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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?

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @04:17PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 22 2016, @04:17PM (#431292)

    and their display is a 640x480 from 2003 that flickers and is dark because the backlight is near dead

    Has there ever been a 640x480 LCD screen? I though that resolution was long obsolete at the time LCD screens started replacing CRTs.

    I already had an 800x600 CRT screen in 1995. And that was definitely not high-end even back then.

  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday November 22 2016, @04:43PM

    by TheRaven (270) on Tuesday November 22 2016, @04:43PM (#431321) Journal

    Has there ever been a 640x480 LCD screen?

    Yes, I had one for a while. I got it a few years after it was new (around 2005 - local computer shop selling old stock off for next to nothing).

    I though that resolution was long obsolete at the time LCD screens started replacing CRTs.

    LCDs were a lot lower resolution than CRTs when they were introduced.

    --
    sudo mod me up

  • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday November 22 2016, @05:11PM

    by Pino P (4721) on Tuesday November 22 2016, @05:11PM (#431337) Journal

    Has there ever been a 640x480 LCD screen?

    The PowerBook 190cs [apple-history.com] (August 1995) was 640x480.

  • (Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Tuesday November 22 2016, @05:44PM

    by dyingtolive (952) on Tuesday November 22 2016, @05:44PM (#431358)

    My first desktop LCD was about 1280x1024.

    They were smaller back in the day though, but you only mostly found them on laptops, for example: Thinkpad 800 series had a 640x480. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad#Early_models. [wikipedia.org]

    My dad had a laptop that might have just been 320x200. I want to say it was an ancient 286 or 386, maybe the T5100? Can't recall, unfortunately.

    --
    Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!

  • (Score: 1) by toddestan on Wednesday November 23 2016, @04:11AM

    by toddestan (4982) on Wednesday November 23 2016, @04:11AM (#431654)

    640x480 certainly existed in early laptops. Never seen a standalone screen of that resolution. I have seen one standalone 800x600 screen. The smallest common resolution seems to be 1024x768, though that's still relatively uncommon compared to the 1280x1024 which was very popular for a few years.