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Anime Japan

Amazon Japan's Manga-Ready Kindle Has 8 Times the Storage (engadget.com) 82

Amazon Japan has an unusual challenge with the Kindle: it not only has to cater to your typical bookworm, but to a local fondness for image-heavy (and thus storage-intensive) manga books. What it's going to do? Release a special model just for those readers, apparently. Engadget reports: The company has introduced a manga version of the Kindle Paperwhite with 32GB of storage, or eight times as much space as the run-of-the-mill 4GB model. You could cram every single volume of Asari-chan, Kochikame and Naruto into this e-reader, Amazon says. The manga Kindle is available for pre-order now, with pricing commanding a slight premium over the usual Paperwhite. You're spending about $157 or $118.
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Amazon Japan's Manga-Ready Kindle Has 8 Times the Storage

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  • by aslagle ( 441969 ) on Wednesday October 19, 2016 @10:29AM (#53107669)

    Why wouldn't Amazon market this internationally? It's not like no one outside of Japan likes manga...

    I've had to banish my manga collection from my Kindle Voyage because one relatively short manga can take up the space of 100 other books. I'd love to be able to fit them all on my Kindle.

    • And there is your answer... Because you have the pressure of ebooks to weigh against your manga, Amazon can get away with selling a small capacity system, and make you the fringe user who needs to buy the more expensive models.

      In japan, the market force for high capacity storage is large enough that a low capacity model won't do well, and they then have to offer something in between.

    • Considering how small they can make large MicroSD cards, why is 32 GB in a device the zies oe a tablet or e-reader considered "large" anymore?

    • Because they're selling the Kindle at a loss, and hoping to make it up in book sales (though they probably aren't). That's my guess why.
  • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Wednesday October 19, 2016 @10:34AM (#53107699) Homepage Journal

    The amount of manga published is incredible... They have fortnightly and monthly anthologies running to 700+ pages covering every genera. People often only read a subset of the stories, but I guess for contract reasons Amazon probably can't unbundle them.

    I read that it's been causing Amazon problems with data consumption too. If you subscribe to regular publications they send them over the cell network for free to your device. No problem when it's 100k for some magazine articles and the odd small photo, but a bit of an issue when it's 750 pages of drawings.

  • While I don't actually need to have all my books on my kindle, it would be really fucking nice if I could put all my books on my kindle and get it ordered how I like. A microSD slot would do that for me. But whatever. It's not like I actually buy ebooks thru Amazon anyways.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      They've done the math. The cost of offering an SDcard slot isn't worth it.

      It's more than the BOM cost of the parts - Software support, customer support, etc - It's just more things to go wrong.

      Amazon is on the hook for support and customer complaints when a bad SDcard causes problems in the device. That isn't free.

      The question you should ask is, will adding and SDcard slot increase the amount of money Amazon makes? Will it significantly increase sales of devices and purchase of content? - The answer is like

  • by tazan ( 652775 ) on Wednesday October 19, 2016 @10:36AM (#53107719)
    If only there was some possible way to add storage to a device. Maybe some kind of hole somewhere where you could plug in some kind of device that would expand memory. Maybe someone could invent that, and we wouldn't need a new model.
    • They'd also have to invent a way to manage that storage so that pulling the card out would only remove the part of your library you expect, and not cause the damn thing to fail catastrophically. They'd also need a way to avoid hours and hours of manual user processes to delegate a storage location, or to migrate collections of books between locations.

      On the other hand, they could put like 1GB of storage in and sell the device cheap, thus lowering the price tag, even though you really need to spend $50 t

      • by tazan ( 652775 )

        They'd also have to invent a way to manage that storage so that pulling the card out would only remove the part of your library you expect, and not cause the damn thing to fail catastrophically. They'd also need a way to avoid hours and hours of manual user processes to delegate a storage location, or to migrate collections of books between locations.

        And yet somehow my Nook manages it. I can have my books on my card, swap out the card and give to one of my kids and they magically have kids books.

