Amazon drops price on Kindle, releases an international Kindle

GnomeQueenGnomeQueen The Lulz QueenMountain Dew Mouth Icrontian
edited October 2009 in Science & Tech
Amazon drops price on Kindle, releases an international Kindle

Comments

  • chrisWhitechrisWhite Littleton, CO
    edited October 2009
    This is great news, I know a bunch of people who have wanted a Kindle but don't live in the US. I have to say, I love my Kindle, I really more textbooks and the like were on it
  • DrLiamDrLiam British Columbia
    edited October 2009
    Wait, can you use this for school textbooks? Is it cheaper? This could be interesting.
  • AlexDeGruvenAlexDeGruven Wut? Meechigan Icrontian
    edited October 2009
    Some colleges are starting to play with it as an option for students.

    Since there's no printing costs, in theory, it could drastically reduce the price of textbooks. In practice, however, the cost will probably only be lowered about 5% because people like making money.
  • chrisWhitechrisWhite Littleton, CO
    edited October 2009
    DrLiam,

    Yes and no. This semester not a single one of my textbooks were on the Kindle store. Last semester a few of them were available online as PDFs which came across decently but lost a lot of the PDF formatting (after nuking the DRM).

    However, the Kindle DX looks like the perfect device for textbooks as it handles PDFs natively and has the screen size for it textbook formats. If you can get your textbooks for the device it would pay for itself and it's much easier to search, bookmark and grab excerpts from.
  • chrisWhitechrisWhite Littleton, CO
    edited October 2009
    So here's my question, the Kindle 2 doesn't turn on or off (it's wireless does) and virtually the only time it uses even a slight bit of power is when it changes a page. So, you can't turn the thing off when you're taking off and descending on a plane, is it okay to continue to flip the pages? Assuming that the edge is off the entire time.

    The only four flights I've taken it on the flight attendants didn't seem to care.
  • GnomeQueenGnomeQueen The Lulz Queen Mountain Dew Mouth Icrontian
    edited October 2009
    You can't turn it on or off? Why not? That seems exceedingly silly to me.
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited October 2009
    Electronic paper retains its image when power is removed. Voltage is only required to change the image (flip the page).

    If the wireless is off, there's nothing that ebook could possibly do to compromise the plane. Even then, there's a significant body of evidence to suggest that FAA regs regarding wireless devices is complete bullshit.
  • CrazyJoeCrazyJoe Winter Springs, FL Icrontian
    edited October 2009
    Yea... Mythbusters did an episode on that and they showed that it doesn't interfere with anything...
  • chrisWhitechrisWhite Littleton, CO
    edited October 2009
    Thanks Thrax, you described it perfectly.

    Didn't Mexico get rid of those regulations recently?
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited October 2009
    Crazy Joe wrote:
    Yea... Mythbusters did an episode on that and they showed that it doesn't interfere with anything...
    I saw that episode and the result was that US CDMA phones don't interfere with anything... but that US GSM phones make radio navigation essentially impossible.

    At any rate, for $260 up front and $10 per title I can buy a lot of conventional books. I'm not seeing the value.

    -drasnor :fold:
  • mas0nmas0n howdy Icrontian
    edited October 2009
    drasnor wrote:
    At any rate, for $260 up front and $10 per title I can buy a lot of conventional books. I'm not seeing the value.

    From a purely economic perspective, actual paper books are still a better deal. The value for me personally is

    a) Instant delivery.
    b) Portability.
    c) Space. We only have a 1600 sq ft house and are always trying to find new places for bookshelves/books. Whenever we have moved in the past, half our boxes are books.
  • AnnesAnnes Tripped Up by Libidos and Hubris Alexandria, VA Icrontian
    edited October 2009
    I just really don't like the idea of my ability to read being hindered by battery life - no matter how long that battery life may be.
  • chrisWhitechrisWhite Littleton, CO
    edited October 2009
    Space was a huge thing for me, I ended up selling off about 200 books on Amazon which paid for the Kindle. At the time I was shooting for owning about 100 items, now I think the ideal for me is 250. 1 Kindle = a lot of books.
  • SnarkasmSnarkasm Madison, WI Icrontian
    edited October 2009
    Using a US cell carrier as the means of downloading books abroad. GREAT idea, Amazon.
  • chrisWhitechrisWhite Littleton, CO
    edited October 2009
    So long as Amazon's the one that gets billed for it :)
  • GnomeQueenGnomeQueen The Lulz Queen Mountain Dew Mouth Icrontian
    edited October 2009
    They had problems getting an international wireless carrier, which I believe led them to use AT&T. I wouldn't be suprised if the pressure from other companies releasing their own E-Readers also increased the desire to get a carrier from SOMEWHERE, just so they could get the international reader out first. We'll have to see what the roaming charges end up being, but speaking from experience, I question the signal strength of AT&T globally. I was in England- two years ago, to be fair- and through AT&T I had signal only one day, despite the fact that I upgraded to an international plan. I spoke to Orange in London- one of the British cell phone services that AT&T is supposed to connect to- and they told me that AT&T users had spotty connections in England, and there was no way that they would be able to tell me when or not I'd be able to connect. Considering I was in LONDON, only the biggest and most important city in all of England, I assumed that I would be able to get service there, but I did not. I suppose we'll have to wait and see.
  • drasnordrasnor Starship Operator Hawthorne, CA Icrontian
    edited October 2009
    Well, I have to admit I'm not objective here either. I've been using my OLPC as an e-reader for a few years and have a healthy stack of PDFs from Fictionwise et al. The batteries last 8 hours or so with the wireless radio turned off and backlight off or at minimum. The display on the OLPC is incredible; I wish I could get that screen on a more powerful netbook.

    -drasnor :fold:
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