The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet [LWN.net]

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 1, 2012 16:32 UTC (Wed) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203)
In reply to: The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet by jmnovak
Parent article: The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Go to a store and try the Nook Simple Touch. The page flips are not anything like what e-paper gained a bad rep for with the latest tech.

But I still doubt there is much of a future in the current e-paper though. On the other hand I doubt the future will belong to current LCD either since it has horrible flaws as well. There is work on e-paper to make it color and update fast enough for video. There is also OLED and several other promising display techs working their way out of the labs. Most will fail and it would be difficult to predict which one will surmount the technical problems first, achieve mass production and thus get cheap enough to dominate the others. But it is a safe bet that one will because the demand is there for an energy efficient display without the side effects of the current leaders.

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The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 1, 2012 17:35 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (13 responses)

For me, it's isn't the eInk screen that makes me hate my PRS-T1 sometimes. Yeah, it flashes. Big deal -- so does a page that I turn manually. But the screen is too small, smaller than a normal book. But even that isn't the problem.

The problem is truly awful quality of the software. It turns two pages, often, when I press the next page button. The library software crashes after pressing next page ten times. It only shows 9 books per page. The stupid thing thinks I've "read" a book as soon as I've opened it. It doesn't handle tags. It crashes when trying to create collections. You cannot cycle through the books; the start of the list is the start, no jumping to the end or the other way around. Search is often broken. The dictionaries are crap. There is no cross-reference between books. If a chapter has a hundred pages, after page 20 it gets really slow, I guess because it layouts every page up to the page it wants to show, for every page. It sometimes start to auto-turn pages. And so on. And yes, this is fully updated firmware.

I think it's the software rather than not wanting to carry two devices that is going to kill ereaders.

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 1, 2012 17:42 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

software bugs on one device will not kill all e-readers

I have the kindle DX because of it's larger screen, the kindle 2 screen is about the size of a paperback, but it changed pages slowly enough to be an annoyance to me, the DX had enough text on the screen to make the annoyance significantly less. The kindle 3 and newer devices have a newer generation of screen that changes significantly faster (as well as providing significantly better contrast)

the kindle DX has problems with pdf books similar to what you describe with long documents, but not with any other format (and I understand newer devices are signficantly better)

The other problems you are dealing with are software bugs on your reader, and not ones that I have heard of on kindles.

your conclusion that these will doom e-readers is like saying that one model of smartphone has problems, and so all smartphones are doomed.

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 1, 2012 20:39 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (1 responses)

I haven't seen anything that makes the kindle software actually better -- it might not crash, but it still sucks for anyone who really reads books.

And, of course, there's no way I'm going let Amazon know what I read and on which page I pause.

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 1, 2012 22:08 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

> I haven't seen anything that makes the kindle software actually better -- it might not crash, but it still sucks for anyone who really reads books.

as someone who reads a lot, I disagree with you.

> And, of course, there's no way I'm going let Amazon know what I read and on which page I pause.

you don't have to. Just don't buy any books from Amazon, and turn off the syncing of where you are in the book.

90% of the books that I have are not purchased from Amazon (and are DRM free, before you trot that out). In my case, Amazon knows that I have most of them because I use the 'e-mail to device' option, which runs them through the Amazon servers, but you could just load them via USB.

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 1, 2012 20:00 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (8 responses)

I have a PRS-T1, and while the software could certainly be improved in many places (I agree with most of the things you say about navigation in the book list), I don't see many of the other problems you're complaining about, such as the »two pages«, »next page ten times« or »auto-turn« issues. I'd take the PRS-T1 over anything out today with an LCD screen, thank you very much.

Also, for all its shortcomings, IMHO the PRS-T1 still beats the pants off the (non-touchscreen) Kindle 3, which I also have. (I'm working on ebooks for my job, so I have a selection of ebook readers to test stuff.) There are also other readers on the market which are way worse.

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 1, 2012 20:42 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

I wish that mine wouldn't have these bugs... I have religiously updated it whenever Sony brought out new firmware. I got it quite early, when it would still sometimes go into berserk mode, which was a known bug. That's fixed now, but the other bugs aren't.

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 5, 2012 11:25 UTC (Sun) by fb (guest, #53265) [Link] (6 responses)

> Also, for all its shortcomings, IMHO the PRS-T1 still beats the pants off the (non-touchscreen) Kindle 3, which I also have.

Could you elaborate on what the PRS-T1 does better? I am honestly curious (I never handled one).

