# Smartphone size Kindle!!!!!!



## muggle (Feb 25, 2009)

I wish Amazon made a Kindle that was the size of my smartphone and used buttons on the side (such as the volume buttons on iphone) to turn pages.  The size means it would be pocketable, lighter, and easier to use on mass transit when one hand is required to hold on to something to prevent falling down on the train/subway.


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## LDB (Oct 28, 2008)

I think that exactly describes the Kindle app on your phone. Not positive about using the volume buttons to turn pages though. I have the Oasis and it has buttons on one side and can be turned either way up so it's easy to use one-handed in either hand.


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## barryem (Oct 19, 2010)

The Kindle app for Android phones does let you use the volume buttons to turn pages. It's not a feature I use. It also lets you scroll instead of turning pages, which I prefer.

I decided a year or two ago to spend a month reading exclusively on my phone to see how I liked it. I'm reading my current book on my Paperwhite and I read my previous book half on the Paperwhite and half on the phone. I've been reading exclusively on my phone for that year or two since I first tried it. It's great having my book always handy, ready to read. My phone lives in my shirt pocket and the only time it's not with me is in the shower. My last phone was waterproof so I could have even kept it with me there. 

The thing about reading on an LCD screen (or an AMOLED screen like my previous phone) is that it's not as easy on my eyes as e-ink. but if I stop and let my eyes rest for a minute about every 20 or 30 minutes that takes care of that. It just isn't a problem. And I can use that resting time to think about what I'm reading so it's kind of a benefit at times.

I finally got guilty about not using my Kindle and I decided to try it again and I'm finding I do like it better but not a lot better. I suspect I'll be using both from now on.

By the way, there is an e-ink phone, the Hisense A5, that does have a Kindle app and is said to be a decent phone as well as good for reading. Here's a link to a discussion about it on Mobilereads: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=322957

It doesn't come with Google Play although it has it's own app store. There is a hacked version available also that does have google Play Store. The biggest complaint is that most sources for the phone don't sell it with English as one of the language options but a few do. i think those are also hacks and they, like the ones with google play don't get updates, being hacked. I've been tempted to try one but I haven't made up my mind to do it yet. I'm pretty happy with my reading situation now.

Barry


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## Fogeydc (Oct 24, 2017)

The way things are going, pretty soon you'll be getting a smartphone the size of a Kindle!
(it's been a while since I heard the term "phablet" )


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

muggle said:


> I wish Amazon made a Kindle that was the size of my smartphone and used buttons on the side (such as the volume buttons on iphone) to turn pages. The size means it would be pocketable, lighter, and easier to use on mass transit when one hand is required to hold on to something to prevent falling down on the train/subway.


I don't think I would want anything that small ... but I can see the attraction of something eInk in a phone format. Meanwhile, there is the kindle app which is fairly customizable to make it not to harsh on your eyes for reading. There are colors and brightness settings, and yes, you can set it to use the volume buttons to turn pages.


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## barryem (Oct 19, 2010)

Now that I'm reading on my Paperwhite I've been using the Kindle app when I read on the phone.  I normally read on the phone using Moon+ reader Pro but the Kindle app is pretty good.  It lets me scroll and it scrolls very smoothly.  It's interface is a bit clunky but everything works.

The biggest problem going back and forth between the Kindle app and my Paperwhite is that they sync so slowly and so poorly.  Going from the Kindle app to the Paperwhite usually works well as long as I remember to sync before I stop on the phone.  Going from the Paperwhite to the phone works about 3/4 of the time.  And even those times it's slow.  The rest of the time I have to find my place manually using text search, which is no problem.  I always make it a point to remember a short phrase near the top of the page before I stop reading just in case I need to find my place.

I've gotten spoiled by Moon+'s syncing.  It syncs via Dropbox when I change from my regular phone to my reading phone.  The reading phone is one I keep handy when I'm reading on the phone so I won't use up the battery on my main phone.  It syncs perfectly every time.  It never fails.  And it's really fast.

