Tag: ereaders

#REVIEW: Kindle Paperwhite, Signature Edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews2 Comments

Having read an entire big-ass book on this thing (TEOTBB is 260,000 words) I can get to the meat of a review of my newest tech toy in a single sentence:

Reading a book on this thing feels like reading.

If you don’t know what I mean by that … I’m not sure how well I can explain it, to be honest. I have an earlier version of the Paperwhite– about ten years old now, so probably pretty close to the first generation– and on that device and every other Kindle I’ve ever touched, I was never able to forget I was holding a tech object with a screen and not a book. I couldn’t get into stories the same way I could with a book. I had trouble remembering details, or even keeping my place on a page. Reading short stories on the Kindle wasn’t bad, but entire books? Forget about it.

At some point in the last ten or so generations of this thing, they fixed that problem, and I’m not sure exactly what the difference is. I can say it’s tremendously faster than my old Paperwhite, which is no surprise, and since ebooks themselves haven’t really evolved all that much in that time you can really feel the speed difference in a way you might not be able to with a phone upgrade or a new laptop or something. It’s got a pleasing heft in the hand and while I wasn’t terribly happy with spending nearly $40 for a case at first, now that I have it I really like it. I got the fabric cover, and the texture is marvelous, both on the inside and the outside of the case, and the automatic wake-up/shut-off when you open and close the cover is a nice feature.

(Why did I spend $36 when I could have gotten a case much cheaper? It says “Kindle” on the cover and not some other random brand. If I’m going to put my device in a case, the case needs to be either featureless or branded for the device and not for whatever random company makes the case. Yes, I know that’s dumb. It’s how my brain works. That’s my original Paperwhite case under the new one up there, and you’ll notice there are no words on it.)

Battery life is going to be excellent– I’m not sure how long I spent reading that book, but it only ran the battery down to 81%. It says that “typical reading time” is just under 14 hours, but I don’t know if that’s how long I took in my one read or what. I was annoyed by the Kindle displaying when certain passages had been annotated by a ton of other people, but I was able to turn that off.

I spent a pleasant half-hour today rearranging my wish list on Amazon, moving fiction books by new authors into a new “Kindle Wish List” section, keeping books I know I want in print and nonfiction on my original wish list. I’m going to need to get into the habit of deciding I Shall Read A Kindle Book Now and buying the book right then from my wish list, because I still don’t like how this thing displays your library and anything I download and don’t read immediately is going to get lost. That will require a bit of an adjustment, but at least I know the reading part is going to work, and that’s good.

(Two more quick things: I just started Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain today, and it’s 1200 pages, and after holding it for a while I damn near shelled out another $17 to get a digital version that wasn’t going to torture my hands as much. I may still cave, we’ll see. Also, Bedlam Bride is unfairly fucking good; it’s the best book of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series so far, and as I’ve said repeatedly DCC already didn’t have any right to be as good as it is. I only have one book from the series left and then I have to wait for the rest of them to come out. I’m not happy about it.)

It was this or a bigger house

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading6 Comments

I have all the books.

Wait.

I worry that what you heard was “I have a lot of books.”

I have all the books. Do you understand?

And, as you no doubt can tell, I have lots of other shit as well. And three other people live in this house! They have stuff too, even though nearly every single object you can see in these pictures is mine. Except the Pokéballs. Those are the boy’s.

This is the second house in a row where we have eventually decided to convert what was supposed to be the dining room into a library. I am absolutely out of places to put shit and I have been reading at a 175-books-a-year clip for the last couple of years. I still have some space on top of bookshelves, especially if I get rid of some of the statues and Legos (and the statues, honestly, may be on their way out soon) but one way or another I’m no more than two years away from needing to pile shit on the floors if something doesn’t change.

So yesterday, fearing an actual intervention, I ordered this:

along with a $12-a-month subscription to Kindle Unlimited. I’m thinking about instituting a rule that any book by a new author gets bought on digital first. Does that mean I won’t get those books in physical form? Not necessarily; as you can tell, I’m not just a reading enthusiast, I’m a book collector, and those two hobbies feed into each other in obvious and terrible ways. There will be books by new authors that I feel the need to own physically. But in most years at least 30% of my books are by authors new to me– this year, right now, it’s actually just over half. Surely this will end up saving me money as well as essential shelf space, right? That Dinniman book on the cover of the Kindle there is in one of those pictures in hardcover– on the white bookshelves, a couple shelves below the Wheel of Time books– but it was free on KU so I downloaded it anyway, to see if I lose my mind trying to read a thousand-page book on an e-reader. We’ll see.

We can’t move. We got our mortgage rate on this house before the economy exploded. We’ll never see this rate again. I’ve got to do something.

In which my decisions confuse me

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek12 Comments

imagesI can’t recall a specific post, but I have to have talked about my distaste for ebooks in some capacity during some point in the (very nearly!) year I’ve been writing here.  I have thousands of books.  I love books– and I love books as physical objects, not as a carrier device for stories.

I got my wife a Kindle for either Christmas or her birthday several years ago, back when the damn things cost $300 and that sounded reasonable.  I bought it, but I refused to touch it.  I disliked the concept of e-readers that much.  I’ve softened since then; I do a decent amount of reading on my iPad, but I do a specific kind of reading on my iPad– mostly short stories or novellas or, occasionally, magazines; i.e., things that either aren’t available in print or that don’t store well.  And it goes without saying that The Benevolence Archives(*) simply would never see the light of day as a printed book; there’s no way to price it that would be both fair and profitable.  Ebooks are awesome for shorter works.  A freaking comic book costs $4 nowadays; you can’t get a 116-page document at that price.

Anyway.  It’s occurred to me in the past few days that since I’m literally trying to derive income from the Kindle’s existence nowadays, maybe it might behoove me to, y’know, own a Kindle.  So I looked into them a bit and today, being the type who really doesn’t like buying technology (or, really, much of anything) online, I swung by Best Buy on the way home to look at Kindles.

Maybe you don’t know this; I didn’t:  there are three basic flavors of the Kindle in existence.  The baseline is just called a “Kindle,” has a black and white screen, and retails for around $70.  Then there’s the “Kindle Paperwhite,” which has a screen (and front light) that is apparently vastly upgraded from the Kindle and, in general, looks like a more reputable piece of kit, which retails for around $120.  Then there’s the Kindle Fire, which has a larger screen, four times the memory, is in full color, and can access the Web and do a whole host of other stuff… for $120.

Here’s where I’m weird:  I have no desire for a Kindle Fire at all.  I have an iPad for everything the Kindle Fire can do.  I do a lot of reading in bed and the iPad is just a wee bit unwieldy for that.  The screen improvements of the Paperwhite appeal to me.  But I can’t find a reason to pay $120 for a Paperwhite when another tablet with a bigger, color screen, with better functionality, is the same price.

Or, to be clearer: I didn’t buy a Paperwhite today because something else that I don’t want was the same price.

I’m not sure that’s sound reasoning.

Feel free to make fun of me in comments.  In fact, I encourage it.

(*) Buy my stupid book!