Upgrade - 8: With Special Offers

Episode Date: November 4, 2014

Special guest Scott McNulty joins Jason and Myke to talk about the new Kindle Voyage and why we use Kindles. Plus follow-up about TestFlight, annoying things people do in the Apple Store, and the introduction of our new cheese vertical.

welcome back to another episode of upgrade on relay fm this episode of upgrade is brought to you by hover who simply are the very best place to buy and register domain names and our new friends jason our new friends but they're friends our new friends at clubhouse so i'm really excited to tell you about they make awesome communities for people, private and awesome communities. My name is Mike Hurley, and you've already heard me by now. It's Mr. Jason Snell. Hi, Mike. How's it going?

Hi, Jason. Very well, sir. How are you? I'm doing very well. I have almost written my Kindle Voyage review. And in fact, to ensure, this is insurance, to make sure we actually talk about the Kindle today, I have invited a special guest, our first special upgrade guest. And the reason we invited this gentleman is because he is an expert when it comes to the Kindle.

It's Scott McNulty. Hi, Scott. I'm very tempted to say something about Siri, but I'm not going to. Don't do it. I was going to say it, but I didn't. I'm not tempted to say something about Siri, but I'm not going to. Don't do it. I was going to say it, but I didn't. I'm not going to. Ahoy, Scott McNulty. Thank you for having me on. It's good to have you here.

So before we get started with the main topic of the show, which indeed is Kindles and things and such, perhaps it's time for some follow-up. We don't have a sound effect for follow-up, though, Mike. Follow-up. Thank you. No problem. That's scary. We might get in trouble.

Five by five? Is five by five going to get mad if you even say follow-up in that tone ever? I don't know. I don't know. I think Steven might get mad. Ah, that's fair. We talked about, in I think our last episode, we talked about TestFlight

and getting approval for betas using Apple's new TestFlight system. And I wanted to point out, first off, Mike, you put this in the show notes, but it's great. It's Marco Arment on Twitter said that his beta was approved in TestFlight for external testing in one day. And then we also heard from listener Glenn who said his first time review was less than 24 hours. And then with each initial no significant changes update, those were processed in about half an hour. It seemed to just be a kind of a server automated thing so it sounds like the test flight stuff is is happening much faster

than we were kind of anticipating for a traditional app review so that's good news i think we were worried that they were uh apple was going to get in in people's way have you been just on that subject have you um had many betas come to you via TestFlight yet? I think I have three in there right now. And it's funny. One of the things that it does is it sends you a push notification when there's a new beta, which is actually pretty awesome. Well, I get push notifications and emails, which is awesome. So I need to try and find a way to stop both of those things happening.

Right. And then there was one app, and I don't want to mention who it was i don't know whether they were having a problem with the system but i got like five push notifications saying that there was a new beta i think maybe they just kept uploading new versions and finding bugs and like but it was like within an hour there were like four notifications i have also had that with with someone too uh so that was why i was very annoyed to continue receiving new emails it felt like every time I deleted an email, I had another email. Yeah. Shut up.

Please stop now. Anytime you want to stop. But I like the system. I like going in and having a little list and just downloading it. I like that I can access them on my iPad and my iPhone very easily. I don't have to do the provisioning profiles thing, which just seemed to always randomly break for me with hockey and with and and uh with previous test flight i always found that it just broke constantly um and oh one other thing that frustrates me is the little yellow dot which won't go away

so when you uh have a beta you know when you update an application yeah uh dear listeners uh you will see that little blue dot which appears next to the app hey you haven't opened this app yet we should know about this and then it goes away however I now have little yellow dots sprinkled about the place which do not go away for betas they will not go away and I don't like that

I agree with you it bugs me but in general it seems like a pretty good thing so I'll deal with the bugged part of it. And it's good to know that the turnaround for approval is not so bad. But it's all right. You know, TestFlight is not new, but this Apple TestFlight version is new. So I guess they'll learn and adapt, hopefully.

I don't need five push notifications, though. That's not good. Here's one interesting tweet that I did see that I haven't put in follow-up, but I'm going to mention it to you now. Surprise follow-up. Yeah, Martin Herring, who is the developer of Instacast, he was having trouble.

Apple were rejecting his test flight app review because of a bug in iOS 8.1. So iOS 8.1 has an issue with iCloud and it's crashing apps when you open them. And Apple were rejecting his app because it was crashing at launch. There's literally nothing you could do about it. I think he's ended up fixing it though for another version

but it's just interesting to think that there are sometimes now going to be things outside of your control that you expect to be fixed by the time you release i guess but apple haven't been able to fix it and so this like raises the question like what happens uh when people are testing against betas later in the year how's that going to work um i wonder if there'll be something different in that time right so when i was i was nine is in beta how will people be distributing tests like will they still be testing for them and will apple allow that and that kind of stuff so it'd be interesting to see what happens there yeah but i hope that all the kinks have worked out and that people adopt it because i think it feels like a much better system um at least for testers i assume it's pretty good for for the developers too if people are starting to use it well just not having

to maintain that list of udids and just being able to get a list of people with their icloud ids and using those and you know because i know they they dreaded like new new devices coming out because it completely screwed up all the beta testing because their beta testers would upgrade their devices and then those lists would be no good. And it was this endless maintenance of UDIDs, which is stupid. So just for that, it'll be a big win for lots of developers, I think.

And I guess if you want it, you can have much larger testing pools now, which can be beneficial. Yeah, exactly. And every one of your people people just by being on your list can test it on all their devices which is really nice yeah um i've got some very silly follow-up but i liked it um this is a listener uh unai unai i don't know how to pronounce it but he's he's in spain and he wants us to do a um a vertical on cheese and he wants to sponsor it and sponsor it via by sending

manchego cheese to you because you're close closer to him than me because he's in spain just to let him know the good cheeses we produce in spain so i've never had manchego cheese you should it's very good what's what's different about manchego cheese to regular cheese oh i don't know scott have you had manchego i i enjoy manchego on to regular cheese? Oh, I don't know. Scott, have you had manchego? I enjoy manchego on a regular basis. Scott, can you explain the difference between manchego cheese and regular cheese? I believe, and I could be wrong, and I probably am, is manchego a sheep's milk? It is a sheep cheese, I believe. Well, there you go.

So, you know, most most cheeses perhaps not most but many cheeses are cow's milk uh so sheep milk has a different taste and the i'm sure the spaniards do some kind of crazy thing to make manchego cheese i assume it's a basque product it could not be yeah i think i think i think it may be and it's it's a um it's certainly from that that area i think up by the french border um and whether it's is it just bas, I think, up by the French border. And whether it's – is it just Basque or is it also in Catalonia? I don't know. But I do know a little bit about Spanish geography, a tiny bit.

But it's a hard cheese. It's not like a gooey kind of cheese. It's a hard cheese. And it's wife wrote. So there's a double endorsement, that manchego with the tomato jam. So tasty. So I guess when you asked Scott the question if he has manchego cheese, you were really hoping that he had considering his wife wrote a recipe for it. No, because Scott's wife, Marisa, has written cookbooks now about

canning and putting food in jars. Her website is foodinjars.com. And the untold story there, okay, it's been told. Scott's told it, is he doesn't eat anything that comes out of jars, basically. So he doesn't eat any of these things that she cooks for her cookbooks. Yeah, I don't like jam or pickles,

and that's a large portion of what she does. She makes a corn sauce, so that's very tasty. Is the things inside the jars that's the problem, or do you just not like jars? If I didn't like jars, I would be in the wrong apartment. I was laying on the floor of our living room for some reason, and I put my hand under our couch and i hit a box of jars there are jars under our bed there are jars everywhere so it's mostly what's in them that i don't like although they're delicious to other people i just

don't like fruit really real-time cheese follow-up real-time cheese follow-up Manchego is from the La Mancha region In central Spain So it's not up by the border Man of La Mancha Manchego And it is It's a sheep cheese It's mild

Mild tasty aged sheep's cheese So thank you chat room For our cheese follow up Literally where would we be without, chat room, for our cheese follow-up. Literally, where would we be without the chat room? Not eating cheese, that's for sure. So what other follow-up do we have? Mike, you put something in there.

