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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

Amazon gave me a Kindle Oasis (the prize for being a finalist in last year's 'Amazon Storytelling' contest). I would never have bought it myself since it costs €249 (!) but I have to say it's a fantastic device.

It's super-legible, has enormous memory, is water resistant, and has buttons for page-turning.

Other than Kindle books that arrive directly after buying, I send books to it via email through Calibre, which removes DRM in the process. Calibre also did the mobi conversion, and now this step is not even necessary anymore.

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>I would never have bought it myself since it costs €249 (!)

I bought my Oasis 2 around for closet to 299 EUR (309.97 USD) when I was making 30k USD a year, was 100% worth it to me while I still had a fully functional kindle keyboard and kindle paperwhite 3. If you're a casual reader, that might seem expensive, but if you are chewing through 1-3 books a week like I do (heck I read 3 books last time I flew from Indianapolis to San Francisco and 2 more on the return flights), it becomes a much better price.

I've been using it for almost 5 years now which has me at a cost of 17 cents per day with thousands of hours of use (about 8 cents an hour if I had to guess).

Actually I had bought a Kindle Keyboard 3G in 2011, which at the time cost $189, so not that far from the cost of a Kindle Oasis today. It served me well for many years.

While it's still working (and the keyboard is so nice to use to type in notes) the plastic case has become "sticky" and a kind of thick film comes off in places. It's strange and very unpleasant.

Recently the battery died, I refurbished it with a new battery from Aliexpress and it came back to life. When the Oasis arrived I gave the 3G to my kids.

I bought an Oasis on Prime Day and it's mostly a nice upgrade from my old Paperwhite. The only negative is the battery life. I have to charge it twice as often as I had to with my years old Paperwhite.

I think we're nearing the end of Amazon not really caring about DRM. AFAIK, the DRM used by latest version of KFX files hasn't been thoroughly broken and it's a cat and mouse game now. There are some less than ideal workarounds (like downloading an older format), but you lose some of the typography improvements that Amazon only supports in KFX.

Now that Amazon seems to be interested in strong DRM, I expect a legislative solution to book DRM is our only long term hope.

Downloading an older format really isn't a high price to pay for getting rid of DRM. But yes, in time, as older devices disappear, this could become a big problem.

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