Kindle - buy standard or paperwhite?

greyfox

I have both a standard Kindle & a Paperwhite and the Paperwhite (which I bought when I was waiting for cataract removal) wins hands down for me. The backlight means that I can read in bed without disturbing OH.

DavidP24

I am sure that there are publishers like that but this is an Amazon policy, it has been covered and I heard them interviewed saying it was deliberate due to business unit structure.

Amazon dominate this market and can do what they want because of the lack of competition.

Like the movie and music industry, when customers do not have choice they revert to other means and that spawned the illegal copies online which give the publisher nothing.

There is some irony in that many of those copies are made with Amazon products.

Tiddlywinks

Good grief - someone's got a little anti-Amazon obsession going there....

Anyway, back to the original question.... I have both a first generation Kindle and a Paperwhite.

I bought the original in 2010 and it is still going strong - my husband's original from 2011 is now with a friend and still used daily.

We now primarily use Paperwhites and love them. The display is fantastic and the controllable brightness of the backlit screen is so localised that I can read in bed without the light on and the 'shine' from the Paperwhite is low enough not to disturb my husband.

The battery life is also very good indeed - as is the large amount of free content available.

If you are desperate to change right now then I'd say buy from John Lewis online... if you can wait then keep checking Amazon as they do deals every couple of months which brings the price down significantly. Recently they had an offer on the Paperwhite at around £89.

I've always found Amazon to be very helpful with any issues I've encountered... but then that kind of experience doesn't make for good tabloid hysteria does it?

mac.d

JReacher1 wrote: »

You can use Calibre on a Kindle as well. It is not just Kobo

You can of course use Calibre with any ereader you want (and with help of some extra software, remove DRM and easily switch formats too), but I said better book organisation with Calibre. Both Kindle and Kobo use a form of collections to organise books on the ereader itself, with Kobo's you can set up collections using Calibre and they will appear the same way on your Kobo, that doesn't work with Kindle's, unless you jailbreak it, you have to organise your books manually. A minor issue for some, a big negative for others.

Tiddlywinks wrote: »

Good grief - someone's got a little anti-Amazon obsession going there....

Exactly. Pointless even refuting all of the points (which is easily done), when someone has so clearly made up their mind regardless of reason.

onomatopoeia99

DavidP24 wrote: »

How about them deleting your Kindle account along with books, no explanation

The explanation is that she had been using an overseas address to circumvent the publishers' copyright licensing agreements. A copyright holder can grant different licences to specific territories, so Amazon may not have had the right to sell certain ebooks in Norway, which the buyer bypassed by purchasing using a UK address. Once Amazon realised this had happened they would would have been obliged by the contract they agreed with the publisher to remedy the situation.

I know a lot of people on this forum think that circumventing copyright is "moneysaving", rather than wrong, but it is a concept that governments worldwide agree to and legislate for, and it's obviously an important one for people that create or sell original works like books.

Also, an 11% return rate (37 out of 343 is obviously not less than 10%) is absurdly high. We wouldn't do business with people that did that, the amount of extra work it generates makes it not worth having them as a customer. The balance of the gift card should have been refunded to the original purchaser though.

bitsandpieces

Thanks for all the suggestions. I found a really moneysaving solution - an old Nook I'd stuck in a drawer after being unable to revive it a couple of years ago (had tried a hard reset etc...but it was frozen) seems to have started working :j I'll use this for now, at least, and consider upgrading at some point.

UK Kindle ereaders don't work with overdrive library books, then? In that case, I think I won't buy one any time soon - most of the ebooks I read are from my local library (they have a pretty good collection, and it's free).

DavidP24

Excellent money saving!!

DavidP24

onomatopoeia99 wrote: »

The explanation is that she had been using an overseas address to circumvent the publishers' copyright licensing agreements. A copyright holder can grant different licences to specific territories, so Amazon may not have had the right to sell certain ebooks in Norway, which the buyer bypassed by purchasing using a UK address. Once Amazon realised this had happened they would would have been obliged by the contract they agreed with the publisher to remedy the situation.

I know a lot of people on this forum think that circumventing copyright is "moneysaving", rather than wrong, but it is a concept that governments worldwide agree to and legislate for, and it's obviously an important one for people that create or sell original works like books.

Also, an 11% return rate (37 out of 343 is obviously not less than 10%) is absurdly high. We wouldn't do business with people that did that, the amount of extra work it generates makes it not worth having them as a customer. The balance of the gift card should have been refunded to the original purchaser though.

When I said explanation I meant to the client, BEFORE they cancelled her account and not AFTER the press got hold of it.

Not the first time I have heard of this.

I think you will find that not all Governments observe Copyright, China for a start, but in this case Amazon create the counterfeit market with their greed.

Also they can beeeech about copyright while they AVOID/EVADE millions in UK tax, on top of that many publishers and authors feel exploited by Amazon, so they are not the friend of anyone.

I have no sympathy for Amazon at all.

Amazon are supposed to offer a good return service, if I had a customer that bought over 300 items from me I would have no problem with 20% returns if the returns were valid on a case by case basis.

At the end of the day I can see you like them and I am sure that is the way for most people until they have a bad experience.

Corporations that fail to service a market in a fair way will force that market to find other ways to get the products

We see it with expensive drugs, Music and Movies/Series. The sharing will go on until those companies find a way to deliver product to those markets at a price that reflects their income (which may be $10 a month if they are lucky). Other people who are on very low incomes will also use such services as will those who seek to see movies earlier. There are countries that get DVD releases before we get cinema.

It does no harm to those markets, because even if someone has a shared copy they still tell their friends how good a movie was and many of those friends will not only buy the movie but they will share with their friends too. It is like having an army of supporters and in fact many companies secretly release copies onto sharing sites.

mac.d

bitsandpieces wrote: »

UK Kindle ereaders don't work with overdrive library books, then? In that case, I think I won't buy one any time soon - most of the ebooks I read are from my local library (they have a pretty good collection, and it's free).

No, libraries here in the UK lend books in .epub format, Kindle's don't read .epub's and instead use Amazon's own format (.awz/.mobi). So if you want to be able to borrow library books, you'll need to have an ereader that uses .epub books, which is basically anything except a Kindle. Nook are pretty much out of the game nowadays (unless you are in the US), so if library books are important to you, your best bet for a future upgrade is to look at one of the Kobo models. In the meantime, enjoy your Nook.

DavidP24

Government are obliged to use open standards, hence anything but a kindle, my sister has a nook and loves it, so what format do they read?