I saw on your site, your lovely website, sixcolors.com, it's NaNoWriMo time. It is, it's November. So for anybody that doesn't know, I'm going to do a terrible job explaining it NaNoWriMo is during the month of November where lots of clever people um try and write a novel right right this is this is almost as good as me explaining what Scott's wife does while Scott is on the line let's just go all the way around and then Scott will explain how relay fm works

and we'll be done uh yeah it's nanowrimo is short for national novel writing month because it started as a joke a bunch of friends actually in the bay area and then they set up a website and people were able to sign up and what it is now is it's an international it's all over the world international uh community of people who are writing fiction and for the month of november everybody uh signs up and it's free you go to nanowrimo.org you sign up and you can write a uh the goal is 50 000 words by the end of november which is roughly 1700 words a day and i've done it six times um and and succeeded all six times at breaking 50 000000 words.

And now I'm actually on the board of directors. It's a nonprofit that runs it and has the people who develop the software that runs on the server and keeps the servers live. And there are a bunch of staff. There's a little staff in Berkeley, California that does stuff like there's a young writers program that works on building educational materials so that kids and teachers have materials to use to teach writing to their kids in class. And, yeah, it's great. And there are volunteers all over the world who are in different regions doing meetups and what they call write-ins where people come and meet somewhere and they hang out with the other writers and they write. So it's a great organization. I encourage people to go to the site and consider doing it.

My first NaNoWriMo, I didn't start until like the 6th or 7th of the month. So even now, it's not too late. And if not this year, consider it for next year. And if you do try it and think it's a good idea, I would say donate because I know now the details of how harrowing nonprofits' finances can be. And they could use some donations. Donations are good. And if people are out there listening who know somebody who you think would be really awesome,

awesome as like, if you know an author or something like that, who you think would be awesome for us to know at NaNoWriMo that you should let me know, drop me a line. Cause we're always looking for, we've had support of some great writers over the years who've written things for NaNoWriMo for newsletters or whatever.

But I love it. I've written three novels which are like in draft form in a drawer somewhere. And that would never have happened. I would never have written the first one without NaNoWriMo just about making that commitment and saying, yeah, I'm going to do this. And, you know, 17-hour words a day, it's a lot. But it's only for a month and then you can stop. And it's actually a lot of fun. So I recommend it.

I think it's a really awesome, creative—I keep likening it to climbing a mountain or running a marathon, neither of which I'm ever going to do. But I like that. Writing a novel was always something that I said I thought I would do someday, and I was never going to do it. And then the first NaNoWriMo, I was like, I'm going to do this. And I did it. So sometimes that's all it takes. Now that you're gainfully fun employed, are you going to do NaNoWriMo this time around? I'm not doing NaNoWriMo this time around, mostly because like I said, I've got those three novels already written and I would really like to rewrite them and get them out there even if it's self-publishing them I'd like to get them out in the world and so I'm not I'm trying not to write

more new stuff and instead spend some time so I'm hoping to revise one of those this this month and get it out in the world so we'll see cool yeah it's fun i've started many files on the first of november nice the idea that i would do it and then about oh the second of november i stop well that's efficient you're not throwing away work that's good but i get a solid thousand words and then i'm done i don't know what it was it was something something about that first time that I did it. And I thought this is, I don't know, a lot of writers are so motivated by deadlines. And that's the case for me. If I set myself a deadline, I'm going to meet it.

And for NaNoWriMo, I essentially was saying by the end of this month, you're going to have 50,000 words. And I managed to do it. But I think it takes that kind of mentality of like I'm going to do this. I'm going to commit to this. And then, and then dealing with those deadlines, because it is essentially a 1667 word deadline every single day. And if you get behind, you got to make it up. You can't, you know, you can't skate by.

So you end up with a Saturday where you write 8,000 words to get back to on pace and it's fun, but it's, it is a lot of work. Um, N A N O W R I M O. to on pace and it's fun but it's a it is a lot of work um n-a-n-o-w-r-i-m-o.org just because we say it fast and it's a weird word uh great word i like the way it sounds nanowrimo yeah it's good we used to the non-profit used to be called something else and we realized that national novel writing month nanowrimo that's what it is. That's how people know it. So that's the name of the organization. We got a little more feedback. Got a really nice email from somebody who wishes to remain anonymous who works in Apple retail. And this was a plea to us and to our listeners.

Please, God, don't come in and say, ahoy, telephone. It's the modern equivalent of setting alarms, apparently, which people still do and it's still just as annoying. They set alarms on all the phones in the Apple Store. That's really bad. We've also recently had to deal with folks coming in and literally trying to bend the iPhone 6 Plus because they heard it was bendable on the news. So a plea from Apple retail, do not go in there and as a prank, shout Ahoy Telephone. Or bend the phones. Don't bend the phones.

Don't bend the phones. Actually, that would be funny if you set an alarm using Ahoy Telephone while attempting to bend the phones because they could just take a dart and just take you out right there. That's enough of you. So I thought that was good, and I appreciate getting that letter from a listener in Apple Retail. We definitely do not encourage that, although it was funny to see that video of one of our listeners very quietly trying to say it because he didn't want to get thrown out of the store. And in fact, listener Shep, who we've heard around before, sent us a picture or maybe it was a video. It was from one of the Apple stores in New York City, and he tried to do an ahoy telephone and uh uh they had turned it off so they're getting wise the apple

store is getting wise to the ahoy telephone problem hooray and we have one last piece of feedback mike this is about you and your desire to buy a mac mini. Uh-huh. Are you tired of this one yet? Have you bought anything yet? I haven't bought anything yet. Alright. Listener Brian says to listen to listenership who said get something get the old four core Mac mini

while you can from someone. He endorsed PowerMax.com as a real company. By the way, I actually heard there's actually a guy I talk with a lot on Twitter, and I met at XOXO this year who actually works at PowerMax.com. He said, yeah, we're real. I'm like, sorry. Sorry.

Sounds fishy still. Yeah. Well, it is the Homer Simpson alias. But he also said, obviously, look at the refurbished and clearance on the Apple Online Store. Yeah, I've been checking that. Nothing. And mentioned that Mac Mini Colo will sometimes sell used Minis too. But his fear, and I fear this is going to be the case too,

is that those quad-core Minis are going to now go up in value because they don't make them anymore, and so they might be harder to find. But it's worth looking around. I don't know. Thank you, Brian and Shep, for your advice. They care, Mike. They do care. They're worried about you.

I like that about them. Yeah. I want to take a quick moment, Jason, before we start talking about Kindles and Amazon and such. I hope this is related to friends. Of course. Of course. We want to hear from our friends.

All right, good. These are our new friends at Clubhouse. to friends of course of course this is we want to hear from our friends all right good these are our new friends at clubhouse clubhouse is something that's completely brand new and i want to tell you all about it clubhouse is a platform that allows you to create private communities where people can be themselves without ever having to worry about a whole larger social network leering in and joining the conversation unwanted everyone on Clubhouse is part of a defined community that they choose to join. With Clubhouse, as a community owner, so if you want to sign up and you start a new community on Clubhouse, you're able to do all of the things that you'd want to do, like change colors, you can add logos, and you can create the brand that

sits around the community that you have. Let's say, for example, you run a NaNoWriMo and you want a NaNoWriMo community in Clubhouse, for example. You can do that. So you can have community members that will sign up to Clubhouse and they're able to go in on their phones or on the web and they're able to take part in the communities. People can chat for free within there. They have great activity streams that let people in your community easily chat, post comments. They can post photos as well. And you're able to integrate with external sources like Twitter, Instagram to pull in relevant content. You can have just hashtags appear, for example. Let's say you're on Instagram and you just want all of the hashtag Manchego to pop up into your into your community you can do that so you can

have all that stuff come in the members of each clubhouse as well can earn points for interacting within the community so these points can add up to a whole ranking system so you can see who's contributing the most within a community you're able to set up like missions for people to complete as well so like um post a picture of yourself whilst whole foods using Apple Pay. And anybody that does that, you can award them points and then you can rank all of your members together. And it's like a way to like build more sort of fun within the community. Clubhouse works as well as something called modules. Now, these modules allow you to add in different types of functionality into your Clubhouse. So they have things like that allow you to add events. You can have SoundCloud

and RSS feed integration. They even have their own ticketing system, which has like QR code generation. So you can charge the tickets to an event or set up tickets to an event and like let people in on the door and stuff like that. This is one of the ways that Clubhouse got started doing this type of thing. And then they expanded it out to be this whole like community platform. And these are the things that you pay for. So Clubhouse have a real defined business model, which is really important, especially for anything that's social-related these days.