This is what you get when you buy an app that has to compete with other apps and is written as well as possible so it can compete.  The focus of the Kindle designers is to sell books.  They know they have to give us a reasonably good app if they want us to use it but when the purpose is to sell apps, not books, they give us a superb app.  I've always preferred superb to reasonably good.

That said, I'm finding myself enjoying reading on the Kindle again.

Barry


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## LDB (Oct 28, 2008)

I don't worry about syncing by reading different things. I do have the Kindle app on my phone with something I'm reading for times when I either forget to take along my Kindle or left it in the car because I shouldn't have had a chance to read. It's not what I'm reading on my Kindle though. I very rarely use it because my Oasis is so much better but I have it and use it at times.


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## jkingrph (Jun 10, 2012)

I do have the kindle app on my iphone 11 pro, and find it handy at times, although the screen is imo  too small for easy reading, therefore gets little use as a reader.  I do have a Kindle Voyage and find it extremely handy, large enough to read easily,  I like the buttons and it is small enough to slip into my hip pocket if need be.


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## LDB (Oct 28, 2008)

That's exactly how I feel. The phone is too small for easy reading for an extended time. I'd like to have one with a screen about 1.5" larger diagonal than my Oasis, more like a trade paperback. Or even bring back the DX with the current Oasis screen quality.


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## barryem (Oct 19, 2010)

I'm just the opposite about the size of the screen.  I remember reading an article 30 or 40 years ago about why newspaper columns are so narrow.  It said that studies have shown that people read faster and more easily with better comprehension with narrow columns and that newspapers tried to accommodate that.  I don't recall where I read it so I can't really comment on the validity of the article but I remember at the time it made sense to me.

Reading on my phone does seem faster to me although I never actually tried measuring that.  Now that I'm reading on my Paperwhite I've widened the margins so the text column is narrow as possible, although it's not quite as narrow as my phone's text.

I did compare the width of the text line on my phone to a newspaper column and it was slightly wider.  I don't recall how much but I think it was about 1/8" wider than the text in the newspaper.  My phone has a 5" screen.

I wish I had a Kindle with e-ink the size of my phone.  Using wide margins on my Kindle does help a lot though.  If anyone knows a way to shrink a Paperwhite please let me know. 

Barry


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## Maura (Aug 27, 2019)

For someone who wants a really small Kindle, I'd think the Oasis 1 would work. I traded it in and got the Oasis 2 as soon as it was out because I want the bigger screen. The Oasis 1 was so small it was downright cute, but not for me. I've never seen a Basic, but I got the impression they were smaller too?

I only read on my phone when I don't have a Kindle available - stuck waiting around somewhere, didn't anticipate it and bring a Kindle. IMO the Kindle app is inferior in every way, the screen is too small, and the lighting bothers me.


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## barryem (Oct 19, 2010)

The Oasis 1 isn't anywhere near as small as my 5" phone, which is a little larger than I'd like, but not too bad.

I first started reading ebooks on an HP95lx, with an even smaller screen and later on a Palm III, with a 3" screen, which I always thought was just right.

Barry


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## LDB (Oct 28, 2008)

barryem said:


> The Oasis 1 isn't anywhere near as small as my 5" phone, which is a little larger than I'd like, but not too bad.
> 
> I first started reading ebooks on an HP95lx, with *an even smaller screen* and later on a Palm III, *with a 3" screen*, which I always thought was just right.
> 
> Barry


I think your preferences are what might be labeled unique.


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## barryem (Oct 19, 2010)

>> I think your preferences are what might be labeled unique.

Thank you! 

Actually, reading on the Palm is the reason we have Kindles and ebooks.  That's where ebooks got popular.  They'd been around for a long time before that but the Palm was always be handy and people started putting books to read on it and before long there were a LOT of apps for reading on it.  These were all for reading plain text files, compressed to fit in the small storage of the Palm, but there wasn't any formatting.  That came later when companies like Mobipocket saw the potential market and designed a few format that did include formatting and started selling books in that format for it's app.

Prior to that books were scanned and shared by readers.  That was legal in those days although laws were later passed and the people who did that were then called pirates.

