6 ms·

> Combined with Calibre, I don't even see what the Kindle value prop is. Easy purchasing of ebooks from Amazon, combined with their large selection of ebooks.

by jfim 4y ago

nucleardog 4y ago
Yeah like, I don't wanna point out the typical HN problem but... Imagine explaining this to someone's grandma. "Click this Amazon shortcut, type your book name up here, click on it down below, press 'buy now'. If it doesn't show up right away, wait 5 minutes and check again." Versus... something to do with trying to download mobi files (from where?), starting calibre, starting an import process, locating said files (this is seriously harder than you think for most people), plugging your reader into your PC, running a sync process...
- anakaine 4y ago
  1. Turn on the reader. 2. Go to "Kobo Store". 3. Look for a book. 4. Click "Buy". 5. Click the book to open it. Thats about my workflow in the kobo, assuming I didn't drop a file on there via usb.
- michaelmrose 4y ago
  99% of this difficulty goes away if Grandma uses her phone or tablets browser to download unlimited free books from zlibrary and reads them on the same device. Honestly the grandma example is starting to feel dated. When I was born in 1980 a 50 year old grandma was born in 1930 and probably didn't own a TV until they were raising their own family. The same 50 year old today was born in 1972 and would have been 5 when the Apple II hit the scene. At what point do we realize that eventually old folks will be those that only grew up with iphones and stop assuming that anyone with grey hear needs to be assumed to be technically incompetent.
  - scarygliders 4y ago
    Don't know why you're being downvoted. This born in '69 53 year old right here is programming backends and frontends for websites, and PySide5/6 Qt5/6 applications. I'm still sharp as a pin. Like you say, there has to be some point at which those younger than I stop thinking someone in their 50's isn't as hopeless with technology as they assume. Of course not everyone in my Gen X'er group will be like me, then again, I know of folks in their 20's who struggle with anything IT. Quit with the ageism, people. It's getting old ;)
    - josephg 4y ago
      I got yelled at at a conference for using my mum as an example of a user who wouldn’t use some complex software solution. I was told off for being sexist, or ageist or something. They didn’t get it. My mum is super smart and prolific. She has a PhD in international development and has helped tens of thousands of disadvantaged kids go to school. It’s not that she’s not smart enough. She just doesn’t care about the technology. She’s not going to spontaneously get comfortable with the terminal and learn rsync. But she can install Dropbox no problem. If a kindle just works and has all the books in easy reach, that’s what I’ll recommend to her. She’s too busy to bother with software that’s not user friendly. That’s not ageism. I think about her a lot when I build software because I respect her. She deserves to spend her day thinking about her job, not thinking about stupid tech problems.
      - scarygliders 4y ago
        I agree with what you say. I've witnessed more than enough software with absolutely abysmal UI/UX and don't have time for that myself - except for when I really need to, like this one truly abysmal phone app for an energy company which I need to use to pay for my energy. It looks and acts like it was designed/coded by idiots; additional popups to remind me to rate the app (already did and it was very negative!), a popup with an "okay, got it" prompt - the only prompt - which instead of setting that yes, I actually did get it, just pops up again the next time reminding me to use some feature I don't want to use. And so on. That's obviously the fault of the people involved in vomiting out the abysmal application(s). But yes I agree, most people simply don't care about the technology, they just want a Thing to do the thing they want it to do, no muss no fuss. This situation has always been the case and I can't envisage a time when it will change.
  - DharmaPolice 4y ago
    I highly doubt that people are thinking of 50 year olds when they're talking about grandmas. But in answer to your question, I suspect the cliche will slowly die out when most of the 60/70/80 year olds we meet are tech savvy.
    - another-circus 4y ago
      A ton of kids these days aren't that tech savvy. I work with high school kids and many have a real lack of understanding about how things work. A large number have no idea how to much with software outside of browser, believe that internet traffic travels through satellites to get between continents, and can't even debug simple printer jams.
