Amazon announces first Kindle ever with color screen, retailing for $279

Brkdncr@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 172 points – Amazon announces first Kindle ever with color screen, retailing for $279
cnbc.com

I still have an old Kindle and it still gets months of battery life. I occasionally read comics so this may get me to upgrade.

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I'd recommend everyone to buy a Kobo over these, it's much easier to read your own .pdf and .epub files than on a Kindle.

Thanks for this. Was in the market for an e-reader and didn't really feel like jumping through Amazon bullshit

Kobo is the way.

How's their store? I'm kind of ashamed at how often I'll finish a book and then instantly buy and start another, but I also love being able to do that.

I also love my Kobo. I've heard you can unlock it and flash a community supported OS, which might be another true benefit over Kindle depending on your needs.

Im just using KoReader on mine. I don't remember the last time that I've seen the stock interface.

I recommend Boox, I don’t know about their dedicated e-reader, but I have the Onyx Boox Air C it’s a little pricier, but it’s an E-Ink tablet so I take all my notes there. (The C versions are color)

As someone who takes a lot of notes during their work, I can’t recommend enough. Gone are the days I’ve bought paper notebooks.

The only reason I never bought into Boox is their flagrant violation of GPL.

Amazon also bought up a comic distributor a while back which may make this easier to get the content I want.

I’ve never had issues emailing PDFs and epubs to my kindle address to read them.

I’ll need to check out kobu though, they have a color one that’s $100 cheaper.

interesting, my mum's kindle used to regularly wipe all ebooks i've sideloaded with calibre, only keeping it in airplane mode helped so far

Can second that email works great to send Epub, never had issues in years

Got a very old kindle for free, from someone getting rid of it. No touch, no backlight, most basic thing ever. I only got my account on it to download a dictionary.

I am never buying anything from Amazon to read on it, but I've been using it quite a bit, only on calibre converted stuff. It was not too hard to set up, and once it's done it's just drag n drop.

Until it decides to delete every single side loaded book you have on there, which they like to do from time to time. The only way to completely avoid it is to load all your content via email, which unfortunately only supports limited formats.

The type of person to rock Calibre would probably have airplane mode on constantly. Mine's been that way and I still have epubs sideloaded on my Kindle from when I first got mine all those years ago.

Yeah same. Until I accidentally turned it off 1,000 miles away from my computer. That was a sad day.

Second this. Airplane mode is on and books are sideloaded. However, if it hadn’t been a present, I‘d probably have gotten a Tolino (German/European e-reader brand that is identical with kobo) because they support epub directly (and yes I know the Kindle technically does that, too, now but wordwise n stuff only works if you convert them to kfx)

Well, good luck to Amazon trying to wipe my kindle remotely with black magic then.

It doesn't have WiFi configured at all.

When it happened to me I was staying with a family member whose house I’d never been to before, so I didn’t have their wifi. I couldn’t believe it.

Some Kindle devices come with a built-in „free“ cellular plan. Maybe it was that?

Aw man I didn’t even know about that. I guess 4g LTE is Amazon’s “Black Magic”

I mean, in general it’s pretty neat. When I was 12 or 13 I had a kindle touch with 3G and since I didn’t have a phone or computer I used the kindle touch to read a lot on wikipedia (it didn’t work for everything, I think. Just a handful of selected sites). Also, it generally costs extra when you buy it, just not monthly.

Biggest draw to Kindle for me is whispersync. Having my progress synchronized between Audible and Kindle is fantastic.

I would agree at this point. I love my Kindle but if I am buying a new one that’s they way I would go

Did a quick google and the first review that came up shows that's not true at all, it's the exact same process on a kindle as it is a Kobo, though you and this review are both really over-selling it:

Getting ebooks from other stores onto the device is also a hassle. You have to plug the e-reader into your computer and drag and drop files (though Calibre, the ebook management app, does make it a scootch easier). But that problem isn’t unique to Kobo. Amazon and Barnes & Noble also insist you sideload books.

