is okay for simple text books. If you're using image-based books (comics and pdf) you'd have a problem. Obviously that's not what the PW is designed for. It is designed for a very narrow application. Each to their own. Not for me.

And since all those problems can be soved with jailbreak plus easy-to-use hacks courtesy of ixtab twobob knc1 and NiLuJe, that isn't a problem. By default the Kindle is dumbed down because that makes it easier to use for the majority of readers. You have stated

Originally Posted by Rizla

But each to their own. Personally, the PW2 options are too dumbed-down for me. Why remove functionality? It's not a question of compatibility vs stability that is so often cited as a justification for the very narrow options offered on the PW2 (as compared to the Kobo). I run Coolreader on a Nook ST with multiple options (including being able to set margins to exactly what I want), and it never crashes or requires a reboot or even slows down.

clearly you have no problems doing so. Thus, the Kindle is not a dumbed-down device anymore.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by joblack

You are giving Amazon (and consequently the NSA) information on the e-books you're reading.

What you read is what you (or your character) are.

Do you really want to give so much personal information to the NSA?

All anyone has to do if they want to know what I'm reading is look at the "What are you currently reading?" thread here at MR. It's not a secret.

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

ludicrous is a relative term... I consider 32 GB, and the desperate need thereof, to be quite ludicrous. YOu may know what I am talking about already, ... needing to archive Wikipedia/Project Gutenberg in it's entirety, just in case, is not a valid cause for concern.

At least in your opinion. (And why do you have to use ludicrous exaggerations when arguing against someone else's position?) I'm just saying that if a person wants to carry his whole library with him, more power to him. Choice is always good -- if you've got a microSD built-in, you have more choice. It's a pretty simple concept. Not everyone needs to do everything the same way.

[Rizla]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

By default the Kindle is dumbed down because that makes it easier to use for the majority of readers.

I can't see how having less font and formatting options makes it easier for people, unless they are near-total idiots. Are you suggesting that?

Originally Posted by eschwartz

...clearly you have no problems doing so. Thus, the Kindle is not a dumbed-down device anymore.

I'm speaking in general and not only for me. Why do you and others confuse the two so frequently? And what's with all the bold underlines? Brand loyalty?

[Rizla]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Caecilla on the Kindle only comes in one font family which the Kindle then did does to add some weight to and to make the condensed version from. One thing I do dislike is that Amazon closed the USE_ALT_FONT loophole to get to have custom fonts.

As for the margins, I know on the Touch and PW1, you can use negative margins in the p class for. KF8 to get rid of the margins. The PW1 works well with a left/right margin of -40 and the Touch is good with -30. If you like, I can make a KF8 book that has -40 L/R margins for you to try on the PW2.

One thing that is a bother is the larger line height the KF8 code forces. You cannot make it any smaller other then modifying a font's metrics to force it to have a smaller line height. I've done this with my version of CharisSIL. Because the Kindle uses different numbers in the metrics then ADE, we can have one font family that works well for ADE and the Kindle. I'll embed my new hinted CharisSIL along with the negative margins and post in this thread for anyone who wants to test it.

As for the small amount of memory, that's just being cheap on Amazon's part.

Thanks, but if I owned a Kindle, I'd jail-break it. And I use Android and Coolreader on a Nook. I took a different path to you, I think.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Caecilla on the Kindle only comes in one font family which the Kindle then did does to add some weight to and to make the condensed version from. One thing I do dislike is that Amazon closed the USE_ALT_FONT loophole to get to have custom fonts.

As for the margins, I know on the Touch and PW1, you can use negative margins in the p class for. KF8 to get rid of the margins. The PW1 works well with a left/right margin of -40 and the Touch is good with -30. If you like, I can make a KF8 book that has -40 L/R margins for you to try on the PW2.

One thing that is a bother is the larger line height the KF8 code forces. You cannot make it any smaller other then modifying a font's metrics to force it to have a smaller line height. I've done this with my version of CharisSIL. Because the Kindle uses different numbers in the metrics then ADE, we can have one font family that works well for ADE and the Kindle. I'll embed my new hinted CharisSIL along with the negative margins and post in this thread for anyone who wants to test it.

As for the small amount of memory, that's just being cheap on Amazon's part.

Thanks, but if I owned a Kindle, I'd jail-break it. And I use Android and Coolreader on a Nook. I took a different path to you, I think.

The other thing that would irk me about the PW2 options is the lack of narrower margins. Why not let the user use the whole screen? Would that lack, as eschwartz suggests, make it easier for users? But as he / she suggests, a user can jailbreak. But quite why Amazon doesn't include such a feature is beyond me.