51–60 of 288 posts
We should be normalizing a separation of device and ecosystem. These are for consuming books, it's not an awful inconvenience to sideload every 19 hours of consumption to queue up the next read.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard to evaluate the cost of a ebook vs physical book without knowing the cut that the author and publisher get of the sales price.
Sure you can. An ebook has zero cost of distribution and no middlemen. A physical book has to be typeset, printed, shipped to stores, shipped to customers, marketed in store, etc etc etc. If a physical book is sold for $10 at least half that is printing, distribution and retail. Like the GP, the price fixing of ebooks at the Dane price as physical books mothers me as well, particularly because physical books can be s…
The costs of printing and retail are definitely less than half the sales price: https://www.davidderrico.com/cost-breakdowns-e-books-vs-prin... Publishers say it's 10%; Derrico thinks they are underestimating certain logistical costs but no way it's 50%.
Never buy another Kindle? I keep mine in airplane mode all the time and sideload all the books/papers I want to read. It works practically just as well as when I bought it. Why wouldn't I buy another? If Amazon makes a Kindle with color at 300 PPI, I will.
Sure, proper EPUB support would be nice, but if I need that I can jailbreak and install Koreader.
If there's another device with comparable hardware/software/battery, I'd consider it. AFAIK, Kindle still has the best standby battery life.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's also not mentioned is that the discontinued devices don't support KFX. KFX is the modern kindle format, AZW meanwhile is heavily PDF-based. KFX was designed ground-up by Amazon, supports every modern feature they could think of, and presumably couldn't be backported to 2013 and earlier Kindles; AZW meanwhile was basically a wrapper around a subset of PDF. KFX is a complete redo, notable enough it's what "Enhan…
The original AZW format was MOBI-based, not PDF-based. MOBI originally from a company called MobiPocket, which Amazon eventually acquired, was built to be an ePub competitor and like ePub was an HTML and JS-based solution, but in a somewhat different, proprietary DRM-friendlier container format. (ePub is "just" a ZIP file, with the DRM applied sometimes inside the container rather than outside it.) MOBI stopped keepi…
Kindle to end store downloads and registering for 1st-5th gen kindles in May
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47678320
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47690049
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47747330
Amazon is discontinuing Kindle for PC on June 30th
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Usually an unsupported device stops getting new functionality and security fixes. The unsupported Kindles lose existing functionality, i.e. the ability to add books. Not quite bricked unlike, say, Sonos, but you are limited to the books y already downloaded to them. This is inherent to DRM, and the reason why I would never have considered buying one in the first place. The eReader I have is a PocketBook Versa. Same p…
Wait, wut? How would they stop me from adding new book to my kindle? I can just plug into USB and load directly right?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98k91yy4z4o
"The move will mean owners of older Kindles, including its earliest models such as the Kindle Touch and some Kindle Fire tablets, will be unable to download new e-books."
For a more tech-oriented site, according to Ars Technica Amazon removed the ability to upload over USB:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/04/starting-in-may-pre-...
"Previously, owners of old Kindles could have worked around this loss of functionality by downloading books locally and transferring them via USB. But Amazon removed the ability to download books to a PC or Mac in February of 2025."
I don't like to brag "I told you so" but I saw this coming 16 years ago:
I can understand why one would want to move from Kindle to another device, but this article starts by complaining that support is being dropped for devices from before 2013. I can even understand being upset by this, but I have absolutely no faith that whatever other device I switch to will still be supported in 10+ years. Could be. But I sure wouldn't count on it.
In fact all Kobo e-ink devices, except the Kobo Mini, wifi, and the original one, are still getting firmware updates.
Their android-based tablets with IPS screens are all discontinued though (as far as I am aware).
This is more than Amazon ever did. They haven't updated the firmware on some of their devices that are officially "supported" in years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Usually an unsupported device stops getting new functionality and security fixes. The unsupported Kindles lose existing functionality, i.e. the ability to add books. Not quite bricked unlike, say, Sonos, but you are limited to the books y already downloaded to them. This is inherent to DRM, and the reason why I would never have considered buying one in the first place. The eReader I have is a PocketBook Versa. Same p…
Wait, wut? How would they stop me from adding new book to my kindle? I can just plug into USB and load directly right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Usually an unsupported device stops getting new functionality and security fixes. The unsupported Kindles lose existing functionality, i.e. the ability to add books. Not quite bricked unlike, say, Sonos, but you are limited to the books y already downloaded to them. This is inherent to DRM, and the reason why I would never have considered buying one in the first place. The eReader I have is a PocketBook Versa. Same p…
Wait, wut? How would they stop me from adding new book to my kindle? I can just plug into USB and load directly right?
Dvd players didn't need to know the date. The new world of constantly evolving drm schemes falls into this world, making it east to eol devices if not updated
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The old kindles can still read all previously downloaded content. Amazon's warning is literally exactly that - you can't download new books or redownload old books (i.e. AZW versions).
but that has nothing to do with what you just said. How would being able to continue to download, or purchase, old books affect the ability of authors to create books to new standards going forward? It's not like me being able to still buy an ebook version made in 2015 on my device from 2012 going to interfere with you publishing a book in 2026. That's just bricking the device in case the user ever has to reset their…
Also, maybe the publisher of that book in 2015 wants to upgrade to new ebook features for that book in 2026, for instance they want to add the physical book's original illustrations now that Kindle finally supports more illustrations. Does Amazon have to keep both of the 2015 and 2026 versions of the book depending on which device the user wants to use? How confused is the user when some of their devices have lovely illustrations and others don't? Should the user be able to choose to read the 2015 version of the file even on devices that support the 2026 version because they hate the book's illustrations and find them distracting?
(That gets into a larger discussion that Amazon has always preferred updating books in place on kindles with later editions as they are published, which archivists hate especially because the kindle doesn't have a great "edition version number" to rely on to track for when Amazon has delivered an update to a file, but which often consumers prefer because typos slowly disappear and books subtly become better than the last time you read them, presuming the Publisher isn't doing some drastic bait and switch and it focused only on "plussing" the book.)