The real reason seems to be that the Kobo is cheaper, honestly, don't see why the kindle is that much more

You can change the store on the Kobo to become to your selfhosted calibre library

https://brandonjkessler.com/technology/2021/04/26/setup-kobo-sync-in-calibre-web.html

Where's the one with unlimited internet connectivity for the lifetime of the device...I'm not seeing it.

My wife has the oasis that has cellular connectivity so she can read newspapers, rss feeds, etc. But I don't see a Kobu with that feature.

I don't think Kobo has that option. I just toggle on my wifi hotspot on my phone though and that works just fine.

Where do u go that doesn’t have Wi-Fi in 2024?

Public wifi? Almost everywhere because security protocols changed, and captive portals don't work on a lot of modern hardware due to DNSSEC

I've had two kindles so far, but my next e-reader won't be from Amazon.

I'm trying to move my tech life away from closed ecosystems as much as possible, So I'll probably go for a kobo or boox.

For me the dream would be a really large colour ereader around 10 inches, where you can view even the densest manga or comics comfortably without zooming or scrolling. I think that's what I'm holding out for.

Have you looked into the Note Air 3 C or the Tab Ultra C Pro from boox? They're both exactly what you describe, and the Tab is out now but the Note launches October 24th.

Thanks. I've been keeping my eye on colour ereaders, and the tech has improved so rapidly in the last couple of years I do wonder if I just hang on for another year then the colour reproduction could be even better.

Can't wait forever of course, that defeats the whole purpose, but it might pay to wait just a little.

Giving you a heads up as a Onyx Boox Nova 3 owner. These devices are poorly supported. You'd get maybe a year of "updates", meaning the bundled apps are updated. But after that you are on your own.

It's a brilliant e-reader don't get me wrong, and I'll take it over a Kobo or a Kindle any day. But go in assuming that you'd want to keep it offline.

I don't understand what the point is with having an e-reader with a colour screen when the screen is so small. Anything I read that would benefit from a colour screen is either a PDF or a comic, and those suffer from tiny letters on a screen under 10 inches.

Or is there a lot of newer books that have images and such that aren't PDF/CBR based?

pdfs don't have a hard-set text size, and cbr/cbz is just a bunch of jpegs in a rar or zip file, respectively. the first one is a non-issue if you reflow and the second one can be zoomed in to. granted, neither is ideal, but it's workable.

personally i've kept it to comics in pocket format.

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Uhh... What was the Kindle Fire? Wasn't that color, it was basically a very dumb tablet instead of a smart eReader?

Paperwhite is awesome, anyway. Great battery life. Perfect format. USB-C for charging, unlike the Oasis, seriously fuck you guys so hard for giving the Oasis microUSB, fuck you fuck you fuck you. Sometimes...you just need to know your lane & stay in it.

The Kindle Fire was an Android tablet, not an e-reader. Completely different products.

My guess is that Amazon thinks everyone forgot about the Kindle Fire cuz that was before last quarter and that's as far back as they remember.

Amazon Fire wasn’t an e-Ink screen, it was LCD.

But it was still a Kindle though?

No. It was a completely different product. It's like trying to claim that an iPhone is an iMac because it has the "i" in the name and is made by the same company. Similar branding to help tie it together, but completely different devices.

In name, sure. But not really. It was Amazon trying to sell an Android tablet on the Kindle brand. It could read Kindle books using the same Kindle app as any Android device, but it was far more than an eReader and didn’t feature the eInk screen that makes eReaders worth reading on.

I have an older kindle. The micro USB is the only thing that really bothers me about it. It hasn't bothered me enough to upgrade, but it almost did the other day if they hadn't sold out and now jacked the price.

Still, I won't give in to their monopoly

Anyone know of a color ereader that I can get a custom Linux distro on? Maybe Pine64 will do one eventually.

Onyx boox runs android. You could probably root it, but I've never looked into it

Pocketbook has always been the best option for linux because it already runs Linux out of the box and is easily modifiable by design

There were already multiple such devices from competitors on the market last year.