Everything chat-related and stuff like that is free, but then you can add in different things like the ticketing system or event creation, and you as a community owner pay every month for that functionality. But the people that join your community, they join for free and they don't have to pay. So it's up to you as a community owner pay every month for that functionality. But the people that join your community, they join for free and they don't have to pay. So it's up to you as a community owner. You can maybe sell tickets to things and it's a way you can make money, for example. Even with Clubhouse, it's possible to break your Clubhouse into its own standalone app so that you can do that.

You can get their tier that you can pay for and you can basically build out your own app. They manage all of the App Store stuff for you, all of the bits and bobs, all the admin that go into App Store, like processes and approvals and all that. Clubhouse take care of all of that, so you don't even have to worry about it. So you can try out Clubhouse for free right now as a community creator by going to clubhouse.cc slash relay. Now doing this will get you something really awesome. And they're doing something which is really super cool. So they're doing a really heavily discounted premium plan. So basically, if you sign up at clubhouse.cc slash relay and start your community there, you'll see when you go to add a module,

when you go into your clubhouse, you want to add a module, so add like the event stuff or stuff, you will see a special Relay Unlimited. This unlocks all of the premium modules, so you have access to everything for just $50 a month or $500 a year. Now, that's an incredible deal. When you start to look through, you literally will be saving hundreds of dollars because you'll be able to access everything that Clubhouse can do for you.

So go to clubhouse.cc.relay. Go and check them out. You can sign up for free and start a community for free. You don't have to pay anything. But then if you want to go to the premium stuff, if you sign up via that URL, you'll get access to the whole thing. Thank you so much to Clubhouse for their support of RelayFM and Upgrade. Look for us in hashtag Manchego.

You should do that. So, Mike. Yes, sir. Back in episode one, I think we talked about that we were going to talk about Kindle sometime. Yep. And we're now up to, what are we, episode eight today? Yeah.

So, should we talk about Kindles? I definitely think we should. Now, let's change the subject, Scott. What do you say? Let's not talk about Kindles? I definitely think we should. Let's change the subject, Scott. What do you say? Let's not talk about Kindles. Manchego it is. Canning and food in jars. So, yeah, I was really excited when the week that this show started was the week that Apple – or Apple, jeez. Amazon.

Apple's the one with charts with numbers on them. Amazon announced the new Kindle Voyage, which shipped last week, I want to say. And it's out and I've got it and I know Scott's got it. Scott, you have every Kindle ever, right? Is that

accurate? Well, if you're being pedantic, I don't. you missing like one of the dxs or something or no i have both the xs i don't have amazon started offering the models where you could get the 3g or just the wire the wi-fi so i switched to just wi-fi. So I don't have every variant, but I have every major model of Kindle. Now, what motivated you to purchase every generation of Kindle? Insanity, I suppose, is probably the biggest one. I've just been – there were two times in my life where I saw a technology that really entranced me.

One was when I saw the iPhone for the first time. And the second, which happened actually before I saw the iPhone, is when I heard about e-ink for the first time, because I just thought that technology was so amazing. And I'm a huge reader. And I thought it had the power to change the world. I don't know if it has that power to change the world, but I was really excited about it. And so I ran out, and actually I didn't. But when I had enough disposable income, I bought a Sony reader,

who were kind of first on the market with e-ink readers. And then maybe three weeks after I did that, Amazon announced the Kindle. And I was very sad, and I just bought a Kindle. And I've been buying them ever since. But why did you continue to buy all of them, though? Because there's a difference between just buying one and then buying another one in, like, a few years' time to buying all of them. Well, that is a good question.

I don't know if I have a good answer. I just like them a lot i bought the first one and then it was kind of uh i actually liked the first kindle except for the weird uh silvery interface thing because they couldn't get the touch screen right so um and then the second kindle came out and i wrote a book about the second generation of the kindle so that was my excuse for that uh which was available only on the kindle and nobody bought it. And then I just kept buying them. And now I have like and I've also for a time I was buying all the Nooks as well.

I stopped doing that. Has it become like I've started buying them now. So now I just have to buy them all type thing. Well, I like action. Well, yes. And I tell myself, well, my wife will get my cast cast off kindle so it's not really a waste of money does your wife need every cast off i will tell you uh the so every time i get the new kindle i order it immediately as soon as it's available and then i get it the first day it's available uh and i show it to my wife and she's like oh that's nice give me your old kindle

this time i showed my wife the voyageage, and she said, oh, order me one of those. Which I thought was interesting. So it's the first time she's actually wanted the latest generation Kindle. But it's not... Does it really seem that different from the Kindle Paperwhite to her? Because that's the thing that struck me about the Voyage. It's not that different from the Kindle Paperwhite, really. Is it? It's not hugely different, but Kindle Paperwhite. Really. Is it?

It's not hugely different, but I think it's a matter of refinements. And I think adding the page press areas is really a big improvement to the Paperwhite because I always disliked having to move my thumb and tap the screen to turn the page. You know, I try to explain that to people. And every time I try to explain that to people and every time I try to explain that or I'm writing about it, it makes me feel like the lamest person in the world to say, I have to

slightly move my finger if I want to turn the page and therefore this is not as good. But it's so true that on the old button Kindles, there was a physical button on the bezel to turn the page and you could literally just hold the Kindle in your hand and never move your hand other than to just squeeze the button down and you could just go next page next page next page next page and it was a really great reading experience and when they

went to the paperwhite they took the buttons away and so every time you wanted to turn the page if you're holding it in your right hand you could just sort of like migrate your thumb or finger over and tap and then move it back you're holding in your left hand you had to like stretch out and do like a really weird awkward swipe so that it went forward instead of backward and it was really stupid and uh i'm really glad that they added they're not really buttons right they're these special areas that are pressure sensitive pressure areas but it's basically a button it is and it has a little haptic feedback kind of deal-y to it that you can set the vibration to, which is nice.

And I think the screen, if you look at a Paperwhite, a second-generation Paperwhite and a Voyage and put them next to each other, the screen does look better. It doesn't look like if you I wouldn't suggest you just throw your second-generation Paperwhite out the window. It's not uh comparing a first generation kindle screen to right the voyage that's

a clear gigantic difference but it is better yeah well i i held my first generation paper white up right next to it uh today i was doing that and uh it's definitely better the lighting is way better although i i know that they fixed a lot of that in the second generation paper white the lighting is better the text is crisper all of these it is a better, although I know that they fixed a lot of that in the second generation paperwhite. The lighting is better. The text is crisper. All of these, it is a better all-around product, no doubt. Right, and I think it's easier when you have a first generation paperwhite to, unless you're me, to convince yourself that you need to upgrade. I just bought the new one, whatever.

Because when you look at side by side, the first generation paperwhite was nice, but I always thought they didn't quite get the light right, I didn't think, the distribution. The second generation fixed that, but if you skip the second generation, the Voyage is a great upgrade. Yeah, the first generation Paperwhite had the kind of bluish light, and it was a little spotty. Yeah, and even at the bottom, you could see the kind of the arcs of the leds lighting it up right right exactly and this is much and these are all these are nitpicks of course but they are they matter because i think that's a big thing about the kindle and why moving your thumb is so annoying is because you know a kindle is a purpose-built device right it's just built to read uh books generally but you can read other stuff on it so you're

spending a lot of time holding this thing and you don't want to have to think or move too much because you're reading and you want to be part you know in hand entranced by the story you don't want to have to think about and this is why i like kindles i don't want to have the the the temptation to check twitter as i'm reading i just want to read and i don't want to move my thumb when i'm reading is that so much to ask? I think we've touched on a lot of stuff that I want to get back to, but the point you just made is actually at the core of why when people – when I tell people that I buy Kindles and they look at me like I'm crazy, they're like, you've got an iPad.