But really it all began with people sharing books to read on their 3" screens.  I have no idea how many ebooks I read before it was possible to buy them on my Palm but it must have been close to 100.  I won't admit to having scanned any, even though that was legal when I might have done it. 

Barry


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## Elk (Oct 4, 2010)

barryem said:


> That was legal in those days although laws were later passed and the people who did that were then called pirates.


While it was always illegal to copy a book onto a Palm, people did so in good faith thinking it was legal.

The Copyright Act of 1790 was the first Federal copyright law in the United States and applied to maps, charts, and books.

But it was legal if you had a pre-1790 Palm.


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## barryem (Oct 19, 2010)

As I understand it, copying a book in those days (the Palm days, not 1790) would make one subject to a civil lawsuit but not to facing criminal charges.  I'm no lawyer but I've been in discussions on forums on this topic over the years where lawyers did participate and that's what I remember them saying.

My first experience with ebooks, before they had that name, or at least before I knew that name, was on Compuserve in the HP forums.  HP had made the HP-95lx, a palmtop MS-DOS computer that ran on 2 AA batteries and one of the forum  members wrote a program to read books on it called Vertical Reader.  A lot of the members of the forum scanned books to post in the forum for others to read.  At that time the word "piracy" usually referred to sharing software.  Anyway both Compuserve and HP had very strict policies against piracy which they enforced rigidly and yet they provided storage for these books.  They were widely known among people in that forum and even in other Compuserve forums.

By the way, if you know where I can get a pre-1790 Palm I'd like to get one. 

Barry


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## LDB (Oct 28, 2008)

I had one of those HP95's until my ex managed to break it. I really liked it.


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## barryem (Oct 19, 2010)

I still have one as well as an HP100lx and 200lx, the next generations of the same basic device.

An interesting side-note about the 95lx is that it had an infrared port on it so two of them could talk to each other wirerlessly.  HP designed a communication protocol for it and that was used as the standard communications protocol for all infrared ports.  The standard has a name but I don't recall what it was.  Google remembered.  It's the IRDA standard.

The HP100lx was the first device to use PCMCIA cards with flash memory for removable storage.  They had Sandisk design the flash cards and that became the basis for SD cards and micro SD cards.

All three models had a full version of Lotus 123, the major spreadsheet of the day.  Lotus originally contracted to HP to design this device as a portable spreadsheet.  When HP decided to make more than that of it Lotus lost interest but HP still included the spreadsheet.  It was a remarkable device.

This was all before Mr Hewlett and Mr Packard retired.  Up till then it was an engineering company and marketing was largely ignored.  Then they retired and Carly Fiorina turned it into a marketing company, with just adequate engineering.  A popular saying about HP before they retired was that if HP sold sushi they'd market it as cold dead fish. 

Hewlett and Packard were engineers who, working in their garage, ala Jobs and Wozniak decades later, invented the oscilloscope.  They set up a plant to make them along with a lab to develop new products and are considered the founders of Silicon Valley.

I know nobody asked for all this but it got me thinking and sometimes I think with my fingertips. 

Barry


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## LDB (Oct 28, 2008)

I remember a good bit of that now I'm reminded and it is very interesting. Thanks for sharing it.


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## Elk (Oct 4, 2010)

barryem said:


> As I understand it, copying a book in those days (the Palm days, not 1790) would make one subject to a civil lawsuit but not to facing criminal charges.


This is correct.

I did not mean to imply any technical meaning by my use of the word illegal (which certainly can imply a violation of criminal law). Perhaps the word unlawful is more comfortable.  To wit: It has been unlawful to copy another's books, for any reason, for hundreds of years. Once caught, you had to forfeit all copies to the copyright owner and pay 50 cents per page (a stiff fine at the time).

Edit: It occurs to me to point out that under modern copyright law it is uncommon for the government to pursue the infringer. Almost always it is the copyright holder who brings an action against the bad guy. That is, as a practical matter, the law is functionally the same now as it was in the 1700s.



> At that time the word "piracy" usually referred to sharing software.


