Paperwhite Second Gen: First Impressions

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by nynaevelan

Honestly unless Amazon fixes these issues I do not see me staying with the pw2. Unfortunately the bulk of my library is purchased through Amazon so I am going to stay with their devices for the convenience of my cloud as well as whispersyncing. I just need to investigate to see which features I want to give up in order to switch to another eink device. I will tell you this, I am sorry I gave away my pw1.

One lesson I have learn is never give away or sell a eReader or Tablet before you know what your getting into. I did this with my Kindle Fire which is now hubby's then I got the HDX 7 which was a mess for me. He doesn't share but luckily on Cyber Monday the Kindle Fire HD went on sale and I got that. It works great my only complaint is they need to fix the line spacing issue. On Kindle For Android it's fixed. I no longer use a eInk reader but I do have them in case I ever do go back to them. After hearing the nightmare of the PW2 I am relieved I didn't jump into that mess specially after dealing with the HDX nightmare I am happy to have something that I can read on and it does what I want it to do.

[sirmaru]

Originally Posted by Blossom

One lesson I have learn is never give away or sell a eReader or Tablet before you know what your getting into. I did this with my Kindle Fire which is now hubby's then I got the HDX 7 which was a mess for me. He doesn't share but luckily on Cyber Monday the Kindle Fire HD went on sale and I got that. It works great my only complaint is they need to fix the line spacing issue. On Kindle For Android it's fixed. I no longer use a eInk reader but I do have them in case I ever do go back to them. After hearing the nightmare of the PW2 I am relieved I didn't jump into that mess specially after dealing with the HDX nightmare I am happy to have something that I can read on and it does what I want it to do.

Glad to hear you have finally settled down to your HD 2013 and your Nexus 2013. Jack is settled in his iPad mini and Nexus 2013. I have settled in my PW 2013 and HDX 7 2013. My wife is settled in her PW 2012 and HD 2012.

All the rest of the posters have also apparently found their comfort level with that Dutchman maybe settling for print books which meets his needs.

It looks like all our posts will be few and far between now until the next models come shipping out in 6 to 9 months. Maybe Calibre will introduce their own eReader and all their fans will get a perfect fit then.

[booklover6]

Calibre is already a perfect fit with Kobo, Sony T-series, and just about any tablet.

I'm pretty happy with what I have....2 e-ink Kobo's and 3 tablets.....I hope I don't get bitten by the "new device" bug any time soon!

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by sirmaru

All the rest of the posters have also apparently found their comfort level with that Dutchman maybe settling for print books which meets his needs.

Thanks for the sneer. Apparently it's too much to ask to have a device just fracking *work without annoyances* (and without bugs) these days. It seems that if a device has anything to do with computers (even remotely, such as an e-reader), it *has* to be broken in some way, or try to force a certain way of doing things where that is not necessary.

The best you can hope for is that a device "only" has featuritis. (= Including a lot of functions just to be able to tout a list of features, even if only very few people will ever use them.)

The weird part is that it seems to be accepted that people have to find workarounds for bugs and/or annoyances to get to use their stuff as they want to. It's ridiculous.

Sometimes I think devices are solely created to earn money, instead of serving the customer. You know what? If you create a device that serves the customer *as he wants to* (which means, no annoyaces, bugs, or restrictions), then the money will be earned automatically.

[tomsem]

The fact that you cannot modify collections offline or add side loaded content without getting nagged is a bug. This is not the case with any of the other implementations of Cloud Collections (iOS, Fire, and now Android), and probably why nobody AFAICT is complaining about it with those.

Ironically, I would rank the Fire implementation as the worst of those three and the Android as the best.

I am planning to start a new thread on the subject of Cloud Collections when I can get online with my laptop and its real keyboard, unless someone betas me to it. This thread long ago ceased to be about 'first impressions' .

[jocampo]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Sometimes I think devices are solely created to earn money, instead of serving the customer. You know what? If you create a device that serves the customer *as he wants to* (which means, no annoyaces, bugs, or restrictions), then the money will be earned automatically.

Well, of course!