      - ev1 4y ago
        This is my gen z experience, I hope you find it somewhat insightful: - Your first computer given to you was probably a Chromebook at school. It is your browser. Every app is a web page. Docs, Sheets are all web pages. If you were rich or privileged you might have gotten a Macbook at school instead. But nearly everything is a web page. You use Google Docs with your friends and for group projects. I can count the people that had desktop versions of Word or Excel on one hand. You upload your videos to YouTube, presentations to Canvas or Google Drive, you don't bring in a flash drive. If you plug in a flash drive it might just show up as "External Storage (128 GB)" and not /sdcard or /media/USB0 or whatever. Even then, you don't really folder it up. You might use it to copy one file or a ton of images from one thing to another, then you format it when you're done. You don't just keep one around to build stuff up on, why bother, it's on The Cloud. - You grow up with no hierarchical file organization. Imagine mobile. You have a "Pictures" tab I guess, and a "Downloads" tab? What else is there? You don't have album folders with FLAC files or anything; all your music streams, all your content streams, none of the apps that serve that content allow you to download them into the filesystem, if anything they do their best to prevent that. You don't have a filesystem path on iPhone. You have maybe tags and categories on Google Drive and you don't keep anything on it other than Sheets and Docs stuff that is listed by name, sorted by recent usage, and do not physically exist as files on the filesystem. Tap to select by thumbnail and Most Recent do an insane amount of work to hide what a folder is, nearly nothing but F/OSS f-droid apps on Android will expose things like /sdcard/Something or /sdcard0/emulated/Downloads. You get a selector of thumbnails. - Mobile is first, always. Phones are cheaper than computers. Every kid has a phone, whether it's for legitimate use or for parents to abusively track them and monitor and record everything they do. Internet is always just kind of around you in the air, magically. You've never really had to think about how continents were connected, there never was a time in your life where the internet wasn't just magically all around you apart from during no signal areas. If you go to a location you ask for the wifi login. You don't ask where you plug in your ethernet cable. When you sign up for internet, unless you are specifically an enthusiast, your ISP gives you mesh wifi pods/gateway/whatever as the default. When you travel, hotel, coffeeshop, class, library, you get a wifi login. If you don't have wifi you use your phone or tether your laptop to your phone wifi. - Rarely have a printer. If you print in class you weren't allowed to resolve paper jams yourself, and pro-tier laser printers almost never jammed even if you were doing 50+ pages at a time. When was the last time I had to print something? Your presentations are on Google Classroom/Google Drive/etc. Your homework is turned in online. Your concert tickets are on your phone with a moving barcode to prevent screenshotting (hope you have mobile service and it isn't too contended). Amazon returns are just dropped off and show them QR code, you don't print a label and they actively discourage you from choosing an option where you have to print a label. You have to very actively seek out these things and want to learn, you can't passively pick it up like presumably in the past you had to tinker at least a little - tablets and phones are meant to force you to shut up and consume, not know about it. Chromebooks are intentionally locked down as hard as possible. Every app you use is probably a web page or a web page in a CEF wrapper.
  - krageon 4y ago
    Grandmas are 70-90, not 50. At that point we're still close to the second world war, which is a very different path. Those folks simply cannot be expected to have any competence. As an aside, I work with many folks around 50 and most of them are functionally technologically illiterate. It doesn't seem like such a strange assumption to make from where I'm sitting.
    - colomon 4y ago