Like, why would you want a Kindle if you have an iPad? Number one reason is my Kindle doesn't do push notifications. one reason is my kindle doesn't do push notifications my kindle isn't two taps away from being email or twitter or a web a good web browser there is a web browser it's still experimental like 10 years later the experiment is how quickly can i drive people crazy who use it um the experiment is will anybody find it yeah you know it's only there so you can log into like hotel wi-Fi. I really believe that's the only reason that web browser is there. That makes sense. But that's why

I use it is because it's purpose built for this. Like you said, Scott, purpose built. It's made for reading. It's really good with text. It's got you read it outside in a way that a smartphone or a tablet, you just can't. But the number one reason is when I'm reading on my Kindle, I'm reading.

I'm not multitasking. I'm not going to get distracted. If I want to go get my phone or my iPad and look at Twitter, I can. But, you know, I focus on what I'm reading and it really makes a difference. And so for me, yeah, I've got other devices, but I don't use them to read novels or actually get a newspaper on it or the newspaper. I use the Kindle for that because it's, you know, when I'm reading on the Kindle, I'm really focused on just reading and not 10 other things that are one click away. Is that, you guys both have Kindles, right? So why do you have Kindles?

My answer is a lot answer is worse, really. I like to think that I read more than I actually read. So I bought a Kindle 2 because I was fascinated by the original Kindle, but they weren't available in the UK. You dodged a bullet scott says he likes it i actually bought one and then returned it it's one of the few times i've ever done that with a an electronic product on amazon i was like no uh this is because it was so weird and i really wanted to like it and it was too weird and i went a year without what didn't you like what didn't you like about it well like scott scott said that that metal um the screen wasn't very good and that metal strip that you had to use to like – it was this weird silvery strip, and you slid a little black dot up and down it in order to select.

It was really weird, and it was kind of ugly. It was weird-shaped and weird-colored. It had the crazy keyboard layout, right? Yeah. It was kind of like jagged for no real reason right exactly and then the second generation was a much more it felt like a real like not a prototype so that one i kept so it was really strange like when the when it i mean i bought it because i was interested in it was new technology um like a like brand new right it was like you ink and all this kind of

stuff and you had to get it in like a really weird way like you could buy it but you had to buy it through amazon.com yeah to ship to the uk like they would ship it to you but you had to do this weird thing like i had to sign into amazon.com and had to like forcibly tell it to stop redirecting me uh and it was possible to do that. Amazon allowed you to do it. They only did it for a couple of countries and you could buy it. So I bought it and it shipped and I had to buy a separate plug for it because it shipped with an American adapter,

which is very peculiar. And I really enjoyed it and I use it quite a bit and I used to use it every day on my commute. But then kind of my love affair with podcasts took over enjoyed it and I use it quite a bit and I used to use it every day I used to on my commute um but then kind of my love affair with podcasts took over and I listened now to this sort of stuff and so I I didn't have I didn't replace that kindle I recently gave it away but then I was going on

holiday recently and thought I want to relax and read so I bought a kindle Paperwhite, and then about six days later they announced the voyage. So, you know, such is life. So I have the second edition, second version Paperwhite now. It kind of frustrates me, the tapping on the screen. I really don't like it um i loved the buttons on the on my my second edition kindle like i loved them yeah and i really don't like the tapping because it's like do i tap it or do i swipe it neither of them feel like they do anything immediately sometimes or like i feel like i'm about to do the wrong one and then nothing

happens or it just doesn't feel it feels awkward because the bezel is quite thick compared to like an ipad or an iphone you know where so if i'm swiping or tapping it's like well i'm used to just like right at the very edge but i'm like covering up the content here with my big thumb um yeah it's weird but it looks great and the the light really does make a difference like i was reading on the beach, and it was really, really nice. I actually spent most of my time on my vacation because I was on vacation during the iOS 8 launch and stuff. I was just reading people's reviews via Instapaper,

which I love still works, so I just had a bunch of things in Instapaper, and then I just sent them to Reviews for me because a lot of them are like books. So I sent them all to my Kindle and read them. And unfortunately, I've not used it since that holiday, which I was worried would happen because I'm kind of – I struggle to like keep focus when reading.

So even if I'm not using something like an iPhone or iPad where all of the world is there, you know, I just then just seek out the world. I'm like reading on my Kindle. I'm like using something like an iPhone or iPad where all of the world is there, I just then just seek out the world. I'm like reading on my Kindle. I'm like, where's my iPhone? Things are happening. I kind of just struggle to keep my attention. So when I'm listening to podcasts and stuff,

I play games like video games on my phone, stuff like that. And weirdly, that helps me focus on the podcast. But when I'm reading, I'm like, oh, what else is going on? So I actually haven't read a full book in many years, I think. Which I know probably horrifies you both. It does. Makes me sad for you.

Yeah. I don't read fiction. And when I do read, I never read fiction. That's valid. The Voyage is available today in the UK so you should buy one I did see that, it made me smile I was like okay so today it's going to happen, great

maybe I'll have to buy one because I basically had the Kindle for a couple of days on my holiday and the screen's all scratched up oh obviously I had to put it in my beach bag and there must have been something in there. You rubbed it on the sand?

Obviously, I rubbed it in the sand, and I buried it, and I don't know what the problem is. Yeah, I assume there must have been, like, a coin or something in there, but one corner of the screen is all kind of scratched, and that's frustrating. So the Kindle, I have a little, like, Kindle case. It's not actually, like, it's just a carrying case. It's like a sock.

It's like a fancy sock, Kindle sock. But that keeps it in pretty good shape, usually. And you mentioned carrying case. It's like a sock. It's like a fancy sock, Kindle sock. And, uh, but that keeps it in pretty good shape usually. And you mentioned the beach. It's funny. I mean, I think beaches are, that's when, when I go to someplace like a beach or a swimming pool or something, that's when I see all the Kindles, all the Kindles are out because it's so much better to use in, uh, in those situations in, in in where it's there's bright light and also quite honestly i i feel less worried about the kindle being destroyed or stolen or something than than my smartphone or my tablet for some reason even a more expensive kindle i think i would feel this way um when i've i don't take baths very often but when i have i've i have a couple of times

done the jeff bezos trick where you put it in a ziploc bag and you just read your kindle in the bathtub uh billionaire by the way uses a ziploc bag on his kindle but you can do that too i mean they're so versatile like build a special waterproof case because he can kind of just ask them to do that oh there probably is one there probably is one now he's probably had space age like science material scientists build him a uh a kindle aquarium of some kind but i don't know i don't know i don't know scott scott do you uh your choice of a kindle over over like an ipad or an iphone for reading why why do you prefer it well i do a lot of reading on my commute i I don't have much of a commute. I have more of a commute than both of you, probably. But it's like 15 to 20 minutes. And I feel, like you were saying, I feel very self-conscious looking at an iPad on the trolley here in Philadelphia. I don't know why. I just do. I feel like everybody's looking at me. I feel like everybody is looking at me. In fact, this morning, a woman was sitting in front of me,

and she was playing Candy Crush on her iPad. And I was, in fact, looking at her play. So I suppose that could have something to do with it. And it just feels like Kindle feels less obnoxious than having a giant iPad and swiping through. Unless it's a Kindle DX. I did feel a little obnoxious when I had my Kindle DX on the trolley. And it's lighter. It's easier to see.

I feel like they disappear. That they're just, yeah, it's not that big a deal to be sitting there with a Kindle. Yeah. So that's why we use Kindles. Some of us more than others. Mike's Kindle is more aspirational.

And that's valid.. Mike's Kindle is more aspirational. That's valid. That's fine. Aspirational Kindle. Although the Instapaper thing, that was something that when I was a regular bus commuter, I did that a lot too where I would just – my Instapaper queue would dump into my Kindle every day. And that was kind of great because I could choose to read like the newspaper or a novel or I could read my Instapaper stories. And that was pretty cool. So it's versatile. But it's for reading.

