Re: [tlug] Amazon Kindle

["Drew Hamilton" <awh@example.com>]

> It's not an unreasonable design choice. Keep in mind, a backlight would
> make it use power when displaying a page; currently it uses none. (I
> believe that with that screen technology, if you remove power to the
> screen, it stays as-is, rather than going blank as an LCD screen would.)

Yes, when I broke my Librie, I did not notice until an hour later when
I tried to turn the page (no comments from the peanut gallery please
-- it took that long to change the page not because I'm a slow reader
but because I dropped the thing as I was rushing to jump on a plane).

> Really? Bic Camera had them for a few months after Sony released them,
> and then they vanished.

Hmm..  It was released in April 2004 and I bought mine (from either
Yodobashi or Bic, can't remember) in May 2006.  That said, they do
seem to be gone now.

> The Librie was a classic Sony failure: a great product, but you had
> to use only special Sony-designed memory cards, and much worse, you
> could only read stuff in a proprietary Sony format. I'd have bought one
> instantly if I could have used it to read PDFs off of standard SD cards.

When I got mine, it was the only ebook reader commercially available
with the E Ink technology.  Now, I stated before that I miss it and
was really upset when I broke it.  I still say that's true, but if I
got another ebook reader, I would get a different model because of
some shortcomings of the Librie:

1)  As far as I could tell no way to get legitimately-purchased
English books on it.  The DRM bookstore was only in Japanese, and it
was not compatible with the Sony Reader books.  I tried buying an
English book in some other format and then converting it, but that
ended up not working.  I finally had to break down and just pirate
books instead.

2)  Format support was poor -- only files it would take were its own
proprietary format.  The best conversion tool was some hobbyist's
project, but it was poorly written and would not work on machines with
Japanese installed, so I had to work within a virtual machine to get
the books into Librie format.

I got by both things quickly enough..  Basically I developed a pretty
quick workflow for downloading and convertin the books, and I would do
about 20 or so in one sitting which would last me for a long time.
But, of course given the other choices today I would likely choose
something different.

Right now I think that my best choice is the English Sony Reader.  It
supports enough formats, and I can purchase books commercially for
it...  Iliad is too big and expensive, and Kindle is too big and also
has all that wireless stuff that I don't need.

 - Drew