I’m currently testing a Kindle Paperwhite 11. Gen (2021) for exactly this, because I felt like I might be annoyed if it is too slow - I don’t have much patience with slow hardware. And I gotta say I’m perfectly fine with the speed!
Downsides:
It’s sometimes a tiny bit fiddly to properly select text compared to when I’m reading on PC in reader.ttsu.app, but most of the time the Kindle selects the correct thing.
The only thing I actually miss is being able to quickly put something into DeepL or ChatGPT because the built-in Bing Translator completely sucks. Guess I won’t be reading any books that are too far out of my comfort range with it any time soon.
It’s a really expensive device for only Japanese (since you can only log into one Amazon account), but I already have a Tolino e-ink reader that I use for German/English.
Those are marginal though, and the comfort of reading anywhere on an e-ink display more than makes up for that. I’m really happy with it so far.
I also briefly checked the manga reading experience, and while pinch-zooming is a tad too slow for my taste, moving around after I zoomed is really quick. (But since I can’t use the Kindle dictionary for mangas anyway I prefer reading on PC after making the text selectable via Mokuro.)
Maybe you could just pop into an electronics store and check if you’re fine with the speed the context menu pops up when you select anything on your desired Kindle model there?
I actually prefer Bing Translator to DeepL. At the level I’m at, the sentences I want double-checked by automatic translation are usually strangely worded anyway, and DeepL takes so many liberties that the text often ends up unrecognizable (and completely off the mark). Bing is more literal, it doesn’t skip whole sentences like Deepl tends to do, and while the result may sometimes sound like gibberish, it’s certainly more useful in helping me figure out what I missed.
Of course, no automatic translation is any good anyway, but sometimes you need a quick helping hand, even if it is likely to fail. I’m very angry at the Android Bookwalker app (it’s likely Google’s fault) for using Google Translate instead of a proper dictionary for lookups. Google Translate is horrible, but even if it was good, no translation can ever compare to a dictionary.
So I did a bit of experimenting last night using my samsung 8 tablet.
Contrasting the kindle app with ttsu-reader + yomichan + chatgpt.
Kindle app is okay. I linked it to my amazon.co.jp account and pulled down a LN quite easily. As a reader app it’s a slicker experience than using ttsu-reader. The dictionary and translation look ups are ok, quite quick, the translation was okay. Sometimes the dictionary wouldn’t find the word, but it would be translated. Selecting text was not great, not terrible.
kiwi-browser + ttsu-reader + yomichan + chatgbt. yomichan look ups are lightening fast. Much better recognition of verbs and phrases; all needed a little bit of fiddling to get working but nothing too bad.
for example: ”不満げに口をとがらせる” - to pout disappointedly. yomichan splits this into 2 phrases 不満げ & 口をとがらせる; kindle dictionary on the other hand, didn’t. It pulled out 不満、口、とがらせる, making it a bit harder overall.
Might be how I’ve got it configured, but I found it hard to copy from ttsu when yomichan is enabled. I found myself having to go to a second tab, turn off yomichan, and then copy paste from it into chatgbt. To be fair, it would be easier to do this from the kindle app. It’s probably because I’ve removed the tablet keyboard, I’m sure I could do some key-press to stop this yomichan lookup. I’ll do some research this morning.
Other than that, my main issue was that my tablet is too big (14"6) to comfortably sit and read from from the couch.
So I tweaked the yomichan settings to look up on touch release, so if I hold down with my pen I can then drag it to select blocks of text to copy. It works… most of the time. I’ll try it out in a proper reading session and see whether its less annoying than simplying turning off yomichan whilst selecting text to chuck into chatgbt
FYI it’s possible to install yomitan on firefox android. Working nicely. As I’m a firefox user, it meant I could uninstall kiwi browser from my tablet.