I mean it's a black and white device. This is one of those things that actually I realized with the Voyage release. And I'm wondering what you guys think of this. I felt like over the years, Scott, as we watched these new Kindles coming out, they were always like, well, they're priced a little bit less. And you got the sense that at some point Amazon was literally going to say, if you're a Prime member, you can get a free Kindle every two years. Just, we don't care. We just don't care. Just buy things. That's all we ask is just keep buying things. And that may yet happen. But something funny happened this year, right? First thing is all the Kindle Fires are now just the Fire

tablets, right? They're not Kindles anymore. They changed the name. Well, there's still a Kindle Fire HDX. Yeah, but it's like last year's model, and it's going to become the Fire something, right? Or get, I mean, like the new Fires aren't Kindle Fires, right? They're just Fire tablets. And the Fire TV, which I always call the Kindle Fire TV.

Right. It's not the Kindle Fire TV. So it's like they're de-branding kindle kindle used to mean like all the hardware that amazon had and it's gone back to being for the reading stuff it's really it's about kindle is about reading so i think that's really interesting and then the other thing that's happened is that they made this device the voyage which is more expensive than the Paperwhite. And I think that's really interesting because for a while, I felt like almost like Amazon's strategy with the e-ink readers was like,

they're not as good as tablets. So the only way they're going to succeed is if they're cheaper than tablets. So let's just keep pushing them down in price and we'll have a $79 Kindle and we'll have a 69 or $59 Kindle with special offers. And we're going to push that down. And the Paperwhite was nicer, but still you got the sense that they were playing that

same game. But with the Voyage, it's clear now that they're not playing that game anymore. That somebody at Amazon has looked at the numbers and they see the numbers. They don't just put up a chart with a line that's going up and say, look, it's going up. They know the actual numbers. And I feel like they're looking at that and saying you know the people who are buying these things probably even have tablets and they

don't care they want to buy these things so maybe we should just make a really good one for them because they just love these kindles and they want to buy them and and like the paperweight like i said was felt a little bit like that but the voyage is like crystal clear it's like this is a 200 e-reader it is made for people who um you know they want to $200 e-reader. It is made for people who, you know, they want to buy an e-reader. They're not like saying, oh, I don't know. I got an iPad. I don't really need that. It's like, no, they want a really great e-reader. And Amazon appears to be willing to make that now, which I don't know, in the past, it felt like they weren't. Like they were really kind of hesitant to put too much into the Kindle to make a nice Kindle because above a certain point,

I think they kind of felt like you graduated to a tablet, which is, I think, totally not true because my experience is I use the Kindle all the time and I have a tablet. So I don't know. It feels like that to me, that the Paperwhite was the start of it and that the Voyage is like the clincher, that Amazon is embracing this product category and saying, we're just going to make great e-readers, and they're their own thing now. Right, and they have three different versions of Kindle at the moment. So they're covering all the price points.

So you can still get a Kindle for $80 if you just are Kindle curious. If you're devoted, you can get the $200 fancy pants Kindle Voyage. They both basically do the same thing. The Kindle Voyage just does it nicer and has a light-up screen and some buttons that aren't really buttons. Right. And I think they're borrowing a little bit from Kobo's playbook. Of course, Kindle is much more successful than the Kobo.

But the Kobo has a whole lineup of crazy e-readers. You can get a tiny little Kobo Mini. You can get an Aurora HD, which is waterproof, so you don't need a Ziploc bag. Yeah, they've got a whole lineup of crazy e-ink readers that you can buy. I don't think anyone does buy them, but you can buy them. Theoretically, you can buy them. So I think Amazon's borrowing a little bit from their playbook, but of course benefiting from the fact that they are the major e-reader player in the market. Now that Sony's not selling them in the United States at least.

I don't know if they're selling them anywhere else. And Barnes & Noble seemingly has given up. I assume that it's fair to say that they are the winner because they have the catalog, right? Well, Barnes & Noble has an equal catalog to Amazon. And this is the first time – I liked my first Kindle so much because I had a Sony Reader. And the Sony Reader – I'm looking at it right now – and it looks so much better than the first generation Kindle but I used my Kindle so much more because it was so easy to get books on the thing the Sony reader Sony generally makes beautiful hardware and this thing is beautiful but the software I had to hook it up

to a PC which I didn't own at the time so I needed to get a like virtual PC on my Mac so I could download the Sony app so I could buy books through it and then hook up my reader to it. And then it might have worked and they were using Adobe DRM. So I had to sign in with my Adobe account so I could authorize my book. And then, you know, contrast that to Amazon on the Kindle. I clicked a little weird scroll button twice and then I had a book on my Kindle, I clicked a little weird scroll button twice, and then I had a book on my Kindle. And I think Amazon just has figured out how to get it to you so easily. And I wouldn't underestimate their recommendation engine either.

And because I think it, Amazon knows how to sell you things and how to suggest things that you will like. And so I think, and plus the idea that you can, one of the other things i love about the kindle is you go to amazon's website you can buy a book on amazon's website and it shows up on your kindle the next time you use it which nobody was doing then i do wish though we're talking about the purchasing process that they would um they would stop doing that thing where it's like send

to this device and and you end up with like 100,000 different devices. And it's like, so every tablet you've ever owned, everything that's ever had a Kindle app on it, any device, and it's like I went in recently and cleared them out. It's like, oh my word, like my iPhone 3G is in here. Like, what's happening?

Imagine how I feel. Manage your devices. It breaks when Scott tries to manage his devices. It just cries. Yeah. Mike, do we have another friend? Should we talk about another friend now?

I would love to talk about another friend. Today's second friend is Hover. Hover. Oh yeah, Hover. Hover. Hover. Hover.com.

Hover is the best way to buy and manage domain names. It's my place of choice and it has been for years. Whether you pronounce it Hover or Hover likecom. Hover is the best way to buy and manage domain names. It's my place of choice, and it has been for years. Whether you pronounce it Hover or Hover like I do, it should be the place that you go to. Because when it comes to buying a domain name, there's just nowhere else that you should be going to. If you have an idea for a project, or you want to just name your own site,

as in, you know, like, with your name. I mean, you can name it anything. Jason did. He didn't go with Jason Snell. S mean, you can name it anything. Jason did. He didn't go with Jason Snell. Snell.zone. Snellworld.com. Whatever. You can get them all.

And Jason, I know that you use Hover. I think you mentioned this before. You used Hover to help you get the Six Colors domain as well, didn't you? Well, so the main Six Colors domain I got through a weird escrow service, but the way that it worked, I was able to then transfer it back to Hover. And then for Six Colors spelled the way you would spell it with a U, that one was actually for sale and Hover was my broker basically for that one. I was able to buy that directly through Hover and they made the sale happen. So I did, I did it sort of both ways, but they all ended up at Hover. Yeah. Because I mean, that's one thing like, you know, people, you come in and buy what's available, but if something isn't available, Hover can act as the middleman to help you with facilitating the deal

that needs to be made, which is good because they're a trustworthy company. And then it also remains where you want it to be. And you don't have to deal with any of the craziness that goes into trying to buy a domain from someone, which I can't even imagine how horrible that would be because my domain processing and my domain buying has always been so lovely because I use Hover. They have a very simple, fast, hassle-free way of buying domains. You just type in the words that you're after, some keywords or some different sort of – maybe you just want to find a specific domain. So maybe you want Snellzone.com, but but snailzone.com is taken by jason snell so maybe you get like i don't know

snail zones you know that kind of thing they suggest all that sort of stuff so that i make suggestions to you if a domain is taken they'll suggest different ways of uh maybe trying to find different formatting of it and things like that which is really cool you don't have to go through a thousand million hundred thousand million screens to add on a bunch of different craziness that you don't want. They're not going to force you to pay for Whois privacy if they give you that for free. All of this stuff is just made simple. They have a really great checkout process. They don't spam you with emails every six weeks telling you that your domain is going to expire in a year. They just send you one when it's coming up and you can choose what you want to do.

