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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2558 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 4, 2025

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Little by little my Nook ST is beginning to wear out so I'm thinking about what I should look for when it's time to buy a new one. What are some of your must have features / biggest annoyances / missed opportunities in e-readers?

It's table stakes but I still love having an instant dictionary. Instant translation would be nice. Instant wikipedia would be good too. The more quick-look-up reference resources the better.

I like the idea of bookmarks and highlights/margin notes but I don't use them as they're not well implemented, for example when moving books between devices and different software. That raises the issue of software and hardware. Call me old school but I'm a firm believer in removable local storage as a means to preserve data should the device fail.

Not once have I wanted to install additional apps. I also don't particularly care about having a fancy OS/UI since I spend 99.999% of the time inside the book, not outside. I guess that audiobooks could be a relevant feature but I never listen to them and it's a slippery slope to podcasts, music, and just using a fully featured tablet. Ideally there would be a read-out-loud feature that used the ebook as the source rather than a separate audio file, and I imagine it's not far off if it hasn't been done already but again it feels like that would require a much more powerful device for only marginal benefit.

You say UI doesn't matter, but Amazon's enshittification of the Kindle OS is a crime. My library is buried beneath ads.

As others have said I only read pirated books now. I don't trust publishers as license holders/DRM so being able to easily side load is key.

You say UI doesn't matter, but Amazon's enshittification of the Kindle OS is a crime. My library is buried beneath ads.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAS. I have a huge Kindle library that I read through, and I personally find that Fire tablets are cheap and serviceable enough to serve as my readers but even with the ability to cut out the ads the experience has steadily declined. I still love to buy books to support the "independent" authors that I like rather than subscribing to Kindle Unlimited but even so, Amazon seems to have their fingers in every piece of that pie as well, be it books from 47 North or serials from Royal Road curated into Kindle books, and the bookstore itself is utter shite to browse now that every. Single. Damn. Page. Consists of about 25% of the same four "sponsored" books at the top and bottom of each page.

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