5 ms·

Kindle has been around for over a decade. And Amazon is huge. Why the distrust? Honest question. I'm trusting Steam with over 400 games. I don't read a lot of e

Kindle has been around for over a decade. And Amazon is huge. Why the distrust? Honest question. I'm trusting Steam with over 400 games. I don't read a lot of ebooks but I don't see why Amazon would redact something I've paid for.

m4rtink 2y ago
Didn't Amazon just discontinue their Android app store, including leaving people who bought stuff there hanging dry ?
- Finnucane 2y ago
  all both of them?
  - sunaookami 2y ago
    So where do we draw the line? How many people need to be affected? 100? 1000? 10000? It's okay when 99 people loose their money but not 100?
    - account42 2y ago
      Steal from one person (natural and otherwise) and you need to pay them back and get fined/locked up on top of it. Steal from thousands and can just give five bucks to each of them in a class action settlement.
rovr138 2y ago
Amazon has deleted books off of people’s kindles before.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
  That's not cool.
- fastball 2y ago
  In response to what?
  - rovr138 2y ago
    Rights, licensing, content guidelines, “offensive”, public backlash. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amazon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amazon Read under the section “Anti-competitive practices” They’ve done it multiple times. They have the mechanism to delete them. They also have the mechanisms to push content to kindles. While I don’t have examples of them redacting, they can clearly do so. A government order would be a great example of this.
arkx 2y ago
Kindle readers are far from the best and completely locked to Amazon unless you jailbreak. ePub is the standard format. I’ve made sure to convert everything I’ve bought back to ePub without DRM. I read a lot in Japanese. One nice benefit of this approach is that all the dictionaries and other language learning tooling is just ready to be used.
- fastball 2y ago
  Kindles support epub now. "Locked to Amazon unless you jailbreak" is overselling it imo. You've always been able to (very easily) sideload DRM-free ebooks and read them on your kindle. Since "reading ebooks" is ostensibly why you'd buy a Kindle in the first place, I'm not sure what more you need.
  - KingMob 2y ago
    > (very easily) sideload "Easily" does not apply to grandpa and huge swathes of the human race.
    - fastball 2y ago
      What is it grandpa is capable of doing, if not plugging the kindle in the computer and dragging and dropping a file onto the "kindle" device that is now mounted in his file explorer?
      - fastball 2y ago
        If grandpa understands how to use email, he can also just email his kindle an ebook and it will appear on his kindle.
      - KingMob 2y ago
        "OK, I opened the explorer, but I don't see it." "Type 'kindle' in the search." "Alright, hold on... do I want kindle.com? I'm on Amazon, now where do I go?" A slightly more experienced fastball realizes grandpa has opened his never-updated Internet Explorer on his old Windows box. Maybe your family is tech-savvy, but there's many who aren't.
ekianjo 2y ago
It's much better when you don't even need to trust.
NilMostChill 2y ago
Simple answer, profit, line must go up. If it makes financial sense in the future to pull shenanigans with book access or content, they will do so unreservedly and with haste. They have done this already in small amounts, no reason to think they won't do it on a larger scale if it becomes worth their while. Steam is an interesting example, technically some of the games are DRM free (as in you don't need steam to run them) but most of them rely on steam in some form for continued usage. The main difference here is that steam has better PR and a history of not fucking everyone over for an extra % on profit margins. Will that remain the case, probably not, especially after Gabe Newell dies, but they certainly have the general trust of people who use the platform. Not to say they haven't had their share of fuck-ups over the years but none of them seemed to have "I'm a billionaire so i can do whatever the fuck i want" energy to them. That's just personal opinion though.
cyberax 2y ago
Kindle department at Amazon got a new manager who doesn't care about books. So he started to cut costs to drive up margins, and this included the cancellation of Kindle Oasis refresh. Now he's making sure customers are more locked-in into the Kindle ecosystem. So the fear is that they'll start doing BS like showing ads and/or restricting features like family sharing.

m4rtink 2y ago

Didn't Amazon just discontinue their Android app store, including leaving people who bought stuff there hanging dry ?

Finnucane 2y ago
all both of them?
- sunaookami 2y ago
  So where do we draw the line? How many people need to be affected? 100? 1000? 10000? It's okay when 99 people loose their money but not 100?
  - account42 2y ago
    Steal from one person (natural and otherwise) and you need to pay them back and get fined/locked up on top of it. Steal from thousands and can just give five bucks to each of them in a class action settlement.

rovr138 2y ago

Amazon has deleted books off of people’s kindles before.

8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
That's not cool.
fastball 2y ago
In response to what?
- rovr138 2y ago
  Rights, licensing, content guidelines, “offensive”, public backlash. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amazon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amazon Read under the section “Anti-competitive practices” They’ve done it multiple times. They have the mechanism to delete them. They also have the mechanisms to push content to kindles. While I don’t have examples of them redacting, they can clearly do so. A government order would be a great example of this.

arkx 2y ago

Kindle readers are far from the best and completely locked to Amazon unless you jailbreak. ePub is the standard format. I’ve made sure to convert everything I’ve bought back to ePub without DRM. I read a lot in Japanese. One nice benefit of this approach is that all the dictionaries and other language learning tooling is just ready to be used.

fastball 2y ago
Kindles support epub now. "Locked to Amazon unless you jailbreak" is overselling it imo. You've always been able to (very easily) sideload DRM-free ebooks and read them on your kindle. Since "reading ebooks" is ostensibly why you'd buy a Kindle in the first place, I'm not sure what more you need.
- KingMob 2y ago
  > (very easily) sideload "Easily" does not apply to grandpa and huge swathes of the human race.
  - fastball 2y ago
    What is it grandpa is capable of doing, if not plugging the kindle in the computer and dragging and dropping a file onto the "kindle" device that is now mounted in his file explorer?
    - fastball 2y ago
      If grandpa understands how to use email, he can also just email his kindle an ebook and it will appear on his kindle.
    - KingMob 2y ago
      "OK, I opened the explorer, but I don't see it." "Type 'kindle' in the search." "Alright, hold on... do I want kindle.com? I'm on Amazon, now where do I go?" A slightly more experienced fastball realizes grandpa has opened his never-updated Internet Explorer on his old Windows box. Maybe your family is tech-savvy, but there's many who aren't.

ekianjo 2y ago

It's much better when you don't even need to trust.

NilMostChill 2y ago

Simple answer, profit, line must go up. If it makes financial sense in the future to pull shenanigans with book access or content, they will do so unreservedly and with haste. They have done this already in small amounts, no reason to think they won't do it on a larger scale if it becomes worth their while. Steam is an interesting example, technically some of the games are DRM free (as in you don't need steam to run them) but most of them rely on steam in some form for continued usage. The main difference here is that steam has better PR and a history of not fucking everyone over for an extra % on profit margins. Will that remain the case, probably not, especially after Gabe Newell dies, but they certainly have the general trust of people who use the platform. Not to say they haven't had their share of fuck-ups over the years but none of them seemed to have "I'm a billionaire so i can do whatever the fuck i want" energy to them. That's just personal opinion though.

cyberax 2y ago

Kindle department at Amazon got a new manager who doesn't care about books. So he started to cut costs to drive up margins, and this included the cancellation of Kindle Oasis refresh. Now he's making sure customers are more locked-in into the Kindle ecosystem. So the fear is that they'll start doing BS like showing ads and/or restricting features like family sharing.