Yes, I suspect because those on these early sites/mailing lists who programmed and worked with software appreciated how much work went into it and resented someone taking their work without compensation (copying software was easy at the time). Thus, they objected and properly called out the pirates.

Unfortunately, they were unable to recognize the similar work which goes into writing a book, composing a song, making a movie. Stealing these works was sadly not considered piracy until many years later.


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## barryem (Oct 19, 2010)

Sharing movies or music online wasn't really practical in those days.  The MPEG-1 codec was first available in 1993 and a movie encoded in MPEG-1 would be far too big to transfer on the internet with the speeds available then.  It would take weeks to download a movie. The MP3 codec was finalized a few years later when things were faster but still not fast enough to transfer a music file in a reasonable time.  I remember downloading a GIF picture file from a BBS and that took a couple of hours and it was a very grainy picture.  A picture like we see today would have taken hours.  I don't recall what year that was but it was on a dial-up modem, probably 1200 baud but I'm really just guessing.

My first modem at home was 300 baud and I used that for a few years.  At 300 baud I could read text as fast as it came in.  My first modem at work was 55 baud and I remember being impatient waiting for the next word if I was getting text.  I learned to go get a cup of coffee while the screen filled up. 

Ebooks were a lot smaller and easier to transfer than movies or music or picture files, especially in the early days when they were plain text files.  Even the early Palm ebooks were plain text files although they were compressed so they were even smaller.  I just took a look at one I have, "The Quick Red Fox" by John D MacDonald.  I have the .pdb (Palm file which is plain text compressed) as well as the .AZW3 file that I bought from Amazon.  The pdb is 93k.  The Kindle book is 1.1 meg, or 118 times larger. 

So piracy had to wait till there was enough bandwidth except for ebooks, which were small enough to transfer.

Actually, and I'm just guessing now, I suspect that illegal (or more correctly, sue-able) sharing slowed considerably when it became possible to buy ebooks.  At the time I was downloading ebooks from friendly sites I never considered the legality but if I had I don't think that would have prevented me.  I had cataracts in those days and reading was difficult and being able to change text size made it possible.  I'd steal food rather than starve.  I'd steal books rather than not read.  I'm basically an honest person but I'm not that honest.  However, I won't steal books if I can buy them and when they became available to buy I did buy them.

These days we can get ebooks and movies and TV shows and music legally so piracy would be a bit silly.  I suspect if any of these media became unavailable piracy would go sky high.

Barry


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## LDB (Oct 28, 2008)

I remember going from a 1200 modem to a 2400 modem. WOW, that's fast! And then jumping to 9600 and setting fires with the heat from that speed.  Yeah, young people don't know nuthin.


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## barryem (Oct 19, 2010)

The manager of this place I live in is 28 and is somewhat tech savvy but when I tell her about some of the old stuff she doesn't see how it was worth the trouble.

We're all like that, I guess.  I remember on my first programming job writing software for mainframes IBM came out to do a demo of a new technology they wanted to sell us.  They connected a screen to our computer and let us play with it.  Try as we might none of us could think of a single use for it.  I didn't see another computer with a screen till my friend who owned a bike shop bought an Apple II.  All of a sudden it made sense. 

Barry


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## Tip10 (Apr 16, 2009)

You ought to go back to the early days and read the plethora of posts and discussions that took place on here with respect to DRM and archival copies and Fair Use doctrine. We had some rather lengthy and interesting discussions on the matter...

I’m sure Anne and Crebel and Loon can probably remember some of them....


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


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## barryem (Oct 19, 2010)

That's a good idea.  I'll be tied up for the next few days but when I'm done I'll go back and read some of the early posts.

I'm all for paying for our books but I sure don't like DRM.  It's a pain.

Back in the early days of Audible when I still had my cataracts and was listening to a lot of audiobooks I was in a special forum they had.  I think they invited about 20 customers and a lot of the officers at Audible's various companies.  USA Audible, German Audible, etc.  They wanted to discuss ideas with us and get our reactions.  One of the things we discussed was DRM and everyone at Audible as well as all us customers disliked DRM.  All the Audible people agreed that the only reason they had DRM was that without it the publishers wouldn't give them titles.  They all said they wish they could get rid of it.

