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I recently bought a Kindle/Fire device pre-owned, to save money. But seeing full-screen shitty consumer products ads on the 'covers of my books', sitting aroun
by neilv 1y ago
I recently bought a Kindle/Fire device pre-owned, to save money. But seeing full-screen shitty consumer products ads on the 'covers of my books', sitting around my home was so depressing, I paid the extra $10-$15, to retroactively turn it into an ad-free device.[1]
Though, even with Special Offers disabled, it still puts oversized icons for marketing promotions, bursting out of the search bar at the top of the home screen. This is one of the reasons I find the home screen a little bit unpleasant to look at, and avoid it as much as possible.
[1] If you want to remove Special Offers from your own Kindle/Fire (I don't know about Echo Show), go to https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/digital-console/alldevices https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/digital-console/alldevices , click on the icon for your device, and scroll down, to find an option to disable Special Offers by paying some amount. IIRC, it said the amount was the difference between the original retail prices of with-ads and ads-free versions of the device. I've also heard some people can get Special Offers removed for free by customer service, but in my case it seemed like a fair deal, so I just paid the modest fee.
- exe34 1y agoturn off WiFi and transfer by usb.
- RandomBacon 1y agoAmazon no longer allows eBook downloads from their website.
- henry2023 1y agoThen don’t buy from them, plenty of venues
- EA-3167 1y agoI’ve purchased and backed up over 700 kindle books over the years. The day Amazon made backups impossible I switched to Kobo and have never looked back. Amazon can can go forth and multiply with itself.
- mapontosevenths 1y agoBackups aren't impossible, its just a bit harder than it used to be. That said, Kobo is great if they have the book you're looking for.
- geraldwhen 1y agoMany with trade offs. I recommend the pocketbook 4. You can disable recommendations easily, and the unit mounts as a disk so you can read and write books as if it were an SD card. No internet required. No sync software required. It’s quite nice!
- GrantMoyer 1y agoDitto. It's also significantly lighter weight than competing readers (at least when I bought mine), has physical buttons, has color models, and has really good battery life possibly because it runs a custom Linux instead of Android.
- neilv 1y agoI really liked my PocketBook InkPad Lite. After the one-time firmware update, I put it into airplane mode permanently, and always just updated DRM-free books on by plugging it in as USB Storage, and `rsync`-ing `~/doc/` to it. The update script was pretty much this (on a laptop set up not to automatically mount removable filesystems): #!/bin/sh -x DeviceMountPoint="/media/pocketbook" mount "$DeviceMountPoint" || exit 1 cd ~/doc || exit 1 rsync -crltv . "${DeviceMountPoint}/." Status=$? umount "$DeviceMountPoint" exit $Status And the `/etc/fstab` entry was something like: /dev/disk/by-id/usb-USB-FS_PocketBook_MYSERIALNUMBER-0:0 /media/pocketbook vfat user,noauto 0 0
- patja 1y agoI switched to a Kobo device and have zero regrets other than that I didn't switch earlier
- exe34 1y agomy next device will be a kobo, for sure! I just have two old Kindles that I keep alive because they're still useful. I ripped the drm on all ebooks I bought from Amazon because I don't trust rich people (and I was right), and now I only buy drm-free.
- exe34 1y agothe copy of the ebook you download doesn't have to be the one you paid for. if buying isn't owning, copying isn't stealing.
- cjbgkagh 1y agoI just got a case in for the kindle instead of unlocking ad free, I barely notice the ads in the very brief time they’re visible
- like_any_other 1y agoPaid the Danegeld. Hope it works out.
- neilv 1y agoIn this case, the original retail buyer was offered a choice between paying $X for ads-free or $X-minus-discount for with-ads. And it was disclosed upfront what they were buying into. Since my priorities were different than the original buyer, I repaid that discount amount.
- grues-dinner 1y agoNice deal for Amazon because they get to double-dip as the same device served ads for some time for the first owner and then they still get the ad-free uplift eventually. Maybe one day they'll turn it into an yearly thing to avoid ads.
- neilv 1y agoIt was a fair deal to me. I respect that they offered the option at purchase time and then at any point after, and at a reasonable price. And isn't this an option that the everything-is-a-market HN libertarians would like to have: People who want less expensive, say, TVs, can get the existing market price for that. And people who don't like that ads/surveillance, but want the nice economies-of-scale hardware, can pay what the brand would've made on advertising and surveillance, to opt-out, for that unit? Ideally, a lot of the current surveillance and advertising (implemented almost entirely by HN's own field) would be outlawed, but paid opt-out can sometimes be a reasonable pragmatic individual compromise, for now.
- like_any_other 1y agoYou bought a device that obeys its manufacturer instead of you. A device you have no control over. Or maybe I'm wrong - did the $X you paid for ads-free also give you root access?
- 1y ago
- cameldrv 1y agoSame thing with Audible. Very annoying. When you open the app, it shows you ads for books to buy instead of the books you already have or the book you're listening to now. Of course, they do not care. Whether you actually listen to the book isn't that important to them, as long as you buy it.
- patja 1y agoI found the Kindle ads particularly infuriating when they advertised books I had already purchased from Amazon. They were insultingly brain dead in their targeting especially given how much Amazon knows about me
- truCoat 1y ago>.. insultingly brain dead in their targeting especially given how much Amazon knows about me. Fascinating isn't it? It continues over decades. I cannot recall ever once opening an overt ad among, what, hundreds of thousands? Google `subverts' in search I've opened, but that only layers their more desperate enshittings. Newpipe escaped and saved me from Youtube's thousands of bearskin hoodies, butter and bowel movements, pink salt trick, something about men's erections and a tomato. These must be smart people who engineer this, this `inverse' offensive ad targeting, it must be for some brilliant objective, but I remain completely lost at what it could possibly be.
- jonhohle 1y agoI worked on Prime during the Prime Video launch. All of the marketing was around it being ad free and a new benefit of the Prime membership. Not too long later they started playing pre roll ads for Amazon Video offerings (maybe Amazon Studios, I don’t remember). I brought it up in a meeting and the business folks said it was OK because it wasn’t in the middle of the selected content. I’m pushed back, but it went nowhere. Thinking about it now, he probably meant it was OK regarding their contracts with studios. Our engineering chain of command was completely obsessed with customer experience. The business side, not so much.
- sanex 1y agoI'm always amazed at how little people will care about the customer experience for a shot at a 20k raise.
- neilv 1y agoIn all fairness to the MBAs, the "Customer Obsession" commandment could be interpreted multiple ways. Such a metrics-driven company will surely know something about how incentives drive outcomes.
- ROBLOX_MOMENTS 1y agoFor a metrics driven company they sure did not cite a single metric or have any data when they forced mandatory RTO without having enough office space or desks to support everyone returning while I worked there. Not sure they really care about many metrics these days.
- garciasn 1y agoThe metrics are there and they were driven by them; they just didn’t want to share what those metrics were because they wouldn’t be received well. “Our primary investors are also leveraged heavily in the commercial real estate market and they’re losing their shirts and we need their money, so…”
- squigz 1y agoJailbreak it, install KOReader. https://koreader.rocks/ https://koreader.rocks/