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Amazon has made its premium Kindle Oasis e-reader an inch larger and given the device an IPX8 waterproof rating (in this case, immersion in up to 2 meters of fresh water for up to 60 minutes):
Amazon has been selling Kindles for 10 years now, but "waterproof" hasn't appear on its list of incremental technological advancements until now. The company just announced a new version of its popular e-reader that builds on last year's Kindle design and now has an IPX8 waterproof rating.
The new Kindle Oasis — the same name as last year's premium Kindle — has jumped up in size, moving from a 6-inch screen to a 7-inch screen. It has an aluminum back, which gives it a more premium look and feel than the Kindles with soft-touch plastic.
It supports AZW, TXT, PDF, MOBI, and PRC, but lacks EPUB support. Storage starts at 8 GB ($249) but there is a 32 GB option. Amazon has brought back physical buttons for page turning as an alternative to the touchscreen, and comes with an accelerometer to automatically change page orientation.
Still no color e-ink.
What's that book to the right of The Hobbit? Does it support that book?
Also at CNET and TechCrunch.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @06:16PM (5 children)
That is a symptom of the proprietary nature of this device.
Were Amazon to allow users to modify the software, this device would immediately learn how to process EPUB.
How can you support a product that is so arbitrarily limited? Fuck this thing; put your money into something else.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday October 12 2017, @06:25PM (4 children)
I agree that it's entirely annoying that they don't support the main e-book standard that's an open standard, however in practice aren't there converters out there that convert EPUB into MOBI? Do you really miss out on anything? A quick read of the Wikipedia page comparing e-book standards only shows sound support lacking in the MOBI standard. Of course, having to do the conversion is annoying by itself, even if no useful data is lost (like it is when converting between lossy sound compression formats, such as .ogg->.mp3).
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Thursday October 12 2017, @06:49PM (2 children)
Using a program like Calibre [wikipedia.org] makes the conversion and management of ebooks fairly painless.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday October 12 2017, @07:33PM
Sounds good, and if I ever get an e-reader I'll surely use that, but I do feel I have to point out that not everyone manages their collections that well.
So for instance, for music, I keep all my music organized well as ripped Oggs, and then sync those to devices as necessary. But most listeners with mobile devices don't do that; they buy something on Amazon or wherever, in MP3 format, and stick it on their device and that's it. I'm guessing e-reader users expect to do this too, rather than to have to curate their collection with an application on their PC. However, most of those people probably just buy from the e-book store that their reader is set up to buy from (Kindle store for Kindle readers, B&N's Nook store for Nook readers), so maybe this isn't really an issue.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 13 2017, @04:09PM
Agreed, but you still shouldn't have to.
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Thursday October 12 2017, @09:49PM
My paperwhite is running either netbsd or Linux, I can't remember which. Anyway, it's trivial to "unlock" (ssh over serial USB connection, change a few settings) and then install whatever reading programs you'd like. I don't know if this is also true for the Oasis, but it probably is.