Personal fazit: they lose in almost every area against a cheap tablet.

Except for the screen

Especially the screen, unless your only plans for the device involve lots and lots of static text. eInk has improved tremendously over recent years, but it still has a long way to go before it starts replacing LCDs and OLEDs.

it still has a long way to go before it starts replacing LCDs and OLEDs.

I really don't think it's even trying to fill the same niche. No eReader is attempting to sell you Netflix. It's just an entirely different device.

There too. Low contrast and less bright than b/w e-paper and still suck more power. AMOLED is better for the eyes, even though it glows.

Eink is just better for reading though

If you're reading then colour doesn't matter much. For comics I'd probably get a tablet.

Color is very useful for highlights, taking notes and reading comics, its fine if its not for you but its very interesting for me

Highlighting, taking notes, comics all seem different from just reading

Okay, eink is really really good at two things: reading and taking notes/drawing.

Comics are a form of reading (especially french comics i read, theyre 50% text).

You highlight parts of books.

And for taking notes, say in class, is much nicer when you have color avilable

Hard disagree, e-ink is fantastic for two thing, reading and battery life. Everything interactive, you're better off with a tablet.

Comics are a form of reading

We both mentioned it separarely. And for a good reason imo, traditional books are a much better fit for e-readers because reflowing text just werks while comics are going to be a lot harder.

Note that the usual responsiveness problems dont apply when you use a pen to take notes, as the pen just directly pulls up the ink pellets in the screen.

Why do you say that amoled is bezter for the eyes? Is that also true for b/w e-ink?

No, i think e-ink has it's place. But color e-ink is currently too much a tradeoff in everything else e-ink is strong, imo.

How so? Color eink has pretty much zero tradeoffs as far as i can tell, other than price.

Weak colors, so dark that you constantly need backlight...

Weak colors yes, but normal eink has no colors, and what do you mean by "so dark that you constantly need backlight..."?

Look for comparison videos between the color e-ink technologies.

Only if you live in the US or UK. Lol I didn't realize Amazon's international kneecapping of their products moved to include hardware along with software.

For context if you are Canadian you don't get access to overdrive or audiobooks on Kindle. Fun fact this also includes their fire tablets.

I just got a boox e ink tablet. It runs android. I have a sideloaded manga reading app and Google books installed. epub books (found easily on Yandex) can be uploaded to Google books from my phone.

I love it.

Which one do you have? That is pretty much my exact use case!

Oh nice! Yeah this is 100% the best way to go. I use the app Mihon for finding/reading manga, its basically the same as tachiyomi before it got shut down.

The one I use is the Boox 7.8" Nova Air2 eReader. I chose one without a color screen. The color screens are cool and all, but for black and white content, the color layer makes the white more of a grey color. For that reason I don't recommend the color e ink quite yet.

The 7.8" screen is literally the perfect size for manga. It feels perfect.

Good luck!

I have a colour one, I think the white is pretty white tbh? Or, I mean, it looks like paper. Off-white like a book.

I have a boox page and i love it. I don’t use it for reading manga but i haven’t tried it so can’t speak on whether it would be good or bad. It’s amazing for books though, great battery life and SD slot which were huge for me. It also runs regular android so I use Koreader to read books and you could definitely download Mihon to read mangas.

Is it big, as in the same size as a regular comic book? That’s what I really want for comics, and I’m also waiting for the colors to get vibrant.

I’m super torn between not wanting more Amazon in my life and wanting a convenient way to binge a lot of comics and manga

I quite like my Kobo Libra Colour

Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll look into it 🤔

As another owner of the Kobo Libra Colour, I can recommend it for its excellent ergonomics and UI. Plus as a bonus, it has pen support!

Youre looking for an Onyx Boox tablet - a little pricey, but worth it for the un-enshitified tablet.

I want to read comics but I also don't want to miss out on that feeling when you turn a page and are greeted with awesome two page spreads.

