Whatever happened to cheap eReaders?

I removed the 3G modem when I replaced the battery to prevent it from being turned on and draining the battery as it constantly tries to connect. The microusb port is not in great condition and only works with the cable at certain angles. On the bright side, that's only an issue every few weeks when it gets charged and a new load of books.

My wife has the newest basic Kindle because she prizes light weight over any other aspect.

That said, I am very happy with my Supernote Nomad as an e-reader as well (it is a note taking device, but runs the Kindle Android app) even if it is completely out of the price range the OP discusses.

Also a paper book you'd carry every day with you for a year will look in much worse state than a Kindle.

Reading e-books is an affordable past time...

It's the best gadget I've ever bought.

Not to mention that you can just buy an old generation, or used/refurbished, if you want cheaper than that.

I had an old Kindle with a keyboard, which I got with the official jacket-and-booklight accessory.

It was great. One day years later I let it update and it got a lot worse.

I also got a Kindle Oasis. There is no booklight option. You're supposed to use the built-in frontlighting, which is so bad that I never use the device at all.

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/SAEF-2-13-Inch-High-R...

I'd bet Amazon would be pretty willing to give away kindles that only work with a prime subscription.

Amazon isn't winning because it's the least expensive, it's winning because it's the easiest. They have a huge selection and one click to buy a book that shows up on all your devices without having to do anything more is where the bar is. If you ask people to manage their own books or expect them to understand what an epub or pdf or azw is (never mind encryption!) you are limiting your market to a pretty small slice.

Took about 20 minutes to have it jailbroken and KOReader installed, I can now wirelessly copy over books from Calibre on my Mac to the kindle and don't have to touch amazons storefront at all.

I believe that stopped many years ago: https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/baen-books-can-no-l...

Its not difficult but I think a lot of non-technical users will have trouble with it:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email/

Pretty sure that, these days, Tolino devices are literally just Kobo hardware with Tolino firmware loaded onto them.

Which admittedly has made some of us regular Kobo users a bit envious, because Tolino devices somehow support sideloaded cloud syncing, while standard Kobo does not. So Kobo clearly knows how to do it, they just choose not to. :(

Was it ever true?

It's even easier to just load the book over a USB cable, assuming you have it in mobipocket. It's a "technical" process in the same sense that using a USB key is a "technical" process - one that everyone is already familiar with.

Though I do remember that the packaging for my Zen Stone specifically indicated that it would only work with a Windows computer. That wasn't true; it showed up as a USB device and you could transfer files just fine regardless of your operating system. There wasn't even an alternative proprietary method to use on Windows. The manual carefully covered the meaning of the directory structure on the device. I'm not quite sure why they claimed to require Windows.

So I just didn't bother.

Also I was very confused by the assertion that ebooks are a niche market. By the authors math more than 20% of people in the UK use e-readers to read on a regular basis. That seems like a very healthy market to me!

But when you stick it next to a 10" Android tablet with an 8 core CPU, 12GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, full colour higher resolution screen, dual cameras and all that jazz, which is less than half the price of a black and white Kindle...suddenly it doesn't look so great.

IMO Kindles were best when they had hardware buttons so I have no interest in buying these new touchscreen ones.

1. The screen is easier on my eyes. Especially at bedtime, when I do the majority of my reading.

2. The form factor - larger than a phone, smaller and lighter than a regular tablet. I find it much easier to use lying down (vs my iPad).

3. Cost - WAY less expensive than a good tablet. I can take the Kindle on a backpacking trip and not worry about breaking it. A hammock and an e-reader are my "luxury" items on these trips.

And with koreader I can set it up exactly the way I like (invert Colors at sunset, customize gestures and taps, copy paste text on my phone via a qr code…) it’s very easy to install it on a kobo.

It’s actually just an Android phone with an eInk screen, so you can run any android app on it. It’s just that eInk is terrible at everything but displaying static content so it’s not good for much besides being an eReader. Though you can also pull up a PDF reader or read emails if you really want to.

E-Readers are absolutely better for reading than phones, that's why there's a big market for them.

Not only are the fire tablets priced aggressively but they can be used to watch videos, surf the web, listen to music, play games, use remote desktop, all sorts of things. And if you lose one you are out $30 instead of $300 or so for an iPad.

This SafetyNet nonsense is now why I begrudgingly have an iPhone. After playing cat and mouse with Google for a long while, I'd had enough. The main reason I was on Android was because of the freedom I had (or, used to have). If I have to be walled in, Apple has a better garden than does Google.

Was (and still is) a great epub reader - I still do most of my ebook reading on it. Same that Libby won't work on this version of android as I'd love to read current magazines on it.

I think e-ink patents are holding the ecosystem back in terms of possible designs (and trade-offs). I'm sure we'd see more and cheaper e-readers if the tech was freer.

The software still seems like the biggest let-down in terms of progress though. I've used like five different readers over the past decade, all from different manufacturers and they all have something that really annoys me. Things like one missing notch on the brightness slider, no custom software option or just poor UI button placement.

I read a lot of ebooks, but it's almost all on my laptop with calibre. I tuned the color scheme to be easier on the eyes at night and it's honestly fine. I used to have a kindle, but I lost it in a move long ago, and haven't really missed it.

I suspect it's mostly that e-readers tend to use pretty old chipsets, & that no one has bothered updating support in a long long time. Maybe perhaps possibly there is some technical gotcha but I expect its more an issue of neglect.

