Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/14/kindle-paperwhite-just-85-tod.html
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I believe they had the same deal around this time last year.
I do enjoy mine! It’s a nice device — I bought it originally for reading in the bath, as it’s waterproof, but it’s become my primary reading platform.
I love my paperwhite, the only thing that prevents it from being perfect is the lack of physical page-turn buttons.
…only if you love DRM and think Amazon should control your e-reader, so that Jeff B. gets some money from each ebook you read.
For all others I can recommend a Pocketbook, which connects to USB or wirelessly to dropbox or other services.
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Well that price is for “with special offers” which sounds like a wonderful extra added to your device but in fact means “advertising is added everywhere”, not particularly special - you can pay $20 extra to not receive the “special offers”
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I haven’t checked the link yet. Is this the one that receives ads, or is it the “clean” version?
I’ll take a look. I have a number of Kindle books that are still loaded down with DRM, and now that I upgraded my Mac to the latest OS, I had to also upgrade the Kindle App and I no longer know of a way to remove the DRM using Libre. But maybe that also progressed since I last checked.
Is this the one you mean? https://www.pocketbook-int.com/us
Yep. And the occasional leaps to elsewhere in the book when trying to turn the page (then you can’t get back to where you were), which was enough to frustrate me into no longer using my Paperwhite.
I’ve not had the “back button” fail me — and I haven’t really experienced what you describe. Faulty unit perhaps?
Personally I don’t find them terribly annoying, but if it had been only a $20 premium to get the non-advertising-laden version when I purchased mine, I probably would have gone for it. A good thing for you to have pointed out for folks considering the purchase!
Yes. I bought a Touch Lux for 3 €100 in 2017, and was pretty happy with it. A couple of months ago we discovered that one e-reader is not enough for a family, so I bought the Touch HD 3 for €150.
Here’s a feature comparison of both devices.
What I really like about the Touch HD 3 is the smartlight, which can change brightness and color temperature of the backlight automatically depending on time of day. I find it hard to go back to the white background LED of the Touch HD 3 after experiencing that. The touch HD 3 also has audio, which I never used, and higher resolution and faster CPU, which is nice, but not essential for reading.
Both work great with dropbox and Calibre.
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I still have the previous (2015/G3) Paperwhite, but I have never had a single DRM-encumbered book on it.
As soon as it arrived, I put it in Airplane mode (so the lock-screen ads, aka “special offers” would go away), and I load books using Calibre over a USB cable. It took a few weeks for the ads to expire, but now my lock screen is lovely and ad-free.
It’s a beautiful device, and I’ll definitely get another one when this one eventually goes they way of all electronics.
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I downloaded Calibre for Mac so I could strip DRM from books I had purchased from Apple, and put them on my Kindle. But OMFG is the GUI just blech! It seems that given most folks really just need a few key features out of a program like this, someone could design a very basic and easy to use application?
I might be missing something, and my frustration levels quickly skyrocket for GUIs and UX that don’t thrill me, compared to some folks who are both smarter and more forgiving than I am, but am I off-base here?
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People removing DRM are not the target audience of Calibre. But you’re lucky, there is a very simple paid application ($29.90) that claims it does what you need. I searched for “How to remove DRM from iBooks” and it was the first result in DuckDuckGo.
Calibre is - as far as I know - the best software out there for managing (personal) ebook libraries. After a learning curve - which I don’t think is particularly steep - I find the UX is pretty good, and you can tweak everything to behave exactly like you want it to.
That might be because some software does not exist to thrill you, it exists so you can get a job done, to bring value to you. Obviously Calibre got the job done for you, for free.
I find that most apps that are look really polished were not created to bring value to you, but to extract something of value from you: your time, your attention, your data, your money. And most of those apps are targeted at one very simple use case, and if you need more complexity, you’re out of luck.
Good to know that’s possible, and that the ads expire.
What happens in case you need to do a firmware update?
I haven’t typically considered GUI & UX, and functionality, to be mutually exclusive, personally.
Can we have a vi vs. Emacs battle now? 
Calibre is the ugliest, most painful-to-use app that I use just about every week, because nothing else works as well.
It’s frustrating, in part because the developer is blind to any criticism of usability issues, but that very same developer is very responsive about functional bugs and is constantly pushing the app forward. Nothing else really handles large libraries as well, warts and all.
P.S. “Most folks really just need a few key features…” is one of the three classic blunders, the others involving a land war in Asia and going up against a Sicilian when death is on the line. 
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I’m not sure how I would know that I need to do a firmware update, but probably such a thing could be handled via USB cable.
Alternatively, it’s airplane mode, which is a toggle. I could always toggle it off and deal with a few more weeks of ads in exchange for temporary wifi access.
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Both take time to implement. Time is limited. Free software typically priorities features and stability over beauty.
Why use a specialized device rather than an app on your cellphone?