        • What if your card has a mixture of kids's books and pornography? How do you move the pornography onto your reader? Do you select everything in one go, or spend large amounts of time and effort hunting and pecking one book at a time? How are they sorted and grouped? How do you ensure only kids's books go on the kids's books card?

          This is why we have LVM and migrate data, instead of scattering it over 40 partitions and the odd external drive. Consolidated storage is easier to manage.

          • Sounds like all the more reason to have SD cards. One for kids stuff, the other for porn. It's not rocket surgery....

            • My point was having two SD cards is rocket surgery--or at least is often more-complex than would be obvious. The UX to easily know what data is on what is difficult. People who aren't obsessive nerds who organize their $HOME directories essentially want "Space": they want things to download and magically end up where they belong. They don't want to spend 40 minutes sorting through 6,000 files, picking out what's what, tagging them, inspecting them when they don't remember, and then individually setting

              • Lazy stupid people deserve to be confused and lost. It's not that hard to to have folders and put things in them.

                There's no user-friendly reason for the device to not be able to easily handle this basic concept either.

                Part of the point is that the storage has gotten so cheap there's no excuse, even if you seal the device and just permanently install a 128GB or larger microHD card in one of these devices. That eliminates the whole "external device/changing cards" "weakness" you describe.

                If folders are that

                • Sure, in the same way it's not hard to just order the cheap dextromethorphin powder, measure it on a mg scale, and sift it into empty capsule shells. People still buy Robitussum.

                  Part of the point is that the storage has gotten so cheap there's no excuse, even if you seal the device and just permanently install a 128GB or larger microHD card in one of these devices.

                  So one of the things I argued was the control circuitry for a storage card costs about as much or more than a large (32GB+) amount of storage, if you use those NAND chips instead of (or in addition to) the NAND chips you used anyway. You just suggested a more-expensive way to achieve the same goal; and it's also slower than jus

  • You could cram every single volume of Asari-chan, Kochikame and Naruto into this e-reader, Amazon says.

    With DJVu, you can squeeze a page around 10K, often much less, sometimes more. 32 GB is well over a million pages. Just how many pages do those things have?

    • by Khyber ( 864651 )

      You must not know shit about Naruto, which has been out for almost TWENTY YEARS.

      The detail in the manga vs anime easily justifies the space.

      • You must not know shit about Naruto, which has been out for almost TWENTY YEARS.

        You must not know shit about arithmetic, which says that, say, a two hundred thousand compressed pages over twenty years is still almost thirty pages per day. Did it publish thirty pages per day?

  • Here are the spot prices for MLC NAND flash memory [flashbay.com]. There's been a (probably temporary) spike in the last month, but the long-term average price has been:
    less than $10 for 64GB
    less than $5 for 32GB
    $2.50 for 16GB
    about $2 for 8GB
    about $1.80 for 4GB.

    Why in the world would anybody make a 4GB device in 2016? Bumping up to 16GB only costs about 70 cents more per device. I tried to buy a 2-4 GB microSD card for my Roku because people said it didn't need any more, but there weren't many available anymore
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Yeah, totally agree. It's stupid going for the lower capacity chips.
      I'm of the few people who still prefer a standalone device for playing music (and my smartphone doesn't have an FM radio) and most MP3 players have 4 or 8 of memory. I bought a 16 GB Samsung player about 5 years ago (it even has a MicroSD slot). Why are we going backwards?
      • Why are we going backwards?

        Same reason some people roll out of bed every morning to work on yet another RDBMS-backed web app.

  • Seriously, as long as I got access to WiFi the storage is not a real issue.

    What degrades my experience is rather the slow page turn and/or lack of caching of pages in both directions. In addition a lot of times you want to zoom in, to see the page of the manga as intended... sometimes it's a full two-page thing, sometimes it's traditional one-page right-to-left-to-down, and sometimes it's a 4-koma top-right-to-bottom-right, etc.

    Basically the real issue is that the Kindle doesn't let you choose a way of view

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