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Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers

reuters.com

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Re: Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers

#221

Post by sails »

MerlinDE wrote: post #184

This move has nothing to do with usability or device capabilities or software support. The only reason for turning them off is to remove a hole in their DRM. These old devices allowed you to remove the copy protection from their books (hardly anyone else uses DRM these days anymore). Removing the old devices makes freeing your books from DRM just much harder.

Yes.

I often laugh (cry) at the Kindle Product Manager team who ship nothing but DRM updates.

How about a dictionary modal where the font is the same size as the page text..? Hard to imagine what they do all day, given they do seem to force updates but nothing seems to improve

Re: Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers

#222

Post by segmondy »

Aloha wrote: post #107
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #34

Amazon's attitude towards its Kindle device customers is one of lofty disregard. Every time they announce new Kindle products, half of the comments are like "I hope they have buttons," "I hope they bring back the Oasis," etc. But they appear to exult in dashing the hopes of their customers, or at the very least they don't care about them at all. They've doubled down on no-key devices with stupid pens, pointless and p…

14 years of support for a device is pretty incredible.

you think? i can bring up my 40 yrs old NES and it works every time.

Re: Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers

#223

Post by unfitted2545 »

teruakohatu wrote: post #113
qingcharles wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be a hot e-reader right now: https://www.reddit.com/r/xteinkereader/

I really don’t understand the hype of that product. It’s like an entrepreneur with social media marketing skills came across a container full of really cheap small eink displays, then designed a product and marketing around it.

The reason it's trending right now is because it's a convenient price, simple to use and making people read more because of its size. If it helps people cut down on phone use then it's a good product.

The build quality could be better, but there doesn't exist a similar product with better build quality.

Can you build a DIY version that's significantly cheaper?

Well, this was my thinking for getting one, we shall see when it arrives :P

Edit: Also you can choose to install a nice open source community firmware

Re: Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers

#224

Post by neoromantique »

Aloha wrote: post #107
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #34

Amazon's attitude towards its Kindle device customers is one of lofty disregard. Every time they announce new Kindle products, half of the comments are like "I hope they have buttons," "I hope they bring back the Oasis," etc. But they appear to exult in dashing the hopes of their customers, or at the very least they don't care about them at all. They've doubled down on no-key devices with stupid pens, pointless and p…

14 years of support for a device is pretty incredible.

It says a lot about our world that artificially discontinuing a fully functional device (thankfully mine are offline and jailbroken) is "pretty incredible".

Sad even

Re: Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers

#225

Post by swiftcoder »

ladyanita22 wrote: post #191
al_borland wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems they’ve gone out of their want to make them useless. They could have ended official support, while still allowing users to download ebooks from the store and side loading them through a computer. However, before killing support, they eliminated the ability to download ebooks to the computer.

But you can still sideload them, right?

If you don't allow the device to connect to the internet, yes. Kindles are somewhat infamous for updates that wipe storage if they think you are side loading pirate ebooks

Re: Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers

#226

Post by lwhi »

andrekandre wrote: post #153
_doctor_love wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(This may be a very ungenerous reading of your comment, so my apologies if this is not what you mean.) The phrase that jumps out at me is: > being able to cut off support for a 12 year systems would make my life much more full of joy I think this is a nearly-poetical capturing of the core problem. The focus is on the joy and well-being of the maintainer, not the impact to all the people who will be impacted by this c…

> Possibly some people rely on these devices and it adversely impact their joy and livelihood when support is ended. This happens over and over again in tech. its true and i agree with you as a user on the other hand, some software gets harder and costlier to support the longer its out there (think spec changes, security issues, updates in law etc), and even paying a normal subscription for it can cause roi to go neg…

This reminds me of the time we needed to support IE6.

Re: Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers

#228

Post by u_fucking_dork »

anonymars wrote: post #159
ryandrake wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like the 3.5mm headphone jack, which a very vocal bunch of people are still complaining about, 10 years after iPhone got rid of it.

I traded occasionally making my life more difficult, and in return I got what? My old phone was equally waterproof

Keep buying phones with headphone jacks and removable batteries then. They exist. If every social media user that whined about these things acted with their wallet maybe they’d be able to change something.

Re: Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers

#229

Post by u_fucking_dork »

wiseowise wrote: post #176
paulcole wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every time they announce new Kindle products, half of the comments are like "I hope they have buttons," "I hope they bring back the Oasis," etc. WWII fighter plane with red spots on it dot gif. The vast majority of people who buy Kindles simply read books on them and don’t repeatedly cry online about features that are never coming back. I’ve bought about 10 of the things dating back to 2012 either because I wanted…

Ultimate consoomer. Eats whatever shit it’s being fed and doesn’t complain. Powers that be know better what is good for you anyway, right?

[flagged]

Re: Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers

#230

Post by u_fucking_dork »

blcknight wrote: post #208
cvcount wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hardly anyone else uses DRM these days anymore I thought that all the major ebook stores had DRM on most purchases, and it was just a few indie publishers choosing to be DRM-free. Has that changed?

It hasn't changed, and I don't know why people are saying that most books don't have DRM. It is only a small minority. Tor books is the largest publisher without it (owned by Macmillan). Otherwise everything is truly hard DRM either ACSM with epub or Kindle's. They are both more or less easily defeated though.

Because these are people that don’t buy the books anyway. They pirate them and put them onto their 2010 Chinese ebook reader.
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