After I made one of my earlier posts my sister dropped by and I was telling her about this discussion and about how, in the early days, we were scanning books and sharing them and we never considered the ethical or moral issues involved.  She said that that made sense to her.  Whenever she finished a book she'd pass it to someone else.  It was a perfectly natural thing to do and sharing scanned books was the exact same thing if you didn't really think about the implications, which we didn't.

I've never kept books when I was done with them.  I'd either give them to someone or trade them 2 for 1 at a used book store or donate them to a library.  I always had a small bookcase that I kept fairly full of books I hadn't read yet but once I read them they were gone.  I nearly always read paperbacks and paperbacks used to cost 10 cents when I was young, or maybe a quarter for a really big book.  It was decades before the price went up to more than a dollar.  I've always reread a lot of the books I liked but I'd just buy them again.

Barry


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## Elk (Oct 4, 2010)

barryem said:


> Sharing movies or music online wasn't really practical in those days.
> . . .
> So piracy had to wait till there was enough bandwidth except for ebooks, which were small enough to transfer.
> 
> ...


Bandwidth was indeed an issue. This limitation is what led to the creation of the MP3 format which, in turn, allowed music piracy as one could now share reasonably sized files.

While I would like to believe easily available legal sources would cut down on piracy, this does not appear to be true. Even though music streaming is readily available and popular, one-third of music consumers still pirate. Similarly, movie piracy during COVID lockdown has surged to unprecedented levels, up by 41% in the US in the final week of March 2020 versus the same period of the prior month. Scary.


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## Elk (Oct 4, 2010)

Tip10 said:


> You ought to go back to the early days and read the plethora of posts and discussions that took place on here with respect to DRM and archival copies and Fair Use doctrine. We had some rather lengthy and interesting discussions on the matter...


I recall, and was actively involved.

The denizens here tended to either be fascinated or annoyed by the discussions.


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## binaryhermit (May 28, 2016)

What I think would be cool would be an eReader vaguely like a Surface duo except with eInk screens.  They'd probably need to be smaller and a different aspect ratio, though.

But since eReaders are largely dead sales-wise, the odds of any revolutionary new form factor are pretty slim.


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## Elk (Oct 4, 2010)

Agreed; the Kindle which is available now is likely to be pretty much the last, other than minor revisions.


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## barryem (Oct 19, 2010)

Elk said:


> While I would like to believe easily available legal sources would cut down on piracy, this does not appear to be true. Even though music streaming is readily available and popular, one-third of music consumers still pirate. Similarly, movie piracy during COVID lockdown has surged to unprecedented levels, up by 41% in the US in the final week of March 2020 versus the same period of the prior month.


I haven't heard that about 1/3 of music consumers pirating but I am pretty sure that if those numbers came from publishers they're mostly hype. Publishers love to exaggerate the extent of piracy, usually by factors of 10 or more. Of course I don't know the source of that number.

As for piracy increasing during the lockdown I think that's pretty natural. People stuck at home want entertainment and a lot of them don't have their usual incomes. I realize publishers have to care about this but personally I don't see anything very wrong about it. It's an extreme situation.

People should pay for their entertainment if they can pay for it. If they can't they still want to be entertained and they need it.

I grew up pretty poor and I remember my brother and I climbing up onto the roof of our house to watch movies at the drive-in theater a couple of blocks away. We couldn't hear it but we could watch and make up stuff about what was being said. I guess that was my earliest involvement with piracy. 

When I was about 14 I began sneaking into that drive-in to watch movies. I got caught about 90% of the time and they made me peel potatoes and then let me watch the movie. I was about 15 when I learned to just offer to peel potatoes to get to watch. They always let me. 

My parents always bought books. Both of them loved to read and I'd read their books when they were done. When I was done we'd give them to our neighbor, who would also give us any books he had finished. Sharing books was neighborly; friendly; decent. It was just being a good person. I've never lost that feeling.

