Every time they announce new Kindle products, half of the comments are like "I hope they have buttons," "I hope they bring back the Oasis," etc.
But they appear to exult in dashing the hopes of their customers, or at the very least they don't care about them at all. They've doubled down on no-key devices with stupid pens, pointless and poorly-implemented color, and tiny or excessively large form factors with little in between. It's kind of crazy just how much they don't seem to care.
The subtext of the article indicates that the problem isn't discontinuing support alone, but discontinuing support without offering those customers a reasonable replacement for their old devices that had keys and buttons. (Even if it's just a couple of buttons.)
Removing some old book I had was the first major red flag.
Damn near impossible to find DRM free books to purchase though.
Ironically, files downloaded from "other" sources have no issue. So they're just making it harder to buy from Amazon legally.
It's like people have to be taught the same lesson about SAAS over and over and over again. Like what did they expect, to not get rug pulled eventually? Crazy. You own your shit or you don't. Simple as.
For some reason, they're inclined to trust Amazon.
My current kindle is my third one, and is the last. I will never ever pay for a kindle to Amazon, due to its user hostility.
Oh, and also you cannot move ebooks between accounts, even not with a lot of friction, eg. support tickets, which would be a fair way to game piracy and unwanted lending, which was some inconvinience for me in a situation. Not a huge monetary loss for me, rather a reminder that when you pay to Amazon (or Valve, or any other contemporary DRM-burdened vendor) you are only leasing...
I keep it offline in airplane mode permanently from 2016 and haven't seen a single ad in a long long time.
The ads are only shown while it's off, they're static black and white images, and 99% of the time they're for books. Totally unobjectionable.
If they were in the actual UI and for stuff like cars and perfume I might mind, but they aren't so I never cared.
But then I also understand that'd increase the price by 10% and only help right handed people with weak hands so... c'est la vie.
You either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain.
Planned obsolescence is always bad.
Wasn't the original concept of the Kindle that it shouldn't need to be replaced by newer models?
What is discontinued is integration with Amazon account. Which seems fair to me to be fair.
Go to your router settings and blacklist the Kindle's mac id.
Sleep peacefully that your kindle will never be bricked or wiped by a software update.
Ofc there's the high seas, but I'd quite like to support the authors and I can afford ~£10 for a book now and then. But are there any stores as good/convenient as the Amazon one?
Its clock no longer tells correct time; but it’s fine, a book doesn’t have to do that - and I have a watch.
Primarily use two of these for a prepper book cache. (Two is one and one is none.) The battery lasts about a month on low cost chargers, and a pair of 32GB SD cards holds my entire collection. (A redundant pair since two is one.) Whole thing sits in an EMP bag in the bugout bag of my car, so I always have my library everywhere I go.
Exporting to PDF used to be pretty straightforward; the newest encryption is a lot harder to bypass but is still possible:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/1q1uza4/successful...
- use Chrome, by Google, a company earning money with selling ads and wonder why the adblocker is not working
- use Kindle, by Amazon, a company that earns money by renting out DRM-protected content, that sees the Kindle just as a vehicle to (1) sell more of that content and (2) as a vehicle to lock you to their platform
Please for the love of the universe, just start to factor in the incentives a company has when selling you a thing. Before buying my Kobo reader 12 years ago (still going strong!), the first thing I researched is how to get out of Amazon DRM hell. The answer is: get a reader by a company that sells readers as a main business and has an incentive to make sure they work and use it together with something like Calibre, so you have all your books if you lose the thing somewhere. If you're going to the powerful quasi-monopolist, that may be cheaper in the short term, but what about the time you lose when they eventually hold your whole library hostage or decide to drop support on something you relied on? You're not the person picking when that happens.
If I sum up how much I spent on books in 12 years that Kobo has paid for itself 50 times over and I still don't think there is any reason to replace it with something newer.