covetting a kindle...does it make me a bad person?

JJ_Egan

Samsung Galaxy S2 i9100 + free Android Kindle app plus Amazon free books suits me .

jje

Fifer

asbokid wrote: »

there is definitely a huge margin for price cuts..

if you price the components...

ARM-11 board $7
4GB flash $3
gyricon panel $???
3g module $4
802.11 module $4
sundries $2
Linux OS $free

It's probably less than $25 to produce in volume.

The last price I saw for e-paper screens was considerably more than your total $25 component cost.

asbokid wrote: »

We can all remember exam swats when we juggled 5 books at a time. With paper bookmarks and PostMe tabs holding open the vital pages of learning. Adding furious scribbles in the margins. And the younger generation enjoys the graffiti art of highlighter pens to rote-learn the essential texts of schooling. You can't do any of those things with a Kindle.

You can do the electronic equivalent of all these things and far more efficiently.

23n1th

debitcardmayhem wrote: »

I have a Sony 505 , and the Kindle is fine too, not really interested about the pros and cons of Wifi/3G/Pad/Tablet/Whatever New Tech comes next. The biggest con in the world (oh ok as far as the UK is concerned) is 20% VAT on eBooks (of any flavour) vs the 0% VAT on printed books. I won't go as far as the environmental benefits, nor won't venture in to the Net Book Agreement (NBA) argument, nor the piracy concerns of authors. I buy a paperback book £4.36(rrp 7.99) from amazon post free, give it to my neighbour reads it and then passes it on to his son who reads it sells it in a car boot sale, and there cycle then goes on ad infinitum until the binding drops off, on a good day with a following wind 2000 people have read that one book, nothing comes back in to the economy/nor author after my initial purchase, the only people that benefit are those that read the book. Oh and remember the (un)real book I bought from the online seller it costs me 5.23 because of vat and I cant pass it on to others / sell on ebay / boot sale because it is a proprietary format, and has DRM. So I will pass on every old printed book I have to people who have got the same spectacles and same prescription and colour as mine, and were bought from the same store as mine, oh and I forgot if they are registered for VAT.

But truly I would buy an e-ink reader again and again , it's the other bits that wind me up.

I've been saying this since I got my kindle. I flat out refuse to buy an ebook until the vat is either removed or added to normal books.

The price of these ebooks is very annoying sometimes more than the print book.

As far as I'm aware you only need to format it once, when its done thats it. Obviously you have to make sure it will work in different format and that again only needs done once. I don't want to pay the extra for the publisher to licence DRM which cripples everything it touches and only succeeds punishing genuine customers. Its a joke.

On the advantages of ebook readers I particularly like the dictionary that comes pre-installed on the kindle so if I come across a word I don't know I just select it and its meaning is revealed, much much easier and quicker that a paper dictionary.

Desperate_Housewife_2-2

Thanks for all your advice, I have ordered the wifi one and a case to put it in so very excited now waiting for it to come, feel a bit sick at spending that amount of money as I am not a big spender but OH pushed me as he knows I read a lot and my birthday is coming up shortly too

Really excited!

23n1th

Glad to hear it, make sure you use Calibre http://calibre-ebook.com/ to manage your kindle if you're still paranoid and want to convert no drm'd books to different formats (though it has the ability to remove the drm and convert them with certain plugins ) its very good and completely free

debitcardmayhem

I hope you enjoy it, and the previous post by 23n1h pointing you at calibre , is a really good piece of freeware, it also allows downloading rss feeds from newspaper and other websites, and even from here if you wish. I have had my sony for 2 years and it is has paid for itself by virtue of cheap flight baggage allowances, thanks to mr O'leary and his airline. I just wish that the government didn't levy 20% vat on eBooks.

23n1th

I have to be padantic is open source software, and as debitcardmayhem said the RRS feed downloader is brilliant I use it all the time, amazon and the like basically want to charge you for this service calling is a magazine/newspaper subscription. Males me laugh since the same content is basically free online.

asbokid

Fifer wrote: »

The last price I saw for e-paper screens was considerably more than your total $25 component cost.

What price did you see for a Kindle screen? And was it the retail price or the production cost?

It's another reason not to buy a Kindle when the cost of replacing a key component - the screen - is a ridiculous 75% of the price of a new Kindle.

Yet the true manufacturing cost of the electrophoretic panel used in the Kindle is literally a few pennies, much cheaper than the cost of making an LCD panel.

I just read a 2006 article by researchers at Phillips Eindhoven who developed the electrophoretic sheeting process.

It's a technology dating back to the 1950s which they have updated and improved. In 2006, Phillips licensed the production technology of its electrophoretic sheeting to PVI, the Taiwanese manufacturer of the Kindle screens.

The flexible plastic laminate Kindle screens are produced using a roll-to-roll method, similar to making paper, which is why these screens are so inexpensive to make.

The researchers gave a gimmicky demonstration in which they wallpapered an entire room with their electrophoretic sheets, illustrating both the scalability of the process and the low costs involved.

The same "EPLaR" process and the same manufacturing plants are used to make electrophoretic sheets as are used to make Active Matrix LCD screens. So there are no extra costs for building new plant to manufacture e-ink screens.

Since the flexible electrophoretic sheets require no backlighting, and the sheeting is less than a millimeter thick and relies on inexpensive polymers throughout its fabrication, the cost of manufacture is just a fraction of the cost of making LCD panels.

Having read the background to the Kindle screen manufacturing process, I would guess that the volume production cost of a Kindle 3 is well under $20. Possibly the Kindles cost as little as $10 a unit to manufacture.

You can do the electronic equivalent of all these things and far more efficiently.

I can only just perform all those tasks on a PC with a 28" screen. There's not much chance of doing that with a Kindle and a screen resolution that is lower than the cheapest netbook.

The Kindle is never going to simultaneously display pages from five different documents. Yet that is a rudimentary task that I can accomplish with ease when given real books and a large desk.

asbokid

Moonflowers wrote: »

A Kindle doesnt need batteries, it comes with a charger.

The Kindle 3 has apparently got a Lithium-Ion polymer battery, the type of battery commonly found in mobile telephones. Li-ion batteries do fail. Over the years, I've replaced the Li-ion batteries in most of my mobile phones.

According to Amazon, the battery in the Kindle cannot be changed by the end-user. Not strictly true, there are companies selling replacement batteries. But if the battery fails while the unit is still within its one year limited warranty then you have to return the whole Kindle to Amazon for repair/replacement:

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=97357
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxKqr3t35HM

I love my Kindle it was a great investment. I have "bought" for free loads of the classics, as well as current books too.

I must be a literary philistine here, but so far I've avoided the temptation to buy any of the real paper books in the Penguin Classics series, even though they are just a pound. I guess I should be putting the savings aside to buy a Kindle so that I can load a 100 classic books onto it for free!

Fifer

asbokid wrote: »

What price did you see for a Kindle screen? And was it the retail price or the production cost?

It's another reason not to buy a Kindle when the cost of replacing a key component - the screen - is a ridiculous 75% of the price of a new Kindle.

I'm talking cost price for e-paper screens in production volumes. Just over a year ago, they were in the order of $80. My understanding is that current pricing is still around the $60 mark. Manufacturing yields are low.

EDIT: This and other articles suggest that Amazon is selling the Kindle at a loss.