I've been using a Kindle for 10+ years now , but the poor responsiveness has always irked me. I can't tell if it's a hardware or software issue. I'm glad to see this project is focused on reducing latency on the hardware side.
Does anyone know why the Kindle is such a bad product? I use it because I like e-ink and the e-book market is comprehensive, but I don't think it's actually a good device.
What are you trying to do with it that you’re concluding it’s a “bad product” due to the slow refresh times? Kindles have always been the benchmark ebook reader and the most common piece of e-ink technology that you can actually buy. Hardly a “bad product” in any dimension that matters in business terms.
They've been the benchmark for amazon kindle books. They suck for pdfs or anything with graphics.
you are confusing your needs with the use case of the Kindle which is heavily focused on linear reading of text, mostly fiction. Graphics and PDFs are much lower on the priority scale.
PDFs and comics are not a small use case at all - the push to larger screens is mostly driven by people who want to read scientific papers, business documents, etc which come in pdf form, or manga and other graphical works (the drive for color ereaders seems to come almost entirely from this segment). The smaller "ebook only" readers are much cheaper and marketed less aggressively.
Even optimized e-ink devices are not particularly suitable for those kinds of materials and most of the e-ink reader manufacturers have not tried to address that market. It is generally better served by LCD tablets.
Unless of course you read books that have graphics or come in pdf form.
Which is not the business that Amazon and Kobo are in.
Again, you're confusing market success with quality. Many beautiful products fail and many awful products succeed.
I'm talking about aesthetics. In this case, elegance, utility, responsiveness, durability, efficiency .
I think e-readers are pretty much a solved problem for books that consist of solely text - it's got to the point where they only differentiate themselves on things more related to personal taste than any technical merit. And price, of course.
I consider myself a heavy user of ereaders, probably averaging over an hour a day, and have had a few in my time (Kindle paperwhite, Kindle Voyage, Kobo Aura H2O, latest the Kindle Oasis - which I got in Jan 2019). The only real time I felt like I got an "upgrade" was the slightly denser screen on the voyage, then the slightly larger screen on the Aura. The Oasis feels functionally the same for my use case (again, 99.9% text, no images or diagrams or animations, so can't compare them). But really the only reason I "upgraded" after the voyage is leaving it on a train or got damaged in my luggage one time.
And what can they really improve on it? There are denser screens - but they don't make the font size I use actually look any better. There are larger screens, but it's already about the limit of what I want for portability, and much larger would be harder to read not easier. There are faster refreshing screens, but I've never even noticed the page refresh speed, as it's lost in the time it takes to realign my eyes to the top of the page anyway.
So what's left? Looks? "Premium" materials? Thinness? The oasis is already at the point where any thinner or bezels any smaller and you couldn't hold it. I don't read comics on it, so don't really need a higher resolution, or colour panel (though can see the advantage if you did). Same with flash size - every book I've ever read on it (nearly 3000) is still on my 8gb model, and it's not even at 50% capacity.
And now my Oasis battery is starting to fade - it doesn't more than a few days anymore - and somehow it feels weird considering buying the same thing again - or pry open the back off and try to replace it - though who knows what that would do to it's water resistance. I guess the newer models have an amber backlight option, which would be nice, but still doesn't feel like an upgrade to something I purchased over 5 years ago now? Or even more as I only got that because the (functionally equivalent) predecessor got crushed on a plane.
So I think my point is that for the "Reading Books" use case, a kindle has already reached the maxima. Any "improvement" would almost be a waste - why improve refresh times when it won't actually affect the user experience one bit?
Is there something I'm missing? Is this just a local maxima where you'd look back on and feel stupid for not seeing the "obvious" improvement path? Or is ereader "development" just a waste now as it's now just a commodity?
A handle. My hand is not L-shaped. Make it hand-mirror shaped and shift as much weight as possible into the handle. Preferably a fold-down handle.
A folding screen. Or rather, two screens with a hinge, no need for fancy flexible screen tech. It doesn't matter if there's a visible bezel between the screens, you're only displaying text. Ideally, you'd cram it just small enough that it can fit in your pocket when folded.
Also, once you have a handle you don't need bezels.
A handle is an interesting one - I'd be a bit worried by having that you'd make it so you can't hold it any other way. As I read I naturally reposition my hands, sometimes both on the device on each side, sometimes one gripping the side. Sometimes my thumbs supporting it from the bottom, sometimes the thumb over the top corner. It's light enough you don't really need that much "grip". Sometimes not really gripped at all, but leant against sometime, like my hand or the back of a seat tray table on a train. I do the same thing with paperbacks.
I can't imagine holding a hand mirror for any length of time comfortably - especially if there's only a single orientation you can grip it with the screen upright - but that may be the weight distribution as you mentioned.