      If you're just talking about old enough to have a grandchild, 50 is plenty old -- indeed, old enough to have gotten married after college, had a kid who got married after college, and that kid now has a kid of their own. At least one of my high school classmates did that. (I'm 51.) If you're talking old enough to be, say, a college student's grandma, then obviously your 70-90 estimate is much more likely. (Bigger picture: I've been professionally programming for three-and-a-half decades. I find myself more and more annoyed by the user-unfriendliness of tech as I age. As an on-topic example, earlier this month Amazon's mail-to-Kindle feature rejected an EPUB I sent it, and when I used Calibre to convert it to MOBI and sent that instead, lectured me that MOBI was obsolete. I guess this is especially annoying because it seems like they're replacing a service which basically never failed with one that is failing like 10% of the time I try to use it...)
    - quesera 4y ago
      > Grandmas are 70-90, not 50. To a reasonable approximation: - Grandmothers of infants are between the ages of 40 and 80 - Grandmothers of HN commenters are between the ages of 55 and (dead for decades) > I work with many folks around 50 and most of them are functionally technologically illiterate Most people of all ages are functionally technologically illiterate. Many people around 50 are functionally literate in different technologies than you are. Those may be less relevant, or merely invisible to you as a user.
    - QuarterReptile 4y ago
      My son's grandparents are 55-63, and his one great grandparent is 76
    - michaelmrose 4y ago
- input_sh 4y ago
  You're presenting it as if Kobo doesn't have its own store. It does: https://www.kobo.com/ww/en/ebooks https://www.kobo.com/ww/en/ebooks You can access it via Kobo e-reader, same as accessing Amazon's store on a Kindle. Somewhat more limited selection, but both contain Big Five publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster) that own hundreds if not thousands of imprints. Calibre/OPDS server/custom software (like koreader) are an added bonus for the techies, but it's absolutely not a requirement. If your requirement is ease-of-use, there's no difference. If your requirement is a hacker-friendly device, you can do it on both, but it's in my experience somewhat easier to do on a Kobo.
- schnitzelstoat 4y ago
  A grandma might be pushing it, but my SO learned how to use Calibre and she isn't very tech-savvy. Also, Amazon isn't as easy as it sounds - I used it a few times and found it quite confusing to get it on my Kindle after purchasing on Amazon. And its a nightmare as I moved country and would prefer to purchase a larger selection of ebooks in English from my home country etc. but I have a separate Amazon account and stuff.. that was even more confusing.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  - turn up e-reader - click apps (if it's not the default screen) - click "whatever has store in the name" - buy the book - rinse and repeat I'm sure anybody can learn how to do it, even if the brand it's not Bezos's.
kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
The ridiculous pricing of ebooks on Amazon in the last few years has forced me to alternate sources. I'm not interested in paying through the nose for something that's far cheaper to distribute than a printed book. In today's market Kindle doesn't offer any value proposition.
- criddell 4y ago
  When I'm buying something, I'm not thinking much about their margins. For me, it's mostly about value. An ebook is searchable, gives me instant access to a dictionary, doesn't take up space in my house, I can read in the dark, it's more comfortable to hold, and I can set the font to a size that works for my aging eyes. That $10 ebook of The Dog Stars is a much better value for me than a $4 paperback copy. Paper books have their place too. For example, I want physical cookbooks that I can leave open on a stand as I work in the kitchen.
- TheCoelacanth 4y ago
  An ebook is only marginally cheaper to distribute than a printed book. If you're doing a reasonable sized print run, it's only going to cost you a dollar or two to print a book. Most of the cost is in labor to write and edit the book, which still needs to happen for ebooks.
  - Turing_Machine 4y ago
    Printing is only one of many costs, though. Shipping, returns, expen$ive retail space for physical inventory, salary and benefits for retail clerks, utilities, insurance, shoplifting losses...
- themadturk 4y ago
  For me, a 66-year-old who's been reading voluminously for about 60 of those years, the value proposition of the Kindle (or probably just about any ereader, probably) is: 1. I don't have to store all the physical books I would have acquired over the decades. 2. I can carry around a large number of those beloved books with me at all times. 3. I can vary the font size, which my ageing eyes appreciate.
vanchor3 4y ago
Not to mention books available exclusively on Amazon due to KDP Select.