I do recognize that electronic copying means books can multiply and be shared among a lot more people, but that's true of libraries as well.

As a moderately honest person I do think we should pay for what we get. If we don't, in the long run we won't have as much available to us. That's a real thing and an important thing. And the fact that the publishers are so dishonest so often: V.C. Andrews has written far more books since her death than before, as has Robert Ludlum. Either this is God giving special access to publishers or they're putting one over on us. And look at James Patterson, who has a stable of writers writing James Patterson books.

I used to pay 10 cents for nearly all my paperbacks in 1955 at the drugstore book rack. These were all brand new books; things like Perry Mason, Frank Yerby, John Steinbeck, etc. The inflation calculator says that 10 cents in 1955 should be 96 cents in today's money. Will someone point out the 96 cent paperback stand to me, please? I can't seem to find it. 

That's not to say publishers are crooks. They're not! They're hardcore businessmen doing what I'd probably do if I was a hardcore businessman. Actually my brother is one, although he's retired now. He always insists that if you don't say untrue words you haven't told a lie even if your words are carefully constructed to make someone believe something that isn't true.

I invented a situation years ago and we've been arguing about it ever since: a used car salesman gets in an old clunker that he knows is on it's last legs but it actually looks pretty good. He calls his grandmother and asks her to come drive it to the grocery store, which she does. Later, when selling the car to a young couple he tells them the car was driven by a nice old lady to the grocery store and that convinces them it must have been well treated and they buy it.

I insist that the salesman lied and cheated his customer. My brother can't see that he's done anything wrong. I think publishers lie and cheat their customers but I'm sure that like my brother, they don't do anything they think is wrong. Our morality adjusts to fit our circumstances.

I do think most pirates are as honest as most publishers. I also think the availability of legal books does keep down piracy although the publishers will never admit it. And I think if the publishers were more honest they'd have even less piracy.

Barry


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## Elk (Oct 4, 2010)

barryem said:


> People should pay for their entertainment if they can pay for it. If they can't they still want to be entertained and they need it.


Wanting to be entertained does not justify theft.



> Both of them loved to read and I'd read their books when they were done. When I was done we'd give them to our neighbor, who would also give us any books he had finished. Sharing books was neighborly; friendly; decent. It was just being a good person.


I completely agree. Letting someone borrow a book is a wonderful thing. But loaning your one physical copy is completely appropriate and very different from making an illicit copy and passing the copy on.



> I do recognize that electronic copying means books can multiply and be shared among a lot more people, but that's true of libraries as well.


Libraries buy a license for each copy they loan.



> I also think the availability of legal books does keep down piracy although the publishers will never admit it.


I am not following. Please expand on this a bit. I usually understand what you are getting at.


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## barryem (Oct 19, 2010)

>> I also think the availability of legal books does keep down piracy although the publishers will never admit it.



Elk said:


> I am not following. Please expand on this a bit. I usually understand what you are getting at.


I think publishers have a kind of odd situation. They make more money on print books than ebooks, or, probably more accurately, they'll make more money in the future if print is the most common kind of book and ebooks are just used occasionally. This is because it cost less to make ebooks and distribute them and a percent of $20 is more than a percent of $10 or even less. Remember how many years Amazon was able to sell ebooks, even best sellers, for under $10 until the publishers put an end to that. I'm sure Amazon would have eventually raised the prices themselves if they'd been losing money, and that was while having to give something back to the publishers because so many books were selling below cost.

So publishers do everything they can to make print books seem like real books and ebooks something less. In the meantime they've developed methods, some illegal if you recall the price fixing trial involving Apple and the big 5.

Publishers have to sell us ebooks because there's so much demand but they do everything they can to reduce the demand, mostly by controlling prices and in recent years fighting against distributing through libraries.

We live in a capitalist economy and that's a very good thing and all of this is part of how capitalism works. But there are a lot of problems with ebooks that really make very little sense.

