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Ask Soylent: Where Have All The Good eBook Readers Gone?

posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday November 22 2016, @12:04PM   Printer-friendly
from the way-of-the-dodo dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

My ad-supported Kindle's buttons are dying, so I'm in the market for a new eBook reader. I figured the upcoming sales would be a good time to buy one. To my surprise, eBook readers seem to be regressing rather than advancing. My hard requirements are:

  1. e-Ink display
  2. Text-to-speech
  3. Don't need company's software to transfer books

And my preferred features include:

  1. Good PDF support (so a larger display with the same aspect ratio of a piece of paper). I want to read technical books on it, something I can't do with the Kindle.
  2. Stable software
  3. Doesn't spy on everything you do (Kindles track absolutely everything)
  4. Support for multiple voices. The same voice gets annoying after a few books.

I'm unable to find anything which fulfills all those conditions. Any recommendations? Before you say smartphone, it needs an e-Ink display. Are smartphones and tablets killing eBook readers?

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday November 22 2016, @03:06PM

    by VLM (445) on Tuesday November 22 2016, @03:06PM (#431244)

    I had a similar experience a decade or two ago, I downloaded project gutenberg texts and tried to pipe them thru linux text to speech at the time, then play the mp3 files in my car, it was theoretically understandable but unusable for more than five minutes or so. I never used text to speech on kindle I always assumed it was bundling audible human read books at an additional fee, but I guess not. That must have sounded awful.

    That experiment led to the followup of trying to practice morse code by piping gutenberg texts thru a text to morse code mp3 utility and play those in my car. Rather than give me hours of practice per week while commuting it mostly made me tune out after 15 minutes or so. Still, theoretically, an interesting way to "read" a text.

    Some see e-readers as a dead end product much like dedicated portable mp3 players. I checked wikipedia and I bought a diamond rio a little more than 18 years ago when it was first released. Doesn't seem that long ago. I still have it somewhere. Only programmable via a printer port dongle, kinda weird. Used a single AA battery, had to, because it was competing with Sony Minidisks which also ran on a single AA.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @04:28PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @04:28PM (#431306)

    It's my understanding that if you got your book from Amazon, and Amazon/Audible has a human-read audiobook of that book, and you're willing to pay extra for it, then Kindle lets you listen to it synced with the Kindle, so you can alternately read a passage and listen to a passage, and never lose your place. If there is no audiobook, or you don't pay extra for it, or you didn't get the ebook from Amazon in the first place, then you get to enjoy the goodlife experience, listening to stories as read by the bad machines.