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

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, @03:11PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 22 2016, @03:11PM (#431249)

    Alexa does all her thinking back home in the cloud so the network costs, both financial and battery power, would be an issue for ebook readers.

    One interesting anecdote is according to marketing ebooks are only read by hot women at the beach where there's no or limited connectivity and power, although I mostly read in my house like on the couch or in bed to wind down before I sleep and theres no limit to connectivity and electric power at home.

    Alexa does have a nice voice, though. I don't think we're far from radio news readers and DJs being disposed of and replaced with robots. It'll take awhile for the CGI visual arts to replace TV actors and TV newsreaders.

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  • (Score: 2) by EvilSS on Tuesday November 22 2016, @03:20PM

    by EvilSS (1456) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 22 2016, @03:20PM (#431252)
    I meant that I hope they put the T2S feature back in their readers. They pulled it a while back not for technical reasons, but there were grumblings from authors and publishers over it not being licensed as audiobooks. Silly BS but still, if they feel like they can have Alexa do it, hopefully they can get around to adding the feature they used to have built into the readers back.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @05:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @05:06PM (#431336)

    > One interesting anecdote is according to marketing ebooks are only read by hot women at the beach

    "According to marketing"

    WTF?