Unfortunately no tablet or e-reader can have this functionality.

On my iPad, I use an app called Manga Plus and in landscape I get the two page spreads. I suppose any app that's supports two-page landscape view would work. But that wouldn't work well for smaller tablets

Of course. However comics have square-ish aspect ratio when it is two pages side by side and rectangular when it is one page.

No screen can accommodate this change properly, yet. Maybe folding or roll-out displays will manage this someday.

Like imagine reading this along

All these interactions arranged in a grid squares

And then you turn over the page to be greeted by this grotesque monstrosity

(The comic is The Immortal Hulk by Al Ewing)

My Kobo Libra Color does it. I do sometimes need a bit of time to format manga properly but it's perfectly doable.

A tablet for $100 would do...

Normal tablets don’t have e-Ink screens and for reading electrophoretic displays are vastly superior to LED/LCD screens.

Not the current color ones, even though they're expensive.

They still have much longer battery life and they’re still like reading on paper. Just not in a very high "print" quality when in colour.

Depends on the OS tho. Android sucks for this.

For e-readers? It’s fine, if it’s modified heavily enough. The tolino e-reader line (before they just became kobos) used a heavily modified version of Android and they were great devices.

I have a 2011 kindle, the silver one with no backlight . I got second hand from a friend and I use calibre on linux to convert books to the amazon format and copy them over via USB. It does the job but I have seen that these are like 20 ducats on eBay and other places if anyone wants a cheap option.

Anna's archive with virus total for books

Cool, I wonder which type of color technology this uses though, I can't seem to find that info.

I would prefer Gallery over Kaleido, but I'm guessing it's Kaleido because of the different ppi listed between the b&w and color modes.

Have you ever actually used gallery? it sucks

Does it still? Refresh time looked much improved with Gallery 3 so I thought it was better now. The ReMarkable is the only device I know that uses it and I haven't had the chance to try it yet.

I've got a Remarkable Pro, and the old Remarkable 2. The Pro is pretty fantastic, re: refresh times.

What's the @#%^ing point, honestly

Comics and graphic novels mostly. Maybe scientific papers and textbooks.

Oh you mean the point for Amazon? Extract money

Ha, good response. Didn't know people got comic books on Kindle. Thought the point was having/collecting the physical ones.

Well, once you have a room full of long boxes, you kinda have to either become rich enough to build a new house with dedicated comic storage, or you start looking at digital.

Half joke aside (because good luck affording a house nowadays), reading comics digitally is actually very nice, but being able to have and store an entire published history of a comic on a single drive instead of taking up multiple boxes is too damn nice to ignore. And that's assuming you're paying for the digital version. If you pirate, the money issue is a major decrease in resources needed to enjoy comics. Hard to pirate physical copies of the very old and rare stuff, but easy to find digitally.

Because if you read the article, it says it has a battery life of several weeks.

Name one fucking color display tablet that can be used every day for over a week on batteries without charging? I'll buy it tonight.

No clue. I read on a $20 tablet I got off Amazon. With the app that suits you, why not indeed? It's a total POS for anything but reading, but I bought it for an epub reader.

All e-readers with the e-ink tech are like $499.99

That's just too expensive. $100 is the best I can do. So I'll just wait for it to show up on eBay.

https://us.kobobooks.com/products/kobo-clara-bw?variant=41202831949894

https://www.thalia.de/shop/home/artikeldetails/A1070734292

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CNV9F72P

https://www.indigo.ca/en-ca/kobo-nia-ereader/681495007998.html

None of these are even close to $499.99

I'm sorry I made a mistake. I meant to refer to the note taking tablets. There's a difference there.

Ah understand. I would assume a drawing accurate digitizer would be a significant portion of the costs.

Yeah. I could use a good note taking tool like that where I could do free drawing and handwriting. It looks like some of the offerings posted on here can do what I want but boy they are expensive. I hope those prices come down to more like the student or hobbyist edition level.