> Combined with Calibre, I don't even see what the Kindle value prop is. Easy purchasing of ebooks from Amazon, combined with their large selection of ebooks.

by jfim 4y ago

> Combined with Calibre, I don't even see what the Kindle value prop is. Easy purchasing of ebooks from Amazon, combined with their large selection of ebooks.

nucleardog 4y ago

Yeah like, I don't wanna point out the typical HN problem but... Imagine explaining this to someone's grandma. "Click this Amazon shortcut, type your book name up here, click on it down below, press 'buy now'. If it doesn't show up right away, wait 5 minutes and check again." Versus... something to do with trying to download mobi files (from where?), starting calibre, starting an import process, locating said files (this is seriously harder than you think for most people), plugging your reader into your PC, running a sync process...

anakaine 4y ago
1. Turn on the reader. 2. Go to "Kobo Store". 3. Look for a book. 4. Click "Buy". 5. Click the book to open it. Thats about my workflow in the kobo, assuming I didn't drop a file on there via usb.
michaelmrose 4y ago
99% of this difficulty goes away if Grandma uses her phone or tablets browser to download unlimited free books from zlibrary and reads them on the same device. Honestly the grandma example is starting to feel dated. When I was born in 1980 a 50 year old grandma was born in 1930 and probably didn't own a TV until they were raising their own family. The same 50 year old today was born in 1972 and would have been 5 when the Apple II hit the scene. At what point do we realize that eventually old folks will be those that only grew up with iphones and stop assuming that anyone with grey hear needs to be assumed to be technically incompetent.
- scarygliders 4y ago
  Don't know why you're being downvoted. This born in '69 53 year old right here is programming backends and frontends for websites, and PySide5/6 Qt5/6 applications. I'm still sharp as a pin. Like you say, there has to be some point at which those younger than I stop thinking someone in their 50's isn't as hopeless with technology as they assume. Of course not everyone in my Gen X'er group will be like me, then again, I know of folks in their 20's who struggle with anything IT. Quit with the ageism, people. It's getting old ;)
  - josephg 4y ago
    I got yelled at at a conference for using my mum as an example of a user who wouldn’t use some complex software solution. I was told off for being sexist, or ageist or something. They didn’t get it. My mum is super smart and prolific. She has a PhD in international development and has helped tens of thousands of disadvantaged kids go to school. It’s not that she’s not smart enough. She just doesn’t care about the technology. She’s not going to spontaneously get comfortable with the terminal and learn rsync. But she can install Dropbox no problem. If a kindle just works and has all the books in easy reach, that’s what I’ll recommend to her. She’s too busy to bother with software that’s not user friendly. That’s not ageism. I think about her a lot when I build software because I respect her. She deserves to spend her day thinking about her job, not thinking about stupid tech problems.
    - scarygliders 4y ago
      I agree with what you say. I've witnessed more than enough software with absolutely abysmal UI/UX and don't have time for that myself - except for when I really need to, like this one truly abysmal phone app for an energy company which I need to use to pay for my energy. It looks and acts like it was designed/coded by idiots; additional popups to remind me to rate the app (already did and it was very negative!), a popup with an "okay, got it" prompt - the only prompt - which instead of setting that yes, I actually did get it, just pops up again the next time reminding me to use some feature I don't want to use. And so on. That's obviously the fault of the people involved in vomiting out the abysmal application(s). But yes I agree, most people simply don't care about the technology, they just want a Thing to do the thing they want it to do, no muss no fuss. This situation has always been the case and I can't envisage a time when it will change.
- DharmaPolice 4y ago
  I highly doubt that people are thinking of 50 year olds when they're talking about grandmas. But in answer to your question, I suspect the cliche will slowly die out when most of the 60/70/80 year olds we meet are tech savvy.
  - another-circus 4y ago
    A ton of kids these days aren't that tech savvy. I work with high school kids and many have a real lack of understanding about how things work. A large number have no idea how to much with software outside of browser, believe that internet traffic travels through satellites to get between continents, and can't even debug simple printer jams.
    - ev1 4y ago
      This is my gen z experience, I hope you find it somewhat insightful: - Your first computer given to you was probably a Chromebook at school. It is your browser. Every app is a web page. Docs, Sheets are all web pages. If you were rich or privileged you might have gotten a Macbook at school instead. But nearly everything is a web page. You use Google Docs with your friends and for group projects. I can count the people that had desktop versions of Word or Excel on one hand. You upload your videos to YouTube, presentations to Canvas or Google Drive, you don't bring in a flash drive. If you plug in a flash drive it might just show up as "External Storage (128 GB)" and not /sdcard or /media/USB0 or whatever. Even then, you don't really folder it up. You might use it to copy one file or a ton of images from one thing to another, then you format it when you're done. You don't just keep one around to build stuff up on, why bother, it's on The Cloud. - You grow up with no hierarchical file organization. Imagine mobile. You have a "Pictures" tab I guess, and a "Downloads" tab? What else is there? You don't have album folders with FLAC files or anything; all your music streams, all