Interested in ereaders

Christopher Browne cbbrowne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Thu Sep 19 17:16:59 UTC 2013


On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 12:53 PM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 19, 2013 at 12:35:19PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
>> So folks (naturally) want to carry as few things as possible.  Now
>> that I'm starting to carry a smart phone, I'm running out of pockets.
>> So I have to decide whether to drop my Swiss Army knife or my MP3
>> player.  Things are a little better now that the weather has cooled
>> off: more pockets.
>>
>> I tried using the phone as an MP3 player but it isn't 100%
>> satisfactory.  Running down an MP3 player's battery isn't as
>> consequential as running down a phone's battery.
>>
>> I haven't figured out the best way of carrying earphones.
>> Wrapping them around the MP3 player has worked fairly well, but
>> wrapping them around the phone doesn't work.  So the MP3 player almost
>> earns its keep just as headphone storage.
>>
>> All these tradeoffs are non-obvious and very particular.  Hard to
>> theorize what would work for and sell to the masses.
>
> The mp3 player has dedicated electronics for audio decoding.  The ereader
> often does not, and hence is much less power efficient at doing so.
> Now some newer ones might actually have CPUs with audio decoding features,
> but it isn't always easy to determine what actual hardware is in the
> things you can buy.
>
> The ereaders tend to have amazing battery life because they essentially
> turn off while you read a page, and then turn on when you hit a button
> and update the screeen and go off again.  Playing audio continuously is
> completely different from what they were designed to be good at.

Totally correct, yes.

There are enough tradeoffs to be found here as to make it pretty tempting
to get different gadgets for different purposes.

Personally, I prefer a devoted music player, as it has a much nicer amplifier
chipset than they'd think to put into a [tablet/phone].

I do my reading on a Kobo Touch, and I'm debating getting the new "Aura"
model, which would add backlighting, a sizable increase in resolution,
and, apparently, a bigger battery requiring much less frequent recharging.

FYI, I treat the Kobo as a "reading appliance;" my behaviour of throwing
books onto the SD card and managing that using Calibre has worked out
pretty well thus far.

It would be nice to have "my own software" akin to Calibre on the device,
but it seems like that would involve a lot of work including systems
integration efforts that would be liable to be obsolesced each time any
new hardware came out.
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