By the way, I do share my ebooks with my neighbors in my retirement home. Not so much recently because the other tenants at the moment aren't big readers, but that'll change. The readers come and go. I share by having spare Kindles that I can put a book onto and then I loan the Kindle. I have called Amazon and asked if that's okay and I've been assured that it is. My Amazon account is very important to me and I don't want to put it at risk.

Barry


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## binaryhermit (May 28, 2016)

I mean, it's not like tpeople were making unofficial ebooks of in-copyright paper books before there were legally licensed ebooks.


It's funny, apparently the publishers made more money per copy with Amazon's wholesale business model than they do under the current agency model.  Not to mention they likely sold more copies that way as well.

Now all they're doing is pushing people to cheaper, perhaps inferior, perhaps not, indie books.


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## barryem (Oct 19, 2010)

binaryhermit said:


> I mean, it's not like tpeople were making unofficial ebooks of in-copyright paper books before there were legally licensed ebooks.


That's exactly what people did before they (we) could buy ebooks. That's what made ebooks popular and created the audience that made companies like Mobipocket and Ereader.com, etc. begin selling ebooks. They saw that there was an audience and they tried to satisfy it and they did.

The thing is the people sharing ebooks on Compuserve and the internet weren't pirates in the sense we mean today. They were people who bought books, scanned and proofed them, a lot of work, and shared them. No-one thought of this as illegal. It was just sharing books. Even the sites that stored them to make sharing possible thought they were doing a good thing. Legality was never considered. That came later when it began to be done commercially by companies like Mobipocket.

Barry


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## Elk (Oct 4, 2010)

barryem said:


> They make more money on print books than ebooks, or, probably more accurately, they'll make more money in the future if print is the most common kind of book and ebooks are just used occasionally.


Thanks for the explanation. I now understand what you mean.


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## Elk (Oct 4, 2010)

barryem said:


> Legality was never considered.


This was simply out of ignorance; people did not know/understand they were stealing.

Copyright holders started to actively object when piracy became significant with the advent of the Internet, with the concomitant ease and popularity of piracy.

Piracy was of little consequence when cassette mix tapes could be constructed in real time only, recording songs off of multiple vinyl albums. It took similar effort to make copies of books. Neither was thus any threat to copyright holders at the time.

As an aside, sadly there appears to be a connection between ease of copying and the belief an artistic product has little value. Music, books, film are viewed by many as "free."


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## jkingrph (Jun 10, 2012)

barryem said:


> I'm just the opposite about the size of the screen. I remember reading an article 30 or 40 years ago about why newspaper columns are so narrow. It said that studies have shown that people read faster and more easily with better comprehension with narrow columns and that newspapers tried to accommodate that. I don't recall where I read it so I can't really comment on the validity of the article but I remember at the time it made sense to me.
> 
> Reading on my phone does seem faster to me although I never actually tried measuring that. Now that I'm reading on my Paperwhite I've widened the margins so the text column is narrow as possible, although it's not quite as narrow as my phone's text.
> 
> ...


Newspapers in the past were much easier to read. The last few years our local paper has gotten the print so small and smaller means more faint so my old eyes have trouble reading it , so much so I am about to the point of discontinuing the paper. I did look back at some old columns, articles from 20 or so years back and verified that, the print was larger and bolder.


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

jkingrph said:


> Newspapers in the past were much easier to read. The last few years our local paper has gotten the print so small and smaller means more faint so my old eyes have trouble reading it , so much so I am about to the point of discontinuing the paper. I did look back at some old columns, articles from 20 or so years back and verified that, the print was larger and bolder.


I've always felt newspapers were uncomfortable to read. Not just the print size -- which has never been very big -- but the fact of the format: Big flappy pages that don't stay still. Ink that rubs off on your fingers. Never a fan. But with Kindle I read the local paper every day. Soooo much better.


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## LDB (Oct 28, 2008)

The Houston Chronicle over the past maybe decade or so has reduced from 6 columns per page to 5 columns so the paper is significantly narrower. I think they also cut it down 2 inches in height as well. And smaller font. My dad subscribed to it his entire lifetime. I don't think they reduced the size before he passed in 2012 though.


