4 ms·

You’re lucky. I’ve seen books disappear from my Kindle even in flight mode. I wonder what is behind such a persistent bug.

freedomben 2y ago
> I wonder what is behind such a persistent bug. At what point do we stop giving the benefit of the doubt that it's a "bug"?
- thimabi 2y ago
  You make an interesting point. Maybe facilitating the usage of sideloaded books is not among Amazon’s priorities. Yet I don’t know how much of that comes from malice rather than simply negligence or lack of interest.
  - mcmcmc 2y ago
    It’s directly against their priority of influencing you to only purchase ebooks through their monopoly. Whether anti-competitive, anti-user practices are malicious or just a consequence of capitalism run wild, I don’t think there’s much of a difference
    - cowsandmilk 2y ago
      Most likely, it is something they don’t test because it isn’t officially supported.
      - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
        It seems a stretch to imagine that the dev team don't sideload books themselves. Of course that wouldn't be official testing, ...
      - mcmcmc 2y ago
        Right. And it’s not officially supported because they are incentivized not to support it.
- notatoad 2y ago
  i'm not really sure what benefit you think they're gaining by breaking the less convenient, less user-friendly way to sideload books. They're perfectly happy to let you email books to the kindle that you bought at other stores (or stole), as well as sync your progress with those books, backup those books to their servers, and generally have the full reading experience with all the benefits of the kindle ecosystem even if you didn't buy the book through kindle. If they didn't want to encourage the use of third-party files, surely they'd make it more difficult than a bug that randomly deletes books off some people's kindles sometimes.
  - freedomben 2y ago
    The benefit (or potential gain) is that some people will just buy the book from the Kindle store to avoid the pain. I've seen that happen first-hand to my wife. Also by emailing books or loading through their servers, they can still track and get that sweet sweet data/metadata that Amazon thrives on. When you sideload, you don't even have to connect it to the internet, which makes analytics more challenging.
    - notatoad 2y ago
      okay, but this all still seems like a needlessly complicated conspiracy theory. if they want people to buy books from their store, why do they make it so easy to not buy books from their store? bugs happen. not every bug is part of jeff bezos' nefarious plan.
      - jakub_g 2y ago
        It doesn't have to be a nefarious plan to put the bug in, but once it's there, it's guaranteed to be in the very bottom of the backlog to fix it.

freedomben 2y ago

> I wonder what is behind such a persistent bug. At what point do we stop giving the benefit of the doubt that it's a "bug"?

thimabi 2y ago
You make an interesting point. Maybe facilitating the usage of sideloaded books is not among Amazon’s priorities. Yet I don’t know how much of that comes from malice rather than simply negligence or lack of interest.
- mcmcmc 2y ago
  It’s directly against their priority of influencing you to only purchase ebooks through their monopoly. Whether anti-competitive, anti-user practices are malicious or just a consequence of capitalism run wild, I don’t think there’s much of a difference
  - cowsandmilk 2y ago
    Most likely, it is something they don’t test because it isn’t officially supported.
    - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
      It seems a stretch to imagine that the dev team don't sideload books themselves. Of course that wouldn't be official testing, ...
    - mcmcmc 2y ago
      Right. And it’s not officially supported because they are incentivized not to support it.
notatoad 2y ago
i'm not really sure what benefit you think they're gaining by breaking the less convenient, less user-friendly way to sideload books. They're perfectly happy to let you email books to the kindle that you bought at other stores (or stole), as well as sync your progress with those books, backup those books to their servers, and generally have the full reading experience with all the benefits of the kindle ecosystem even if you didn't buy the book through kindle. If they didn't want to encourage the use of third-party files, surely they'd make it more difficult than a bug that randomly deletes books off some people's kindles sometimes.
- freedomben 2y ago
  The benefit (or potential gain) is that some people will just buy the book from the Kindle store to avoid the pain. I've seen that happen first-hand to my wife. Also by emailing books or loading through their servers, they can still track and get that sweet sweet data/metadata that Amazon thrives on. When you sideload, you don't even have to connect it to the internet, which makes analytics more challenging.
  - notatoad 2y ago
    okay, but this all still seems like a needlessly complicated conspiracy theory. if they want people to buy books from their store, why do they make it so easy to not buy books from their store? bugs happen. not every bug is part of jeff bezos' nefarious plan.
    - jakub_g 2y ago
      It doesn't have to be a nefarious plan to put the bug in, but once it's there, it's guaranteed to be in the very bottom of the backlog to fix it.