They have all of the top-level domain suggestions that you're going to expect. Obviously, they have.com and they have.net,.co,.co.uk, if you're like me. But they also have.academy,.london,.nyc,.plumbing,.coffee, all of the really interesting, like zone like jason has they have all the interesting tlds you can get now too they have a fantastic no hold no wait no transfer telephone support policy which is something they're famous for they have great email support

as well if it's something that you need they have great documentation on helping you switch from a different provider however they will also do this for you for free with the Hover Valet service. Volume discounts for bulk domain renewal. They do custom email addresses, storage and forwarding, and so much more. I love Hover, and I think that you will too. So go try them out. Use the Coid, if you use that,

for a new pronunciation completely into this now. We're really expanding this. Are we using a Co coin on Hoiver? Is that how this is working? I think so. I think that's what it is. You want to use the code AHOYTELEPHONE at checkout. That's going to get you 10% off your first purchase at hover.com.

Show your support for us by using the code AHOYTELEPHONE. Thank you so much to Hover for sponsoring this week's episode. Our friends. Our friends. Our friends. And a good friend. A very good friend indeed. Oh, Kindle, more, actually we have real-time follow-up. A question asked in the chat room that I wanted to answer.

Real-time answers to follow-up. Somebody asked in the chat room, this is tangible ghost in the chat room, why do you have to even direct a file you're sending to your Kindle to a specific device? And the answer is because of the crazy cellular Kindles, right? Scott mentioned this earlier, that they have cellular models and Wi-fi models and that was one of the initial cool things about the kindle was that they were on cellular networks so they didn't they initially didn't have wi-fi the first what two generations of kindle didn't do wi-fi at all oh so that's worth noting actually so my my second gen it used at&t roaming yeah that was how i got my kindles i was using an at&t roaming yeah plan which is so weird that that was how they decided to do it but that was how it was done yeah they

made a deal with at&t and so literally you could go you could take that kindle anywhere in the world and if there was at&t roaming in that you could get books on the kindle and they were paying and you know this this still is an issue to this day. Not only is that the reason why when you buy a book, it doesn't just automatically push to all your Kindle devices. One, does the Kindle app on the iPad do background wake-up auto-downloads? I think it still doesn't. But the bigger issue is those wireless ones,

that costs a lot of money for amazon to send data to the to the cellular models so they don't want to do that unless they absolutely have to and as a result you need to pick where you want to send it and if you use like the send to kindle app on the mac um it's got a little box that's like send send this using whisper link and uh basically it's we will charge you to send this if you if you this way. Otherwise, only on Wi-Fi. It's such a weird, like, the charging is so weird. It's so strange. It was a great idea, though, right?

The idea that, like, this, it was like magic. It's like you're just on. You don't have to pay for it. It's all just embedded in the cost of the device. You're just wherever you are. If you can get a cellular signal, you can get books. It was magical, but kind of ridiculous. And then, like, I think the third generation Kindle, there was a Wi-Fi or a Wi-Fi cellular, and they gave you a deal if you just got the Wi-Fi version.

And I never bought at it the other day thinking, you know, if I ever went somewhere like where I knew that there was no Wi-Fi but there was a cell signal, maybe I would take this just because it still works. But it was a cool idea. That's a very Amazon idea, the idea that they would make a deal with a cellular carrier and just kind of embed it in the device as this supposedly free. But it made the device cost more. And I just talked to John Syracuse about what he's gone through with, uh, doing his eBooks. And this is true for all eBook publishers is they will, uh, Marco dealt with this with the magazine too. I mean, Amazon will charge you. If any of your customers download your book over cellular, they will charge you for the,

for the data. And so it's coming out of the pockets of the publishers and it's it's not it's not cool so uh there's like no way in which that seems like a fair thing to do i can't believe they're still making the the cellular kindles at all but they are um i i would have thought that they would have stopped and said look we live in a wi-fi world plus people have tetherable devices the cellular kindle thing is just not that big a deal. But obviously it works for them because they continue to do it, and those cellular Kindles cost a lot more than the main – I forget what the difference is, but Scott,

do you know the difference between the Wi-Fi and the cellular Kindles? Something like $70, I think. That's not cheap. It's akin to buying a cellular ipad except then you have to pay for the data i do wonder what the purpose the like why would you buy a cellular kindle these days i think that um i mean i don't think people burn through books massively quickly in which you could be potentially in a situation where you've oh no i've run out of books like if you're going on holiday i mean you can kind of just load up right and and so you know

you're saying jason about being somewhere like being on vacation not knowing you're gonna have wi-fi we'll just just put a bunch of books on before you leave and i do i have like 50 books in my kindle i'm doing okay yeah which i assume probably most Kindle owners, Scott, maybe you can tell me if I'm wrong, would have lots of books on there because, I mean, the books are quite small comparative to the size of the devices, right? Yes, I think that most people probably load up their Kindles. I can think of one instance where I would buy, still in this day and age, a 3G-enabled Kindle, and that's if I was going to give it to my mother because the beauty of the 3G is that you don't have to think about it. It's just on and it works, and she doesn't have to figure out where the Wi-Fi signal is coming from,

and it'll just get her book and she'll be happy. And, in fact, that's where my second-generation Kindle was for a long time, was with my parents. I said, you know, you don't have to set up the Wi-Fi just take this and now they have iPads and you know it's fine another random thought I've had about my weird second gen Kindle experience

when I had to turn the cellular off all the time because it was roaming it was it destroyed the battery like I'd get like a couple of hours so when I wasn't downloading something, I had to just turn the cellular off because it was really working hard, the little thing.

Yeah, I just turn off. I put it in airplane mode all the time, my Kindles. I don't know why, I just do. And they last almost forever if you put them in airplane mode. Exactly. I want to forget that I have to charge it and then misplace the cable and when it's it gives me that little alert i have to scramble to find something to charge it with kind of makes sense though right because you know to to require the internet connectivity of a kindle you are making a specific choice anyway

because you're going to go to the store to download a book or whatever so the one example i would say is um i told you i get a newspaper i i've i've been getting the daily uh the san francisco chronicle every day on my kindle for like five years seven years i mean since i got the first the second generation kindle and um uh what happens there is that it delivers overnight so when i wake up in the morning i turn it on newspaper's there. And if I would have it in my bag and go out the door to go to the bus, I get on the bus and turn on my Kindle and the newspaper was there. So that would be, I mean,

that was why I always left the Wi-Fi on in my Kindle was because the newspaper would download overnight in the background, which was always really cool. And it was something the Kindle app on the iPad or iPhone could not do, which is why I thought it was extra cool. But it does eat the battery that way. Scott, I assume the DX was really good for newspapers and magazines, right?

That was one of the reasons, as well as textbooks, that they brought it out, right? Yes, and it was pretty bad with textbooks, but good for newspapers. And it was actually, it kind of emulates the size of like a hardcover page. So it was nice to read on as well. But the biggest pitch was they were like, oh, students can use this to take notes. But e-ink, especially the screen technology at that time, was not fast enough to take notes. So you would just get super frustrated as you were trying to type your note in class. And it wasn't a good idea.

No. That was a bad... I did not like the DX. And they had the weird keyboard, too, which was a bad keyboard. Yes. Yeah. But...

But I have two. Oh, you can keep them. I don't want them. I will. All right, good. Good. Keep them away from me. Let's see.

Oh, I wanted to mention special offers just because it's a very Amazon thing that makes me laugh, which is when we talk about prices for these things, the base price for these is for something called with special offers.