Folding would be useful for putting it in a bag or fitting it somewhere, which hasn't really been a big issue for me. A flat profile is already fine when putting it in a laptop bag - it's thin enough it just slides down the side of the pocket. I wouldn't be surprised if decreasing the total volume is pretty much at it's limit already with being able to be held - but maybe putting that is a more square package when stored would be easier in some cases?
i'm compelling people that it's not solved given how critical reading is. It should be better than reading a book in every way. Right now the library sync features are better but the reading experience is worse.
Probably you've seen already, but Kobo is now experimenting with colour screens, plus note taking. People on the internet seem enthusiastic about the colour screens at least.
So maybe zines and comics is where ebook readers are heading.
Successful doesn't necessarily mean good. the UI is slow. It crashes with large books. The hardware is seemingly under-powered. The OS degrades in usability over time. Search indexing is poor. The lack of responsiveness makes the keyboard unusable.
I've heard similar pitfalls about Kindle Scribe, the write-able Kindle.
I use a Kindle Scribe almost every day, have read dozens and dozens of books and documents on it. Maybe we have different expectations but I love mine and take it everywhere. It's never crashed.
When I am trying to focus on reading a book, I appreciate that the Kindle doesn't have too many bells and whistles. I don't want notifications popping off and the distraction of fast Internet access.
I looked into Scribe and it sounds like they upgraded the hardware to making writing more responsive. that's good news.
The Kindle Scribe is way more expensive than normal kindles (and has to handle the more computationally demanding task of vector graphics), so it would have a faster processor, and would be able to handle ebooks way easier than a cheap Kindle.
Not saying you're wrong, just that your anecdote doesn't mean much about $100/$50 Kindles.
It's responsive enough to do what it was purpose built for - read a book. It can do other things, but it's not made or marketed to do them, so they keep the cost low by not innovating on responsiveness. Instead, they make it more comfortable to use in other ways, such as how it's held and navigated, and the backlight.
There are many high-quality products at a competitive cost. That's a pathetic excuse.
A lot of time was spent integrating social features that no one uses. That time could have been spent on quality & latency.
I understand their business goals and objectives. It's still a low-quality product.
A profitable product can also be terrible.
As someone who worked on them a decade ago:
To be clear, the displays are not created by Amazon / Lab126. Instead, they're a product of Eink Holdings, Inc.
From what I remember, most of the screen refresh algorithms etc are Eink IP. And by the way, the cost of the display module alone was eye-watering, especially when compared with LCD displays...
With e-ink, you can drive it faster, at the expense of massive power consumption or terrible ghosting / artifacting. You're not going to get the 6 weeks of use out of a battery doing that.
For reading a book, smudges / ghosting sucks, so they optimize for full screen refreshes just often enough to clear that up (that's when the screen goes black then white, followed by the update).
It's kind of a physics based fundamental limitation -- the display is closer to a mechanical display of old than an LCD.
The kindle is a product that does one thing well: display static text in any lighting condition with a similar quality to the printed page.
Layman here, but what you describe sounds very much like innovation held back by patents:
At the core, it’s really promising tech with actual major advantages over LCDs with applications already in many domains and possibly many more in the future; all you’d need really is incremental improvements, similar to the journey of LCD. Remember the shitty TFT(?) monitors from 20 years ago? Ghosting, low resolution, delay, low contrast, backlight bleeding, etc.
If we hypothetically had 20 companies competing the traditional way, throwing international manufacturing and material science know-how on these bad boys, I’d bet $100 that we’d see massive gains in ability at a fraction of marginal cost – from incrementalism alone – way before you reach physical limitations. And with a bit of luck, there might be a breakthrough in the core tech as well.
I hear you. But brilliant people have been wrong about these statements in all kinds of areas before. Could you share more detailed what those hard limitations might be?
There are high tech eInk devices that can refresh much faster than a Kindle and that you can buy right now, but any eInk discussion on Hacker News lives in a parallel universe where those devices should never be mentioned and we should pretend that the technology is where it was 10 years ago.
With the rapid rate of development recently, I would expect eInk displays to break the "magic" 24 fps barrier in 2025 and hit the mainstream in a major way. Considering that offices worldwide have been constructed to block out sunlight to accommodate display use, this tech has the potential to change everything.
Very cool! Do you have a link to a demo to see what it would look like?
Check out the Boox devices, there's a YouTuber called "mydeepguide" who makes extensive reviews.
Sharp MIP! I drove over locked a small one at 120FPS once. Wouldn't do 240fps though.
It's not patents, it's economy of scale: LCDs ship billions per quarter and are used in phones/watches/laptops/PC monitors/TVs/car-dashes/coffee-machines/fridges/kiosks/etc etc etc, whereas e-ink screens are used in e-readers, supermarket tags, e-notes (stylus tablets), and basically nothing else.
