I have a Poke 2 Color and I have to do disagree with your opinion of Onyx. This device is very well made, battery life is fantastic even with active use, and the software isn’t locked down like Kindle.
I just replaced a Kindle Paperwhite that was probably 7/8 years old with a Kobo Libra 2. Can’t compare it to a modern Kindle, but the Kobo screen is bigger and looks more like paper.
My only gripe is that the software has some odd design choices. On a Kindle, the night mode button is on the main drop down menu, but in Kobo you have to hit the gear button to get to the settings, then scroll down a page to toggle night mode.
Both devices seem to read most formats out there. Look up a program called Calibre to maintain a local library on your PC and convert formats easily.
The main selling point for the Kobo was not sending more money to Jeff Bezos. I cancelled Prime last year and the Kindle was my last link to the Amazon ecosystem. I usually get my books from the library or other online sources but sometimes I’d be out of town craving a certain book and I’d buy it on the Kindle just for ease of use.
Good luck Ants don't trust Ants from other Colonies that look the same but have a slightly different scent. If you have a good Ant Disguise laying around you might be able to find what perfume they use and blend in with your fellow Ants.
Heads up to anyone with cardiac issues, especially long QT syndrome or other meds that prolong the QT internal: Ondansetron is so notorious for QT prolongation and cardiac arrhythmia problems that we have to perform an EKG before we’re allowed to give you a second dose on our cardiac unit.
I have scary anecdotes that bias me against it lol
Yeah, long QT syndrome is estimated around 1/2000 people. Relatively rare. I fully confess that I’m just traumatized by my personal experiences with patients taking the drug lol
Thats why I’m doing this thread, its a labor of love and curiosity but I’m intrigued to hear everyone dish freely about such a mundanely “taboo” subject
I have only had kindles so I don’t have anything to compare to. But I love them. The paper white is the best balance for features vs money. I have an oasis now and I feel like I just paid more money for nearly the same thing. I don’t like being stuck with amazons book store. But it does have most of the books if ever want to read. Classic books can be a lot cheaper or free. It hurts to pay more than like $8 or $9 for a digital book, but I will confess that I do it anyway if I want the book badly enough. After all, I get many, many hours of entertainment from it. In my limited experience with uncommon books, if it is uncommon in printed form then it probably isn’t on the Amazon kindle book store. Obviously that depends on the book. I have sent PDFs to my kindle before and it was fairly easy, but I’ve never had to do it often. I don’t know if other competitors do this, but one complaint is that you can’t zoom on a picture. For example, many fantasy books have a map in the beginning, and depending on the map, you might not be able to read much of it.
Outside of buying stuff directly via the OS on the device, you’re not locked into Amazon’s store. I upload stuff to my Kindle with Calibre all the time (which works much better than the “send to kindle” function Amazon would prefer you use).
Conversely, I use 'send to kindle' from Calibre all the time and absolutely love how easy it is to send a book to any of the 3 kindles in the house. I just send it and the book is there a few minutes later. The only time I've ever run into any issues with it is when I was loading up a Kindle for a kid with a TON of books and it wasn't happy about so many emails.
Overall though, I agree with your message: you're not really forced into using the Amazon ecosystem at all if you're willing to put in a tiny amount of work and the Kindle's are either sold at a loss or at such a small markup that it might as well be one that it's difficult for me to consider the competition since they cost so much more.
Yeah, I used “send to kindle” for a long time and it’s perfectly fine for just getting stuff on the device easily (especially since you’ve got multiple devices and might want to use the Amazon cloud), but there were a couple things about it that annoyed me and got me to switch. The first is obviously that it converts everything to a “document” pdoc file instead of a book (which is obviously more of a psychological thing to make anything not from Amazon seem like “the other”), but the second issue is that the mandatory conversion would seriously screw with the formatting of the book and they just looked worse than their “native” Kindle versions, with weird spacing and big margins on some books and no way to fix it.
Calibre is admittedly kind of a pain at first (not only do you have to plug in your device to a PC, the software is often unintuitive and confusing), but I think it’s worth checking out if you’re not buying books from Amazon but still want to get the best e-reader functionality out of the device possible (and it’s a nice way to see your non-Amazon ebook collection separate from the device). I convert all books to the AZW3 format with it, then use a plug-in called Quality Fix (specifically a function in it called “fix ASIN for Kindle”) and it makes all books pretty much indistinguishable from their Amazon counterparts.
FYI Kindles now support ePub natively and it's fixed a lot of the random issues that used to occur with the spacing and such with no need to convert into AZW3 first (they recently dropped support for AZW ... at the same time they added ePub). It helps that I get everything I can in ePub format or convert to it when I can't.
All in all though, as long as we're all happy with our workarounds, it's all good :-)
I kinda like that mine costs Amazon fractions of a penny in compute time though!
I use a Kindle Paperwhite which works well for me–colour shifting screen, USB-C charging, and incredible battery life. That being said, I have never connected it to wifi, and instead prefer to sideload books so my reading history/money are not sent to Amazon
It was a journey. There were several small things that kept adding up until I couldn’t handle surrounding myself with hypocrites.
Why do Christians get so sad when people die? They act like they’ll never see that person again when their religion says it’ll only be a few years before they’re reunited. Everyone says they believe that, but no one acts like it.
When was the last time the church has been on the forefront of social change, and what was it for? Wasn’t slavery - that’s how Southern Baptists split from Baptists. Wasn’t women getting the right to vote or get divorced… Wasn’t when people were asking for workers rights… Same-sex marriage… You name it. The people claiming to have a direct line to the most potent love in the universe… Kind of suck at spreading the love around.
Mega-churches.
All the pedo scandals and coverups. It’s a feature, not a bug.
Truly horrifying living conditions around the world. There is an amoeba found all over the globe who can eat its way into your eyeball, and then into your brain. Children experience this, and in some places, 30-40% of a population went blind because of it. There is no NEED for this to exist for an all-powerful god, but here they are. If god made nature, they made these amoeba, and I don’t want to associate with someone who created every deadly pathogen to ever exist.
If there is a god, they’re a fucked-up sociopath, not the embodiment of love that I keep being told they are.
Mine was a very similar path to yours. Way too many little observations that alone could have been shrugged off as a rounding error but taken together it was clear that shit wasn’t adding up.
Then I started listening to biblical scholars and now there’s nothing that could convince me otherwise. It’s a collection of human literature. The good and the bad that had come from it is only a reflection of our humanity.
Oh, I’m sure the official recipe has a whole laboratory worth of goodies in it - but the one you can make in your own kitchen: shortening to volume, powdered sugar to taste/texture.
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