Learning New Things, Kindle Edition

[walkitout]

No, this is not a book review. This is an activity and I am blogging about what I experienced.

On our most recent trip (trip report blog entries already up! Might be a new record for me in terms of timeliness), A. and I had trouble connecting to wi-fi at a hotel with our kindles so we could get her something new to read (I ultimately got her _The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet_, which she is enjoying, and is the first of four books. Woot!). It wasn’t finding the hotspot on our phones, either. Eventually, I found a setting to toggle (maximize capability or something along those lines) and that worked. As a result of that, I learned a whole bunch about current wi-fi standards that I really should have known already because the change happened at least a couple years ago. Ooops. Also, her paperwhite (2018) doesn’t have cellular, which was confusing because I thought it did. And in fact, it may well have, but that, too, went away a few years ago.

So I thought, okay, maybe just go buy us both new devices with modern wifi and cellular included. I looked at the oasis, and that hasn’t been upgraded since I bought mine, so, not clear that will fix the wifi problem. I looked at the chart and am not optimistic about the wifi having been upgraded. It does, however, have functioning cellular. And then I looked over at the paperwhite, and they don’t make a paperwhite with cellular anymore but it _does_ have the upgraded wifi. Difficult decisions!

Next up: A. likes audiobooks and she likes to read along as she listens. Can a device do _that_? Answer, NO! Some kindles _can_ play audiobooks through bluetooth headphones / pods / wtf. However, they switch back and forth between text and listen — you can’t do both at the same time. Annoying! I knew we had looked for this feature a while back and been unable to make it work. It had not dawned on me that it cannot be made to work. Learning New Things! Unhappily! She has a solution — place the audiobook on her phone, read on the paperwhite — but ungainly!

Anyway. I’m really hoping for a new flagship ereader that lets you listen and read at the same time AND has color AND has cellular AND has modern wifi. I’m _completely_ okay if they want a ludicrous amount of money for it — I use these things for years and they just don’t seem to break down under ordinary use. But if I give up waiting for that Great Day in the Future when all my dream for ereaders truly Do Come True, I’ll probably buy a couple Signature Paperwhites. They’d at least let me leave a couple of the charging cables behind, since I could use USB-C for them.

Comments

[ethelmay]

So it looks like immersion reading works on the tablet models, and doesn't work on the dedicated ereaders - am I understanding correctly? https://help.audible.com/s/article/what-devices-support-whispersync-for-voice-and-immersion-reading

As near as I can tell, that’s correct

[walkitout]

I did not understand that previously, and I really hope that a future e-ink device with bluetooth corrects this limit.

I think that a _lot_ of people had no idea that people were doing this with audiobooks (during the books on tape / books on CD era with paper books, especially), and so had no idea that a device that supported this had a market.

Re: As near as I can tell, that’s correct

[ethelmay]

Looks as though Onyx Boox might be an option. It's weird they didn't think of the audio+reading thing, though, as it used to be standard for libraries to check out packets with picture books and cassettes, and I remember at least one of my kids reading books alongside listening (the specific book I remember one of them doing this with was Tamsin, by Peter S. Beagle, which is young adult level, so well out of the picture book category). They didn't do a ton of it but it certainly happened, and I have a feeling at least one of their early elementary teachers used to suggest having kids do this. And it also seems like a great option for language learners.

Re: As near as I can tell, that’s correct

[ethelmay]

And come to think of it, my teachers used to encourage us to read along in our own copies of the book they were reading aloud.

Re: As near as I can tell, that’s correct

[walkitout]

Back when I was a JW, lots of meetings involved looking up and reading along with scriptures, and also in the publications. Entire chunks of meetings were somebody reading an article paragraph by paragraph, and the speaker asking the question for the paragraph and people in the audience being called on to answer. My family prepped for this (which we were supposed to do) by going over the article in the same way at home and underlining the answer.

You want to indoctrinate someone in a complicated ideology, it’s tough to beat that strategy, honestly. It’ll bore into the toughest skull eventually, with that scale of repetition in a group context.

Re: As near as I can tell, that’s correct

[walkitout]

Your response caused me to chuckle. Book publishers and retailers never listen to librarians. Really, it’s a core failing on their part, but a very predictable one. Even when they _hire librarians_, they don’t listen to them. Kinda sad!

Yes, I believe you, yes I had known this as well. I’m not saying this is a new idea or anything. I’m just saying that I’m reasonably certain that the scale of the market for this type of reading and the book publisher / book seller understanding of the scale of the market are probably wildly out of step with each other.

Also! Re: OnyxBoox. There is no way in hell I’m going to pay a bunch of money to have to strip DRM off of every book bought from Amazon, much less deal with whatever headaches would be involved in transferring the audible books over. If we were already working primarily with library e-books and audio-books, I might feel very differently.

Re: As near as I can tell, that’s correct

[ethelmay]

Wait, why would you have to strip anything or move anything? I thought on an Onyx you just run the Kindle app and sign into your regular account.

Re: As near as I can tell, that’s correct

[walkitout]

I had not realized that — I was reading stuff that was talking about stripping the DRM so you could read it without the kindle app. Never mind!

It’s an interesting idea. I’m not sure about that large form factor, but it might be good.

Re: As near as I can tell, that’s correct

[ethelmay]

I think to read Kindle stuff in the specific ereader software that comes preloaded on the Onyx (said software being rather confusingly called Onyx Boox Reader) one might need to strip DRM. Some people are very invested in buying from multiple platforms and being able to read them all in one place, rather than reading books from Amazon on the Kindle app and so on.