Amazon, like Kobo, like any other company, make products to make money, for a profit. No company make devices only to satisfy customers. Satisfying customers is one of their goals, but making profitable devices is the main one. If a device satisfy customers but it's not profitable, the company will go out of business.

Also, a device that satisfy a customer not necessarily means it will generate profit. Why ? Because making hardware and software requires capital. So if companies try to make perfect devices all the time, they will be so expensive that profit will be zero or too low and then impossible to make.

[sirmaru]

As it is, Amazon states they sell their Kindles at cost or less and use them to sell their other products. Thus, there is no incentive to produce Kindles to meet the needs of customers not buying other Amazon products.

My Kindles are really just an opening for me to buy all their other consumer products. I can access their store on impulse and buy other items. Those, who buy most consumer items elsewhere, are not going to like Kindles as much. This problem is especially difficult for Calibre users who prefer to buy eBooks at store fronts other than Amazon and for iTune customers who buy all their songs from Apple.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by sirmaru

As it is, Amazon states they sell their Kindles at cost or less and use them to sell their other products. Thus, there is no incentive to produce Kindles to meet the needs of customers not buying other Amazon products.

Even if I did buy all my books from Amazon, my way of doing things would still be exactly the same, apart from replacing Digital Editions with Kindle for PC.

My Kindles are really just an opening for me to buy all their other consumer products. I can access their store on impulse and buy other items. Those, who buy most consumer items elsewhere, are not going to like Kindles as much. This problem is especially difficult for Calibre users who prefer to buy eBooks at store fronts other than Amazon and for iTune customers who buy all their songs from Apple.

You must be the perfect customer. I thought I bought an e-reader, not a storefront. Boy, was I wrong, apparently.

Fortunately, I can live without most of the stuff an e-reader offers as I don't upload more than 1-5 books onto it at any given time.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by sirmaru

My Kindles are really just an opening for me to buy all their other consumer products. I can access their store on impulse and buy other items. Those, who buy most consumer items elsewhere, are not going to like Kindles as much. This problem is especially difficult for Calibre users who prefer to buy eBooks at store fronts other than Amazon and for iTune customers who buy all their songs from Apple.

This is wrong on so many levels...

1. What about the people who buy exclusively from amazon and never touch calibre, but share accounts with their spouse?
2. What about the people who DON'T share, but read many books and switch them out of say, a TBR list, and DON'T always have WiFi enabled TO SAVE THE BATTERY!!!!!
3. What about the people who buy from Amazon and then edit those same books to remove fonts/stupid review pages/stupid typos?

They all suffer as well!

And number three is probably at least as common as people who buy from nook/kobo strip DRM and move to the Kindle.


As usual, you seem to delight in maintaining that Amazon=god and can do no wrong, it is us who are evilly exploiting their kindness and doing bad things, so of course we suffer.

Guess what, not everyone is you.

[Josieb1]

Well hubby is the typical Amazon user, I'm a Calibre user and we share the same Amazon account. With the Paperwhite 5.4.2 update we BOTH suffer as we have to see each other's collections and books. He reads War and I read Romance, not quite two genres that work.

[jgsmith]

Colour me confused. I own a PW2, have never bought content from Amazon (not that there's anything wrong with that), use Calibre to manage my library and transfer books to the Kindle, and have had zero problems. I do not, however, use collections. For me, the Kindle is a reader, not a library. Calibre is the library. I keep all my books nicely organized in Calibre, and only keep the books I have not read, on the Kindle. As soon as I finish a book, I delete it from the Kindle, and it stays in Calibre. When it's time to start a new book, I either go out and get it if I don't already have it, or find it by browsing my Calibre library, then just open it up on the Kindle. I sort my books by author on the Kindle and use a Calibre plugboard to include the series name and number in the book title. Makes finding any book pretty quick and easy. Maybe someone can help me understand what I'm missing by not using collections...

[sirmaru]

Originally Posted by jgsmith

Colour me confused. I own a PW2, have never bought content from Amazon (not that there's anything wrong with that), use Calibre to manage my library and transfer books to the Kindle, and have had zero problems. I do not, however, use collections. For me, the Kindle is a reader, not a library. Calibre is the library. I keep all my books nicely organized in Calibre, and only keep the books I have not read, on the Kindle. As soon as I finish a book, I delete it from the Kindle, and it stays in Calibre. When it's time to start a new book, I either go out and get it if I don't already have it, or find it by browsing my Calibre library, then just open it up on the Kindle. I sort my books by author on the Kindle and use a Calibre plugboard to include the series name and number in the book title. Makes finding any book pretty quick and easy. Maybe someone can help me understand what I'm missing by not using collections...