When LCDs ship orders of magnitude more SKUs, they inevitably have lower costs. That's just economics.
Besides which, Amazon ships Kindles at-cost, there's no way they'd be price-gouged - if E-Ink tried to screw them then they'd buy E-Ink Corp. It wouldn't even be the first passive display company they bought. See: LiquaVista.
The ink in the e-ink needs to be shuffled up and down with each refresh, but if they're pushed too quickly then they pound the capsule they're in and damage it, or get permanently stuck. Either will break the display. And it's powder not a solid object, so the display needs to move all the ink, down, or you'll have ghosting.
Imagine you own E-Ink Corp. You know Amazon needs your screens. You can sell them the screens or you can sell them the company but you can price-gouge them either way. (Of course E-Ink Corp is a stock corporation. The ability to price-gouge amazon is priced in. There's no reason to assume Amazon would save money by buying the company.)
The core patents have already expired.
AFAIK manufacturing e-ink displays is still difficult.
I also have worked with e-ink displays for hobby projects and you’re flipping tiny balls of ink. Unfortunately e-ink displays are extremely slow and it only gets worse if you want colors or anything you might want in a display. E-ink displays look cool and sound cool but really suck to work with.
I've tried to read manga and graphic novels on e-readers which makes EVERY page turn take longer, and it's very clear to me that e-ink latency is a huge problem. Boox is notable for having faster page turns since they're essentially just customised android tablets with an e-ink screen.
Goodreads integration is the best! I track books I want to read with it and then when I’m ready for a new book use the integration to download a sample on the spot
that's good maybe I should give it another review. It seemed like a neglected part of the OS
from what I've read, responsive screen refresh is inversely related to battery life. A more responsive screen results in less battery life. Amazon, and pretty much all other eink readers have prioritized battery life over absolute responsiveness.
They have made significant improvements in responsiveness over the years. Do you remember how slow screen refreshes were on the original Kindle? It's just that that is not a high priority for their main use case of linear reading.
If you want to use it for reading PDF reference books, you probably should look to one of the eink Android tablets that are more general purpose devices and may have a faster refresh rate.
There's also an inverse relationship between response time and image quality with e-ink, speeding up the display comes at the cost of more smearing/ghosting. There's often a software option to tweak that balance one way or the other depending on your preference.
Kindle is now the kleenex of ebook readers, certainly not a bad product by any stretch.
what qualities are good? I admit they have a good ebook selection , networking features are good, and the price point is good when on discount.
But the software is awful and the application of the eink hardware is terrible too.
It’s a better book than actual books for 98+% of books I’ve read on it.
Taking as many books as I want onto an airplane for a business trip is great. My kids and wife read theirs literally daily. I’d have to look up how old they are, but the newest one is 2 years old and I think mine is around 10 (it’s a first gen paper white).
The e-ink display updates fast enough to not distract me from reading. The battery lasts multiple business trips, even on my very old unit.
I’m surprised how negatively you feel about it, given my and my family’s very good experiences.
The ability to take a library with me is great, obviously. I also primarily read on kindle.
The complaints I have are all qualities within their control that seem to be lagging due to neglect (responsiveness, UI, stability, degrading performance over time, keyboard, search)
Now ignore the library aspect and compare reading a single book to reading a single e-book and the gaps will be more visible.
I was recently given a physical book as part of a work-related book club and took it along with my Kindle on a family vacation in April, so I ended up doing a direct comparison. The physical book was not better than a Kindle version would have been. It was bigger, heavier, was only one book, was harder to read in the evening, harder to highlight passages and find them later. I think the only thing is the around double resolution of the print version, where the Kindle's ~300dpi is entirely passable, and the fact that the book's "battery life" is >100 years while the Kindle needs charging once per month. Still a big Kindle win.
You really threw me for a second with talking about your kids reading and then saying "I'd have to look up how old they are, but the newest one is two years old"!
Incredible book selection. Ease of buying books. Great battery life. Great screen and light. Great reading experience.
I read 100+ books a year on my Kindles.
Yes the cloud sync and the marketplace are great , with some reservations on licensing and ownership.
The device itself is neglected, underpowered, unresponsive, unreliable , sluggish with a terrible UI.
Decompose the concept.
UI is great! I can easily read on the thing. What is “terrible”? Who cares if the device is underpowered or whatever? I tap on the screen and things happen. I’ve owned nearly every kindle ever released and never had any of the complaints you do.
It’s great for reading, I’m not mining bitcoin on the thing.
It’s an excellent single-use device.
What exactly do you want the Kindle to be?
Depends on your perspective. If you sell kindles you probably are pretty pleased with almost 100 million units sold. Not a lot of products get those numbers. It sold quite successfully I'd say.
