Item — HN Reader

The devices were supported for more than a decade. Sure, this forced deprecation isn’t great but it’s still had a longer lifetime than many other devices.

I’ll happily keep reading on my kindle, it’s the most ergonomic way of reading for me especially when traveling. I get that there are other options like Kobo, but I don’t see it as significantly better than the Kindles. And I like the fact that I can also use the iPad and iPhone apps for kindle to read on the go if I don’t have the physical kindle with me.

3 comments

IIRC, part of the original sales pitch was replacing physical books, for whatever reason one might like to do that. I did it because I was doing a LOT of travel.

I haven't had a job that requires travel in a long time, so looking at it from that perspective, having my library also require some kind of additional device maintenance cycle or whatever really adds a layer of complexity I don't want to deal with, so depending on what options I have and what I'm buying, I'm finding myself these days purchasing physical books more frequently just to avoid the hassle for future me.

One benefit apart from travel that I couldn’t go without is adapting the font size. I have pretty poor eyesight and some physical books were a PITA to read. Especially from bed / bath where I wouldn’t normally wear glasses.

Yeah, my sister bought into the Kindle eco-system early on, but I picked a Sony PRS-505 instead (mostly because it would fit in a Travelsmith shirt pocket) and for a long while, the only ebook which I had "purchased" was Robert Heinlein's _Space Cadet_ which I got w/ a $10 credit for browsing their store on a certain day (which I then got a price-fixing rebate check for which I kind of wish I'd kept...) and it was so rife with errors I had to check out a copy from the library to determine what some of them were. When the Sony ebook store closed down, my "library" was transferred to Kobo's and their copy of that novel was made in a different fashion, or corrected, so was actually readable on the Sony PRS-600 I eventually upgraded to.

Since then, I bought a Kindle Paperwhite, and I've made a game of either getting free e-books when offered on the store, or purchasing books when on sale and I've had sufficient Amazon gift cards from Microsoft Rewards, so that I've not spent "real" money on any virtual books, except for when I've purchased an ebook to go along with a newly published hardcover by an author whose work I feel strongly enough that it merits such doubled purchasing.

I still buy e-books for nonfiction I expect I'll read once, take a few notes on, and then probably never come back to, if I can't easily get them at the library. No need to clutter up my already overflowing bookshelves. For anything else I'm with you – not only do you not have DRM or other bullshit, physical books are still easier to navigate and overall more usable.

(This is absolutely bonkers though – the experience of using an e-reader has basically not gotten better since 2008 when I got my first Kindle. There are still glaringly obvious usability issues which nobody has spent any time innovating on.)

Also Kobo's ecosystem exhibits many of the same DRM problems that Amazon has. The majority of book publishers still require DRM. You get DRM locked copies regardless of if you buy them from Amazon or Kobo (or Google Play Store).

Some of this post just seems that an "Android Authority" only just now realized there are less-forked Android-based e-readers versus Kindle and they feel happier with the Android ecosystem (and its DRM) than Amazon's. To me it feels a bit like a choice between Purple Drazi and Green Drazi. Many of the same problems but a different ascot color.

There wouldn't be so much backlash if they didn't end downloading ebook support from the website.