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 5, 2012 12:01 UTC (Sun) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (5 responses)

The Kindle 3 is OK if all you want to do is read novels from Amazon. The Kindle document format is too restrictive for more demanding sorts of documents (like the technical training manuals my company produces). The Kindle really sucks for PDF files, because you can't use PDF bookmarks to navigate, and anyway Amazon doesn't let you sell PDF books through its Kindle infrastructure.

The PRS-T1 supports EPUB, which lets you use better formatting in your documents. Unlike Kindle-format documents, EPUB documents can be prepared without proprietary tools. The PRS-T1 is also a lot better than the Kindle at displaying PDF. In addition, it has a touch screen and (among other things) supports hand-written notes. (There is a touch-screen Kindle out now, and of course the Kindle Fire tablet, but I haven't had a chance to try either of those.)

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 5, 2012 12:26 UTC (Sun) by fb (guest, #53265) [Link]

Thanks for the instructive/informative comments.

I use a Kindle DX (the pearl e-ink one) for reading A4 formatted PDFs. It does the job really well, but I reckon I only really use it for (relatively short) scientific articles. Larger PDF files will indeed add too much load delay. My old Hanlin v3 had some Adobe licensed PDF renderer that did reflow on PDFs, it was sure better than what the Kindle does or what I succeeded doing using Calibre and cmd line tools (the Hanlin v3 sucked in other ways).

Most of my e-ink reading falls in the 'normal book' category for which Mobi files on a Kindle3 suffices. (One killer feature of the kindle for me is being able to read Wikipedia articles while camping abroad about the region I am visiting, it sure beats any 'history section' of regular travel guides.)

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 5, 2012 20:44 UTC (Sun) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

PDF is a very bad format for e-books, it has the build-in requirement that you be viewing the page on a particular size screen (or you have to pan around the page, which is horrible in practice.

Given that .mobi is a slight variation of .prc, are you sure that it can only be created with proprietary tools? The formats have been around long enough, and are well documented enough that I have a bit of a hard time believing this.

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 5, 2012 20:51 UTC (Sun) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link]

.mobi is created with Calibre with no problem at all.

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 5, 2012 22:13 UTC (Sun) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

PDF is a very bad format for e-books, it has the build-in requirement that you be viewing the page on a particular size screen (or you have to pan around the page, which is horrible in practice.

PDF does have its problems but if you want anything except the most basic formatting then EPUB (2.x) and especially the Kindle format won't do for you. On the Kindle 3, once you get to the point where you need a table that is not 100% trivial you're essentially up the creek without a paddle.

There is such a thing as »PDF reflow«, which the PRS-T1 does but the Kindle 3 doesn't. On the other hand, we have had reasonably good experience with generating PDF to fit reader-size screens, which is very nice on the PRS-T1 but sucks completely on the Kindle 3 because it won't let you use the links in the PDF to navigate, not even by scrolling around the page with the puny cursor keys. (The new touch-screen Kindle may or may not be better in that respect.)

Given that .mobi is a slight variation of .prc, are you sure that it can only be created with proprietary tools?

There is Calibre, but personally I wouldn't really be prepared to call that an authoring tool.

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 6, 2012 9:00 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The Kindle 4's latest software revision, and the Kindle 5, support KF8, which has better table support among other things. The viewer is... suboptimal, though, as so far every single book I've viewed in that format has a different font size to all the others I own, so I'm always having to fiddle the font size to keep things the same apparent size. This is probably a bug which might possibly maybe be fixed (or maybe they've taken a leaf from the music biz and expect us to buy all our books again to get them in KF8 form!)

The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

Posted Aug 5, 2012 11:09 UTC (Sun) by fb (guest, #53265) [Link]

Reading your post, my sincere impression is that you bought a crappy e-reader. Not even my old Hanlin v3 was that bad (it never faltered on page turns for one).

[...]

I own multiple Kindles and owned an old Hanlin v3 (the one for which there was an alternative GPL firmware).

Regarding the software flaws you reported, the only ones present in a Kindle is lack of tag support and cross reference between books. Myself, I never missed these.

At least for English the Kindle uses the Concise Oxford English dictionary, which is quite good. Never saw it slow down for books of any length (although it is slow for some heavy PDFs). Never missed a page turn. Collections work as expected.

Some (quite technical) people (specially on slashdot) seem to have some aversion to the Kindle on the grounds of its internet connection features. I find that remarkably silly given how technically competent these folks seem to be and the fact that --should you care-- you could just turn off the WiFi/Radio and never turn it on again. You can even upgrade its software withOUT turning Wifi/Radio on.

IMHO text typesetting in a Kindle has a lot of room for improvement, but then that is also true of any other e-reader (tablet, phone, kindle etc) I tried to use.