Thanks for that solution. It is a perfect way to use Calibre. If I ever start using Calibre, I will follow exactly what you have designed.

I strongly recommend that other Calibre users here read it and think strongly about using it this way.

I am copying it to MS OneNote as a reference for myself.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by jgsmith

Colour me confused. I own a PW2, have never bought content from Amazon (not that there's anything wrong with that), use Calibre to manage my library and transfer books to the Kindle, and have had zero problems. I do not, however, use collections. For me, the Kindle is a reader, not a library. Calibre is the library. I keep all my books nicely organized in Calibre, and only keep the books I have not read, on the Kindle. As soon as I finish a book, I delete it from the Kindle, and it stays in Calibre. When it's time to start a new book, I either go out and get it if I don't already have it, or find it by browsing my Calibre library, then just open it up on the Kindle. I sort my books by author on the Kindle and use a Calibre plugboard to include the series name and number in the book title. Makes finding any book pretty quick and easy. Maybe someone can help me understand what I'm missing by not using collections...

You would use collections in the same way you would organize things in a file browser by folder. It makes it easier to find.

I have a collection called Forgotten Realms, that contains 40 books set in the same world in different series' and by different authors. I have a TBR collection with 84 books in it, which is always the first thing sorted on my home screen -- it makes it much faster to find things. I have a Harry Potter collection, A Dresden Files collection, a Percy Jackson collection, a Terry Pratchett collection, -- with these I can quickly access some of my favorite books.

It's like using tags in calibre to find specific groups of books.

You may not feel the need for that, in which case all the power to you. Other people do use it, and for them the PW2 and it's collections mess-up will not be a pleasant experience. Thank god for my Kindle Touch which doesn't have this unfeaure.

[duydangle]

Oh I just did a fully charge the first time I got my Paperwhite. It last very long and I just want to know how long i can last. When the battery is nearly empty, I found that it sometimes not responsive. I thought it could be 5.4.0 so I upgrade to 5.4.2. I was wrong, 5.4.2 did not make it more responsive and it's worse than 5.4.0 with things like "Cloud collections". And now when it's fully charged, it's very responsive and works fast.

I think Amazon applied some tricks like "power saver" and slow down the CPU and the responsiveness of the screen to save the battery.

So anyone with 5.4.0 should stay with it. And charge the kindle when its battery is below 50%.

[nynaevelan]

Originally Posted by jgsmith

Colour me confused. I own a PW2, have never bought content from Amazon (not that there's anything wrong with that), use Calibre to manage my library and transfer books to the Kindle, and have had zero problems. I do not, however, use collections. For me, the Kindle is a reader, not a library. Calibre is the library. I keep all my books nicely organized in Calibre, and only keep the books I have not read, on the Kindle. As soon as I finish a book, I delete it from the Kindle, and it stays in Calibre. When it's time to start a new book, I either go out and get it if I don't already have it, or find it by browsing my Calibre library, then just open it up on the Kindle. I sort my books by author on the Kindle and use a Calibre plugboard to include the series name and number in the book title. Makes finding any book pretty quick and easy. Maybe someone can help me understand what I'm missing by not using collections...

You are not missing anything if the setup you use works for you. However there are many users who like to keep more books on their device then what you prefer. There are also users who like to keep those books organized on the device via the collections. I too use a system similar to yours, the only difference I like to keep @250 books on my device. I tend to read jumping amongst 5 or 6 genres, I also have those moments when I may want something new to read. Therefore I like to keep a few hundred books on my device. With this many books, having them organized is essential, because I like to be able to quickly find them without scrolling through many pages or using the search. Hence, my use of the collections.

And let me just put this comment out there for Simaru because I am sure he is about to give us his opinion on how Amazon designed the device to be used, and whoa to those who do not use it that way.....