Whatever the case, incredibly discouraging. I've looked at Boox Palma's and others but heck no I'm not buying such a clearly unsupported unloved system.

This makes me think of Star Trek's PADD - i.e. an iPad imagined some 20 years before the first one was built. Unlike real iPads, PADDs were used more like pieces of paper or individual books - people would exchange them, they'd submit reports to their commanders by leaving a PADD on their desk; one could easily have half a dozen of those PADDs spread around when researching something, etc.

There's a lot of merit to that idea - 15 years since iPad came out, it's becoming clear that a single expensive screen for everything is not a way to go, at least not for productive work. But I feel that, beyond dirt-cheap hardware, it requires a closed organizational ecosystem.

On the show, it's plausible. A starship is like an office building (except people don't live it for months at a time); PADDs can circulate freely around it, going from person to person, changing purposes along the way. Some get lost or broken and need replacement, but it's a neat, closed system of same-ish hardware in constant flow. But try to do that as a regular consumer product/service in the real world, and it stops making as much sense. It's a problem similar to various tool sharing initiatives - they technically exist, but they aren't really "a thing". People prefer to own stuff to ensure it's available and in working condition.

The Yoto itself does need networking because the card is just an NFC tag that points to a file in a database somewhere that the player has to download. But something similar to a video game cartridge instead could probably work. IIRC a Nintendo Switch game cartridge costs about $10 per unit and in this use case you wouldn’t even need them to be that small so you could maybe get them cheaper.

Works perfectly, despite being like 8 or 9 years old now. I've read dozens upon dozens of books on it, it still works like new, still syncs well, has multi-month-long battery life, is lightweight enough to keep in a bag at all times. Works perfectly with OverDrive for eLibrary stuff as well.

My only complaint is that it uses the old micro USB cables to charge (it's the only thing I use regularly that doesn't work with USB-C).

The new Kobo's look nice (and now support color, and bluetooth audio, and such). But I wouldn't actually use any of that, my old one still works just like new, and it feels silly to buy a whole new e-reader just for a minor USB-C charging convenience.

I personally really value the "sideload" mode on the Kobo where I have no internet connection and can drop my files onto it via USB without any work-arounds. That's enough for me to keep using the Kobo.

That said, the Kindle Paperwhite's display is incredible and the store is pretty good (you risk losing your book "license" on all platforms), plus the extra small bit of screen size on the Paperwhite is just the perfect size IMO.

But the Kobo is the one I use most. I connect it to the internet like twice a year to get an update and then turn it back off. It's absolutely perfect at showing me text of files, which is all I need.

But yes, even the first gen iPad Minis were really nice screens and form-factors.

Meanwhile my Kobo Clara is just trucking along with no obvious change in battery life or responsiveness (despite the standard e-reader application processor with its power-sipping weediness).

It becomes very important when you are on a trip and can't easily charge your devices.

(Of course personal circumstances differ.)

And it has been at least five years since I read a book on the phone, or iPad, though a couple years ago I read part of a PDF book on the iPad.

I think this stuff is really down to personal preference. And the kind of reading you do and where you do it.

My iPad never leaves home, and as such, it’s always going ahead to head against the e-reader, and losing except in the case of PDFs.

I do occasionally find myself with too much time and in a place with just my phone and not my laptop case (which almost always has e-reader in it, along with my laptop), and in those cases, I generally read hacker news.

Paper books get read when I cannot find an electronic version - which is fine, better than any other form except the e-reader.

But that’s me and my devices and my usage patterns and hangups. It’s not my wife, It’s not my kid, and it’s probably not most of you.

E-readers don't need to become cheaper, ebooks do, and at the moment there's still a huge gap between "pirated" or "borrowed from the library" and "bought". That, plus DRM and lock-in makes people think twice about buying ebooks.

I had to find a source, but [0] shows that physical books out-sell ebooks by a huge margin still. I think this chart would only change if ebooks are as readily available for cheap as streaming music.

Come to think of it, I remember now; during that time, tablets also quickly became popular and were the direct competitor to e-readers. The low-cost e-readers were often regular tablets with LCD screens, since both then and now, e-paper is expensive. But you can buy a tablet for cheap.

[0] https://www.statista.com/chart/24709/e-book-and-printed-book...

In contrast, i know people who have went through many kindles in this time and spent a small fortune on them.

Consider the iPod Classic: the shiny back scratched incredibly easily, and after a few years it looked better than it did new (like an old leather wallet, or well worn jeans).

So there never was an £8 reader, it was more likely a £30+ reader that's cost was hidden in the mobile contract or the hopes of you using their book store as it sounds from the wiki that it was a proprietary format

> The internal format seems to be basically uncompressed Bitmaps of 3 or 4 bits per pixel. Font size can be specified in the source book but not changed after the transfer.

If you could make an e-reader for £8 presumably including profit in that price so it doesn't have to be subsidized by vendor lock in book stores or mobile contracts you wouldn't want to use it. The screen would be underwhelming, the plastic creaky, file transfer slow and possibly wired only and the processor slow. It would be ewaste before it's even off the production line.

There is nothing wrong with spending money on nice quality versions of things aligned with your tech ideology, and if you do there will be more things like that in the world. Cheapo disposable tech is actually bad because it all ends up having to be subsidized by exploitative practices like data selling or ads to actually profit from it.

Getting an old but useable ereader for £20 or less is very doable right now - plus you can get the Nook simple touch to run (very old) Android.

What’s the specific harm that you are worried about?