your content streams, none of the apps that serve that content allow you to download them into the filesystem, if anything they do their best to prevent that. You don't have a filesystem path on iPhone. You have maybe tags and categories on Google Drive and you don't keep anything on it other than Sheets and Docs stuff that is listed by name, sorted by recent usage, and do not physically exist as files on the filesystem. Tap to select by thumbnail and Most Recent do an insane amount of work to hide what a folder is, nearly nothing but F/OSS f-droid apps on Android will expose things like /sdcard/Something or /sdcard0/emulated/Downloads. You get a selector of thumbnails. - Mobile is first, always. Phones are cheaper than computers. Every kid has a phone, whether it's for legitimate use or for parents to abusively track them and monitor and record everything they do. Internet is always just kind of around you in the air, magically. You've never really had to think about how continents were connected, there never was a time in your life where the internet wasn't just magically all around you apart from during no signal areas. If you go to a location you ask for the wifi login. You don't ask where you plug in your ethernet cable. When you sign up for internet, unless you are specifically an enthusiast, your ISP gives you mesh wifi pods/gateway/whatever as the default. When you travel, hotel, coffeeshop, class, library, you get a wifi login. If you don't have wifi you use your phone or tether your laptop to your phone wifi. - Rarely have a printer. If you print in class you weren't allowed to resolve paper jams yourself, and pro-tier laser printers almost never jammed even if you were doing 50+ pages at a time. When was the last time I had to print something? Your presentations are on Google Classroom/Google Drive/etc. Your homework is turned in online. Your concert tickets are on your phone with a moving barcode to prevent screenshotting (hope you have mobile service and it isn't too contended). Amazon returns are just dropped off and show them QR code, you don't print a label and they actively discourage you from choosing an option where you have to print a label. You have to very actively seek out these things and want to learn, you can't passively pick it up like presumably in the past you had to tinker at least a little - tablets and phones are meant to force you to shut up and consume, not know about it. Chromebooks are intentionally locked down as hard as possible. Every app you use is probably a web page or a web page in a CEF wrapper.
- krageon 4y ago
  Grandmas are 70-90, not 50. At that point we're still close to the second world war, which is a very different path. Those folks simply cannot be expected to have any competence. As an aside, I work with many folks around 50 and most of them are functionally technologically illiterate. It doesn't seem like such a strange assumption to make from where I'm sitting.
  - colomon 4y ago
    If you're just talking about old enough to have a grandchild, 50 is plenty old -- indeed, old enough to have gotten married after college, had a kid who got married after college, and that kid now has a kid of their own. At least one of my high school classmates did that. (I'm 51.) If you're talking old enough to be, say, a college student's grandma, then obviously your 70-90 estimate is much more likely. (Bigger picture: I've been professionally programming for three-and-a-half decades. I find myself more and more annoyed by the user-unfriendliness of tech as I age. As an on-topic example, earlier this month Amazon's mail-to-Kindle feature rejected an EPUB I sent it, and when I used Calibre to convert it to MOBI and sent that instead, lectured me that MOBI was obsolete. I guess this is especially annoying because it seems like they're replacing a service which basically never failed with one that is failing like 10% of the time I try to use it...)
  - quesera 4y ago
    > Grandmas are 70-90, not 50. To a reasonable approximation: - Grandmothers of infants are between the ages of 40 and 80 - Grandmothers of HN commenters are between the ages of 55 and (dead for decades) > I work with many folks around 50 and most of them are functionally technologically illiterate Most people of all ages are functionally technologically illiterate. Many people around 50 are functionally literate in different technologies than you are. Those may be less relevant, or merely invisible to you as a user.
  - QuarterReptile 4y ago
    My son's grandparents are 55-63, and his one great grandparent is 76
  - michaelmrose 4y ago
input_sh 4y ago
You're presenting it as if Kobo doesn't have its own store. It does: https://www.kobo.com/ww/en/ebooks https://www.kobo.com/ww/en/ebooks You can access it via Kobo e-reader, same as accessing Amazon's store on a Kindle. Somewhat more limited selection, but both contain Big Five publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster) that own hundreds if not thousands of imprints. Calibre/OPDS server/custom software (like koreader) are an added bonus for the techies, but it's absolutely not a requirement. If your requirement is ease-of-use, there's no difference. If your requirement is a hacker-friendly device, you can do it on both, but it's in my experience somewhat easier to do on a Kobo.
schnitzelstoat 4y ago
A grandma might be pushing it, but my SO learned how to use Calibre and she isn't very tech-savvy. Also, Amazon isn't as easy as it sounds - I used it a few times and found it quite confusing to get it on my Kindle after purchasing on Amazon. And its a nightmare as I moved country and would prefer to purchase a larger selection of ebooks in English from my home country etc. but I have a separate Amazon account and stuff.. that was even more confusing.
peoplefromibiza 4y ago
- turn up e-reader - click apps (if it's not the default screen) - click "whatever has store in the name" - buy the book - rinse and repeat I'm sure anybody can learn how to do it, even if the brand it's not Bezos's.

