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Comment by jwolfhn | Hacker News Reader

Any Kindle model with e-ink. The utiluty and simplicity of design of these devices has enabled me to read almost every night before going to bed for the past 6ish years without loosing my place or holding the weight of a book (finally read War and Peace).

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Except for some bizarre restrictions on functionality. You can drag and drop books onto the Kindle like a thumb drive (awesome!), but there isn't support for folders (not awesome!). If you want to organise huge quantities of books into collections which is, after all, the point of the Kindle, you have to do it manually on the device. Or you use Calibre, but I feel like that's a negative point because most consumers won't know about it.

Is it so hard to view as a directory structure rather than listing all the books recursively?

That and they seem to have removed the 3G for web browsing, so now owning a cellular Kindle is pretty much useless unless you're really desperate to get a book abroad.

One of my favorite features of the Kindle is that it works with Calibre. I understand that it's difficult for some, but it's a godsend for me.

Right now, the only thing stopping me from buying the Kindle Oasis is that it has auto rotate that can't be turned off.

I read in all sorts of odd positions and have the odd habit of turning books 90 degrees and reading bottom to top. I started because it seemed to help reduce the eye strain of looking left and right all day, and then found I actually preferred it.

I do like Kindle Paperwhite after switching over, but I do think the Nook I used before was better designed in terms of the hand weight/feel, the tactile buttons to turn pages on the bezel. One hand operation was much better on the Nook, whereas with the Kindle, awkward hand positions are needed to touch the specific screen spots for backward page turn and menu.

I second. The Kindle single-handedly increased my reading by like 6 - 10x. I commute with public transit, a lot, and an e-book reader is indispensable there. Many books I've read are big enough that I wouldn't bother carrying them around in paper form.

I use the kindle app on my phone, but I really like owning physical copies of my books. One of my friends recommended Infinite Jest to me, but told me to buy an e-reader specifically for that book. I got the book itself, and I wish I would have listened to him. It literally occupies half the volume of my backpack, and my arms get tired holding it in my usual reading position.

+1 I have one older model with the big buttons on the sides of the device while my wife has a newer one with a touch screen. Sometimes I wish the contrast on my screen was better, but I will never trade those big physical buttons for a lousy touch screen.

Yes! I will use my Kindle Keyboard until they discontinue it. The large page turn buttons are amazing. I am so surprised that they went away from these. Do people not realize how much better it is?

The Kindle Oasis has big page turn buttons. I have a Paperwhite that works wonderfully, but I really want an Oasis. I'm secretly hoping my Paperwhite breaks so I can buy an Oasis without feeling guilty.

I also started with the first model - full physical keyboard and great physical buttons on the side. Than I switched to paperwhite - and although now I had back-lighting I really missed physical buttons. Now I have voyage - they returned "buttons" - with haptic feedback but I've discovered that the new screen that's flush with front panel really just enables easy swipe to change pages - works even better.

The latest Kindle Paperwhite is pretty good, and I use mine every day, but it's not great yet.

Pros: Battery life, dynamic font sizing, convenience for attaining new books, the 3x3 grid view, and cloud synced notes and highlights are amazing.

Major cons from my experience:

1 - Reading progress time estimates are buggy. In one of my current books, it insists "1 minute left in chapter" for every chapter no matter what page I'm actually on or how far I've read.

2 - Highlighting is very broken. As an avid highlighter, the lag time from initiating a highlight to saving it is almost unbearable. Especially if you mis-highlight by a character or word. It seems to get worse the more highlights you have on a given page — this can make highlighting a few sentences on a page take longer than reading the page itself. Unfortunately I think it's an artifact of the e-ink technology and I'm not sure if it can be overcome today.

3 - I'd like for the battery life indicator to be more clear. Sometimes it says "plugin your Kindle immediately to prevent it shutting off" and then it'll last another hour or two.

4 - Loading non-book content to a Kindle, such as an article from the web is a slow, painful process. It's nowhere near the experience of Instapaper. Yes, I know they have blog subscriptions in the Kindle store, but paying 99¢ per blog for content that's free on the web feels broken.

5 - (Minor) It would be nice to have a collapsible table of contents for every book.

6 - (Minor) The front bezel scratches very, very easily. It happened to mine in the first week and now I notice it every time I read.

As I recall, War and Peace had a huge number of characters with a reference at the front that I always had to refer back to. Do you keep a notepad handy for this sort of thing or have you mastered the use of bookmarks to jump around (I still haven't with my Kindle)...?

Until the button stops working and the only way you can switch books is by letting the battery fully die.

Or when it turns on for an update in the middle of the night, waking you up with its backlight.

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