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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 NCommander on Wednesday November 23 2016, @12:40AM

    by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Wednesday November 23 2016, @12:40AM (#431588) Homepage Journal

    I'm one of those people who find reading eInk to be a lot easier than reading on a tablet, and I find even light web browsing with my Kindle to be a far superior experience than I have gotten with an iPad. I have a wifi paperwhite, and I'm relatively happy with it but I have to find that my older Kindle 3/Keyboard was probably the best device I owned overall; I was very sad when it got lost somewhere in Warsaw.

    With Amazon devices, you could just leave wifi off after initial registration and simply sideload content onto it. Not exactly ideal, but it works. As far as tracking, I vaguely remember someone disassembled some of the older Kindle firmwares, and basically found it only tracked the currently read book and the page which would be required for the WhisperSync page feature (which I find handy since I often switch from Amazon Cloud Reader and my kindle and back). It would be interesting to find out what, if anything, is tracked when that feature is disabled (at least on a non-ad supported Kindle).

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  • (Score: 2) by purple_cobra on Wednesday November 23 2016, @10:47PM

    by purple_cobra (1435) on Wednesday November 23 2016, @10:47PM (#432188)

    A friend had the 3G Kindle w/keyboard and took it everywhere with him - he's one of those outdoors-y people that walks up mountains for fun. Lasted an age but the keyboard started failing and he persevered until he was in a position to replace it. I bought a Kindle Paperwhite last year when it was on special offer and have been very happy with it; I'd have preferred physical page turn buttons, but it wasn't a deal-breaker.

    But yes, register it and then just kill the wi-fi. You can use Calibre [calibre-ebook.com] to put stuff on it and organise it how you wish; there's also a DRM-stripping plugin available if you like your e-books to be DRM free.

    Good luck in finding something that ticks all the boxes.