And I was looking up how Amazon describes special offers on their site. And what they do is they want to use the language of cell phone companies. So they'll say, to buy your Kindle

Voyage for $199, that is a subsidized price. The subsidy is because you will receive special offers and screensaver advertisements as you use your device. I'm sitting there

thinking, subsidized by you? It's just you. It's your ads. It's your device. You I'm sitting there thinking, subsidized by you? It's just you. It's your ads. It's your device. You set the price. But what they've done is they've said, you know what? Here's what we're going to do. We're going to give people $20 off if they agree to see our ads. And because we're the makers of this,

we're not going to run it as a sale. We're going to just make it at the price so we can go out there and say, look, this thing costs $199 instead of saying this thing costs $219. Now, they to just make it at the price so we can go out there and say, look, this thing costs one 99 instead of saying this thing costs two 19. Um, now they could just make a one 99 and not have ads, but that's not what they do. And the funny thing is the special offers are not that bad because some of,

some of them are good offers. The ads are only on the home screen and on the lock screen. So it's not like you see them when you're reading. They're not pop-up ads while you're reading a novel. That would be the worst thing ever but you know what the thing that drives me to pay the twenty dollars to turn off the special offers is it makes turning on the kindle a two-step process because you've got to press the power button and then you've got to swipe to dismiss the ad and that's the thing that gets me that's the thing that makes me go okay fine i'm gonna

pay the twenty dollars yeah yeah you've got to because they they um especially for the if you're in a little magnet case where when you open it it automatically unlocks they want you to be able to see the ad they want you to see the ad you would never see the ad otherwise like an ipad with a smart cover you never see the lock screen if you're always opening the cover because it just automatically unlocks and so even though i don't use a case and so i'm actually physically pressing the button and staring at that ad it still makes me swipe so i have to do i have to do power on and then swipe and now i can read my book and that's what makes me spend the 20 dollars to get the special offers but it's a fascinating idea right that they that they do this that they they uh underprice their uh product by20 in order to show you ads.

It's weird. Scott, do you do special offers? I always get the special offers. Always get the special offers. I buy too many Kindles not to get the special offers. Well, that's true. That would add up over time. I have not been buying them.

I've been buying them with special offers. But like I said, the last two I've unlocked after a while, the paperwhite, and then I actually just did it with a voyage today where I said, yeah, I'm just going to do the $20. Also, after a little while, you can go to one of those sites that has various Kindle hacking things. Do you guys know about Kindle hacking? I had no idea it was such a thing. Oh, I know about Kindle hacking. Oh, yeah.

See, Scott knows. Scott knows. Yeah, so there's some sites out there that there is a Kindle jailbreak community. And you can jailbreak the Kindle. And the only thing I use in the jailbreak is you can... If you don't have special offers, they've got these screensavers. And they're like

these really obscure woodcuts of things themed around writing and reading. Or pictures of dead authors. Those are your choices, I think. And they're not that great. And, um, you can't believe it or not. You can't like copy images onto the Kindle and have them used in the screensaver. It just, they won't let you do that. So that's the number one reason that I hacked my paperwhite was, uh, if you, if you, uh, jailbreak the paperwhite and install this screensaver hack, you can load

your own images as the screensaver, or you can opt for it to use the cover of the book you're currently reading as your screensaver, which I think is actually a great idea. And I have no idea why Amazon doesn't offer that as an option for people who have turned off special offers, because it's really cool to just see the cover art when you turn off your kindle like it was a real book um but amazon is not interested they want like pictures abstract pictures of pens and type and the kobo just another shout out to kobo the kobo does uh display the cover of the book you're currently reading when you walk it by default. Look at that.

But there are no special offers. The Kobo is not special. It makes no offers. Nope. Every now and then there's a really great special offer like $5. Buy a $10 gift card for $5. That happens every now and then. You're like, what?

I just want to make sure you're paying attention. Yeah. I bought some books through it. But I hate the press the button and then swipe to turn it on that's really stupid but i do like you should check out the others kindle jailbreaks they're out there i don't know i assume they haven't gotten it running yet maybe they have i haven't looked for the uh for the voyage but they definitely jail had the paperwhite jailbroken not too long ago. They did that pretty fast. And, yeah, there's not a lot you need to do with a jailbroken Kindle.

I mean, you can copy, convert EPUBs to MOBIs and just copy them on via USB. So it's not like Amazon prevents you from sideloading as much content as you want onto this thing. You could download EPUBs that are, that are not DRM and just, uh, you run them through, is it, is it, what's the, what's the app that you use to convert? Calibre? Yeah. Yeah. Calibre or Calibre or Calibre or Hover. It's pronounced Hover. Yeah, Calibre is the one that you basically can set up a workflow that says, take these EPUBs, turn them into MOBIs, copy them onto my Kindle, and it does it, and Amazon doesn't care, which is kind of cool. And you can also use the send to Kindle to just send a MOBI to your Kindle,

and then it's stored in your cloud library. Yeah, that's actually a feature that they added. They have improved some of the stuff with the Kindle software over time, like being able to add a book and it stays in your library. It's not like a one-time load. It actually stays in there. Like your own personal books can stick around in the Kindle cloud library. That was a nice touch. They let you reset your bookmark now,

which for a while you had to fill out several forms and testify in court that you didn't want. So I would read a book and then my wife would read the same Kindle book. And every time she would open it, it would say, it looks like you're at the end of this book. Would you like to jump to the end?

And she'd say, no, I'm reading the book now. And there was no way to reset that feature. And now you can do that. You can go to their, end? And she'd say, no, I'm reading the book now. And there was no way to reset that feature. And now you can do that. You can go to their, I think, the website and say, reset the bookmark. And it does that. That is a whisper sink. No, I'd say the... I think.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think it's all good now. It just took them a while to get there. The big thing that still drives me crazy, and I'm interested, especially for you, Scott, since you've been using the kiddle for so long john gruber wrote about this when the paperwhite came out and i agree with him 100 it's sadly still true two years later is the typography on these things is not is not i mean it's not terrible i'd say it's mediocre they're like six fonts and most of them are not very good book fonts and they're all justified so um they're they're fill justified so that they're

they're uh uh it's a straight line down the right side which means depending on how the words break you can have like variably wide spaces between words on a line instead of just letting it run ragged right and being properly spaced uh and it also doesn't do hyphenation so it's even worse than it would be if it was hyphenated uh and and so it drives me crazy because it's like the screen is really beautiful now with the voyage but the typography is still kind of crappy i think the voyage would be a much better product if they had some better typefaces and some better type display options that they have and that's one place where something like the i like ibooks on the ipad has it just way beyond Kindle because the typography in iBooks is so much better than it is in the Kindle.

And it's a real shame. I mean fonts, you would think in a product devoted to reading that perhaps fonts would be a priority. And apparently not. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that actually, Jason, because I have read many of these complaints, and it doesn't bother me at all, mostly because I'm comparing it to – I read a lot of paperbacks. And if you look at the fonts and typography in a cheap paperback, they're awful. So I feel like it's an accurate representation of the paperback experience with the added bonus that you can choose from six awful fonts as opposed to the one that's set by the publisher i don't know if they're all awful but many of them right like palatino's fine baskerville's okay i don't even know what i use but i never change it and i it annoys me when i get a book that has the uh the publisher oh and the publisher fonts are

horrible because whatever engine they use to embed fonts and then display embedded fonts those fonts are almost always unreadable yes that's the the worst and it used to be you couldn't change them now you can go away from publisher font to one of the six kindle fonts and it'll let you do that which is better but it just drives me crazy i'm looking at a page of the book that i'm reading right now and there's one line that happens to have broken in such a way that there's the equivalent of like five letters of space between every single word on that line, because they're insisting that it be fill justified and that the right edge be solid, which is there's no need. I would like an option for that not to be the case, and I would like more fonts. So um so you know this is an opportunity for somebody who really cares about typography

to come in there and make the kindle experience that much better and it's just you know i feel like they're not showing off that screen like that screen is now so high resolution that they and there was a story on i was looking it up today there's a story on tech crunch i think that was reporting the rumors of this new they called it a new paperwhite but it's very clearly the voyage and one of the things in their story was that there would be a new hand-tuned custom beautiful reading font made for the this beautiful new 300 dpi screen didn't happen mia yeah it's i have to believe that they're spending they've spent so much time on the hardware, and I think that with the Voyage is kind of the pinnacle of their hardware push on the Kindle side, that they must be, I'm hoping, spending the same amount of time on the software. Because, I mean, you look at a Paperwhite 2 or even a Paperwhite next to the Kindle Voyage at the software level and it's identical.

Nearly identical. Yeah, like the they added the ability to go back from a footnote. Or now the footnotes like pop up. Yeah, the little hover thingies like on your website. They hover. Hover. Yes, that's what they do, Mike.