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago

The ridiculous pricing of ebooks on Amazon in the last few years has forced me to alternate sources. I'm not interested in paying through the nose for something that's far cheaper to distribute than a printed book. In today's market Kindle doesn't offer any value proposition.

criddell 4y ago
When I'm buying something, I'm not thinking much about their margins. For me, it's mostly about value. An ebook is searchable, gives me instant access to a dictionary, doesn't take up space in my house, I can read in the dark, it's more comfortable to hold, and I can set the font to a size that works for my aging eyes. That $10 ebook of The Dog Stars is a much better value for me than a $4 paperback copy. Paper books have their place too. For example, I want physical cookbooks that I can leave open on a stand as I work in the kitchen.
TheCoelacanth 4y ago
An ebook is only marginally cheaper to distribute than a printed book. If you're doing a reasonable sized print run, it's only going to cost you a dollar or two to print a book. Most of the cost is in labor to write and edit the book, which still needs to happen for ebooks.
- Turing_Machine 4y ago
  Printing is only one of many costs, though. Shipping, returns, expen$ive retail space for physical inventory, salary and benefits for retail clerks, utilities, insurance, shoplifting losses...
themadturk 4y ago
For me, a 66-year-old who's been reading voluminously for about 60 of those years, the value proposition of the Kindle (or probably just about any ereader, probably) is: 1. I don't have to store all the physical books I would have acquired over the decades. 2. I can carry around a large number of those beloved books with me at all times. 3. I can vary the font size, which my ageing eyes appreciate.

vanchor3 4y ago

Not to mention books available exclusively on Amazon due to KDP Select.