I used few ebooks and Kindle is the only one that actually works as expected. Some ebooks I used drained battery in few days, not delivering promise of long life. Some ebooks were just crap and broke after few months. Kindle works few weeks from one charge for my use (1-2 hours of reading per day), it's water-proof so I can read my books while taking a bath (priceless). I never had any particular issues with it.
Its UI seems oriented to promote Amazon Store and I never used it, sending books over e-mail and deleting after read, that's OK with me. I'd prefer for its library to have folders and I'd prefer for it to work as USB stick like other ebooks do, so I can connect it to PC and organize things inside as I want, but those are not necessary.
So may be Kindle is bad, but rest are worse, I don't know a single ebook brand of Amazon scale. They all seem to be Chinese no-names which come and go without investments to quality and reputation.
I agree with all of this, and I've noticed as much with the other readers. Some users promote Kobo reader as a quality alternative, but I haven't tried it.
Kobo works quite well: you can set it up without an account (needs a bit of manual fiddling) if you really want, and either way after that you can just plug it in and drag-and-drop epubs to the device. Battery life, responsiveness, etc. are all fine to me (the older devices actually did a bit better IMO and it mostly only gets bogged down for comics, regular books are fine)
Yeah.
I like tools that do one thing well. The Kindle has hit that spot for a long time. There were incremental improvements (faster processor, 3G/4G, front light, higher DPI / contrast, etc), but it's surprising how similar a 2010 kindle is to a 2024 one.
Have you tried Calibre? https://calibre-ebook.com/
After registration, I have never connected my Kindle to the internet - 6-7 years now. This has prevented updates that degrade performance, and Amazon getting my usage data. I just copy over ebooks using usb, optionally after converting to mobi using Calibre.
Works perfectly.
Because it’s made by Amazon
To be fair, the Kindle is primarily used for reading books and doesn't require a fast refresh rate. It also lasts for weeks (months?) without charging.
It's not about refresh rate it's about responsiveness. As close to 0ms as possible. On kindle there's a frustrating amount of input lag
The response you're waiting for is a refresh of the screen.
The Kindle excels at being a low-cost device for reading novels, or linear non-fiction with no graphics etc. For anything fancier, it's simply not built for that.
Isn’t it funny how the CEO is always saying that user experience is their primary focus, and you get such a mediocre experience?
I don't know which kindle you have, but my Scribe is noticably faster than the Oasis 2nd gen from 2017. Almost makes me want to replace the Oasis with the latest Paperwhite.
my paperwhite 2022(ish) seemed faster than the previous one (2017?) but now it's nearly as bad
It becomes a much more stable device when you jailbreak it and put something like KOReader. You can put books on it with Calibre or just SFTP afterwards.
thanks for the recommendation I've started on the jailbreak for my old kindle. I'd like to turn it into an offline wikipedia & public domain books reader.
I use a pocketbook right now, and was using quite a few kobos over the years prior. At least with those, I've noticed that we've kinda reached some ceiling for responsiveness, and I think it's the software/computing hardware not the screen hardware causing it. Stuff like page turns can be quite fast, but closing out of a book and opening another really feels like you're straining the poor thing.
Pocketbook particularly takes ages to reflow text if you rotate it. I think it's reflowing the entire ebook to get page numbers + chapter positions? Very annoying if you forget to turn off the accelerometer.
Try using KOReader instead of the built-in reader software. It's a bit faster (doesn't wait to reflow the entire book if you change fonts, margins, orientation, whatever), and also it's easier to achieve consistent rendering of books (fonts, spacing, etc.) as it supports overriding the stylesheet, and just generally handles HTML/CSS better.
Oh, and speaking of responsiveness, I found that it depends on temperature a lot. E-ink apparently has a sweet spot at room temperature, but when I use the device outdoors, in either sub 10 ˚C temperatures or over 30 ˚C the screen changes noticeably slower.
E-ink devices have improved a lot over the last 10 years, across the board: refresh rate, latency, computing power, responsiveness, you name it.
Indeed, and though Kindle has improved, it hasn't improved by much. I've owned 4 generations and they are all a bit better, especially when new.
It's the same complaint people make about iOS devices degrading to force upgrades.
I don't think it's deliberate but I do think it's deliberately neglected.
I recently bough Onyx Boox tablet. After degoogling device I'm really enjoy possibilities of android system more then closed one like Kindle or Kobo or Pocketbook.
Main purpose is reading a lot of sheet music documents, making annotations and share with choir/orchestra. I discovered that Calibre is excellent tool for organisation of large database of sheet music documents.
What surprised me most is how responsive drawing/writing by stylus is. Weird part is that apps need optimalisaton for fast responsivness which some apps have and some don't. Which mean eink technology capabilities are limited by SW quite significantly.
it's neither, it's a physics issue. Moving electrically charged particles isn't going as fast as making current flow flow through semi conductors
I think it's always e-ink, their patents, their evergreening patents, and their lawyers.