They hover. And yeah, the software is pretty primitive and it's too bad that it isn't better. And the typography a second to update, and it always, if it's sorted by the most recent thing you've opened. So invariably, in the morning, I would turn on my Kindle, it would have my novel from the night before. I would press the home button, you know, tap in the menu bar to bring up the toolbar, and then tap on the home button, and it would bring me to the home screen. And what I would see would be the newspaper followed by my book. And I would reach with my finger to press the newspaper

and at the very last minute, it would resort knowing I just left my book and flip the book up to the top item. And so then I tap on my book and it'd be back in my book. And they go, no! And it's just because the interface is slow and it's not that different from what it was like five years ago, really.

They haven't improved much on the interface. And I imagine one philosophy could be, well, they just want to keep it simple and make it disappear, like you said. But I think they could invest a little bit more time in the interface. And I'm not saying super whiz-bang features. No. Impro improved typography definitely uh even though it doesn't drive me crazy uh it is a room much room for improvement there uh and and maybe some justification options yeah keep it keep it simple let's keep it simple

but uh it could be i feel at this point now the hardware hardware is really being let down by the software i i i gave it more of a pass when it was early days and when the screens were still kind of coming up to speed. But now I feel like they're selling a $200 high-resolution, beautiful product, and the software is still kind of clunky and bad. And that bothers me. But you don't normally see it. I mean the idea is that when you're in there, you're just reading, which is why only the typography really is an ongoing thing that bugs me. But you don't normally see it. I mean, the idea is that when you're in there, you're just reading, which is why only the typography really is an ongoing thing that bugs me. It's just that I wish that it was a little bit better because that's what I'm staring at all the time. I don't know. And they have, to be fair to Amazon,

they did add X-Ray, which is kind of a cool software feature. Yeah. And real page numbers, which is hard to describe as a software feature, but it is a software feature, right? It is. So that's kind of cool. And actually the time countdown, which I do use sometimes, which is how long am I going to be here? It's like, well, about 42 minutes and the book will be over. It's like, oh, that's good. Or how long is it until the next chapter break?

Oh, it's only five minutes. I can sit here and finish this chapter right now. Those are kind of neat features, that they learn what your paging speed is and then use that as the basis um i like that do you ever try and race against it i'll show you kendall just press forward a bunch of times but then it thinks you're really fast reader i have been tempted to time it to see if it's accurate or not but then i haven't done it so yeah yeah the real page numbers is actually real page numbers. I don't really care about. They could be fake page numbers, but I like because they do match like the print edition. So if you're reading and somebody's reading in print, you can say it's on page 415 and it's actually page 415. But I just like it because I know then that, you know, I've I've read 400 pages of this book. It's not that, you know, it's not 200. It seems like I've been reading this a long time, and then I'll look at the real page number and be like, yep, yep. Instead of back in the old days where it was like, I'm at location 20834.

I've read eight dots worth of this book. Right. How many dots are left to go? But, you know, I wouldn't give it up. I would choose to read a Kindle. Even if you gave me an old Kindle, I would probably choose to read it, although I really hated when I had to clip a book light onto an electronic device in order to read it in the dark. That was really stupid. But I could read novels on my iPad if I wanted to, and it would be fine, but I would prefer not to.

And, yeah, so I guess that means it is a luxury item, right? I mean I can read books on other, even eBooks on other devices that I own. So I don't need a Kindle but I do prefer reading on a Kindle to an iPhone or, and I do read on an iPhone. If I'm like somewhere in,

you know, waiting at a doctor's office or something like that, I'll read a book on my iPhone and the WhisperSync is really nice there because I read a Kindle book and it automatically knows where I am and when I go a Kindle book. It automatically knows where I am. And when I go back to my Kindle, it knows where I left off and that's great. But if I could choose and I'm fortunate enough to be able to choose, I choose to read on the Kindle.

I like it better. That's because it is better. Thank you, Scott, for reaffirming my opinions because they align with yours. That's because it is better Scott and Jason. That's the, there you go. Actually, I have one more quibble about the paper or the voyage that I wanted to give,

which is, although I really like the page turn buttons, there's the bezel is so narrow and they're so close to the edge that I find sometimes my, my finger will, we'll just rotate. We'll just roll over a little bit and it will touch the touch screen. And when I'm trying to go forward,

suddenly I'm accidentally like paging backward because it's, it's, it's sensing the touch on the, on the left side of the screen. Um, and it strikes me that that perhaps is a software problem too, and that they ought to be a little, um,

less sensitive when you're touching right on the edge of the screen next to your page turn buttons. Um, but that's something that I noticed. I have had the same thing. sensitive when you're touching right on the edge of the screen next to your page turn buttons. But that's something that I noticed. I have had the same thing. And I notice it's with when I'm using my non-dominant hand. So my left hand, I sometimes just accidentally page back because I'm touching the touch screen instead of just pushing the whatever, the fake button. Yeah, that's a stupid hand and it doesn't know where it's touching and it touches just slightly off and suddenly, and you know, you're trying to go forward, but you move slightly off, and suddenly you're going back. And it feels like they ought to be smart about that very edge of the screen on both sides by those buttons should not be trusted.

It's sort of like the iPad lockout thing where if you're holding it by the bezel, it's intelligent enough to know that you're probably not touching the screen there. This Kindle probably needs that. But I'm better at it now. Before I was picking it up when it was on already I'd put it down for a minute and then I'd pick it up and I'd advance like five pages and I'd be like, no I'm squeezing the button too hard.

And now I'm better at that too. It's just your phenomenal strength is causing you problems. Well fortunately you can use software to calibrate just how hard you have to squeeze the Kindle for it to turn a page and how much it vibrates when you do. So thanks, Amazon. How hard do you squeeze your Kindle, Jason, and how much does it vibrate? I try to be gentle with my Kindle, Scott, and it vibrates moderately. I'm gentle with it, and it's gentle with me.

That's good. Those are words to live by. Mr. Scott McNulty, it has been a pleasure having you as part of this show. Thank you for being a great knowledge of the Kindle world and also for forcing us to finally have this discussion that we've been promising for so long. I have done my duty. And you will never not be our inaugural guest. They can't take that away from you. Unless we erase this show and pretend

it never happened. Which could happen. One show. You were going to say you will never be on again. Maybe when the next Kindle comes out. I notice my popularity gets a brief blip when the kindle comes out and then i go back into obscurity and that's the reason he buys them all folks

please someone pay attention to me and we should say that scott if you enjoyed listening to scott you can listen to him every week on random trek which is a podcast on the incomparable podcast network which is a podcast network that is not RelayFM, but is also very nice. And so go to theincomparable.com slash randomtrek or randomtrek.com will take you to a page completely controlled by Scott McNulty. And if for some reason you can't remember either of those, there are links in the show notes. Relay.fm slash upgrade slash eight eight there's one more thing i want to mention before we go uh we are still conducting our listener survey uh which is a great way for us to try and understand a little bit more about you and trying to help us find

great advertisers to talk to you about great products like our great advertisers today if you go to podsurvey.com slash upgrade, fill in the information there. If you filled in a survey for any other show, please fill in this one too. And if you use the same machine, then all your survey answers will be remembered, which is awesome.

So you won't have to type them all in again. Or you can type them all in again if you want to. I don't know why you would, but you can. So it's podsurvey.com slash upgrade. And you will also be in the chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card if you fill out the survey, so please do that for us. That's a lot of Kindle books.

Lots of Kindle books you can buy with that $100 gift card. Yep. You could buy a whole Kindle. You could buy that Kindle Touch with that gift card and have money left over for books. Look at that. Look at that. Synergy. Synergy. I am at I'm Ike on Twitter I am YNKE

Mr. Jason Snell is at J Snell J S N E double L and he writes at the fantastic six colors dot com and if you'd like to follow Mr. Scott

McNulty on Twitter you can too he's at blank baby on Twitter which we'll save that story for another day maybe

I don't know if there is a story but it sounds interesting thank you all for listening to this week's episode of Upgrade. Thank you again to our sponsors, Clubhouse and Hover. And we'll be back next time. Say goodbye, Jason. Ahoy, friends.

I think that's the start and the end, but we'll go with it anyway. Ahoy is like aloha, Mike. It means hello and goodbye. Bye.