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## binaryhermit (May 28, 2016)

I suspect the dying newspaper companies are doing all they can to cut costs.

I mean, look at newspapers today vs, say, 25 years ago, there's fewer sections and the sections that still exist are way thinner.


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## LDB (Oct 28, 2008)

Yes, I suspect the page count is less than half what it was 25 years ago. And for less than half the pages it costs 6 to 8 times as much to buy the paper. Combine the page count and new price and it's at least ten times more expensive net.


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## jkingrph (Jun 10, 2012)

Yes and I remember back in the early 60's a months subscription was only a couple of dollars.  Now it's $12.99 per month, fewer sections, less local and regional news, narrower columns , smaller print, and oh yes, they just recently eliminated the Monday paper so it is only six days per week now.


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## binaryhermit (May 28, 2016)

LDB said:


> Yes, I suspect the page count is less than half what it was 25 years ago. And for less than half the pages it costs 6 to 8 times as much to buy the paper. Combine the page count and new price and it's at least ten times more expensive net.


I'd guess it's way less than half, like, perhaps less than 10% of the page count.


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## Fogeydc (Oct 24, 2017)

jkingrph said:


> Yes and I remember back in the early 60's a months subscription was only a couple of dollars. Now it's $12.99 per month, fewer sections, less local and regional news, narrower columns , smaller print, and oh yes, they just recently eliminated the Monday paper so it is only six days per week now.


That 60's price may have been only a couple of bucks a week -- but I also remember what I got paid then compared to what I'd get today for the same job (pay grade), or comparing minimum wage to what it is now.

Papers are slimmed-down in recent times (not just this year) for a variety of reasons.
Bleeding money & under siege.

We didn't even have a sports-section (or sports to have news about) for months this year, but it's reappeared since sports started up again.
The Sunday Travel section has been just 2-3 pages in the back of the arts & style section (no surprise there either).


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## KimberlyinMN (Dec 30, 2009)

I think Amazon did make a 6" Kindle Fire - although that was a mini tablet, not an e-ink device.

Barry - I love the ability to scroll on my phone and iPad. I feel like I can read a lot faster and more immersive than tapping to turn the page. I wish we could scroll on the e-readers! Although I suppose the whole screen refresh thing might be affected.


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## barryem (Oct 19, 2010)

I doubt we'll see scrolling on ereaders any time soon.  I'm really just guessing but I'd guess that it wouldn't work smoothly and no-one is going to implement it till it does work well.  I guess time will tell.

Barry


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## Elk (Oct 4, 2010)

True scrolling of an e-ink screen would be very clunky given today's technology.  

But it would be reasonable to incorporate, for example, a one-quarter page "turn" where the result is a screen which now shows a quarter page more at the bottom and a quarter page less at the top.


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## LDB (Oct 28, 2008)

Unicorn sighted! Not the best unicorn by any means, but a unicorn sighting none the less.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000485692554.html


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## KimberlyinMN (Dec 30, 2009)

The one review sounds like it's a de-horned unicorn. Google translated it to the following:



> It's a terrible device. The buttons work through the times. The battery is smaller than the stated capacity. Terrible translation of the menu - to use "on the Russian" is simply impossible. The case is useless. There's only one font. Without over-stitching very slowly works and periodically hangs.





LDB said:


> Unicorn sighted! Not the best unicorn by any means, but a unicorn sighting none the less.
> 
> https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000485692554.html


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## LDB (Oct 28, 2008)

Yeah, a piece of junk, but it fits with the required unicorn desired specs, for those wanting a unicorn. Any unicorn is better than no unicorn at all?


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## LDB (Oct 28, 2008)

I just got my PW4 back from loaning it to a friend. I forgot how tiny it is. Combine that with choosing the widest margins and it is no larger than reading on a phone but has the far better eye relief of the eink and true white front lighting. Much better reading experience. Yes, it is physically some larger than a phone but the actual print area can be adjusted to match a phone screen size. Maybe it shows a few more lines top to bottom but the width is the same. Another possible option in the unicorn hunt.


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