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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

#331

Post by bborud »

swores wrote: post #323
carlosjobim wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not very familiar with anti-cartel laws (in any country), but I wonder if there would be legal issues preventing publishing companies from working together in such a way even if they otherwise had wanted to? Then all syndication services would have been banned, including Spotify, Netflix, and so on.

There definitely are ways that publishers could have avoided falling foul of anti-Cartel legislation (my question was about where the line is, ie if they did it legally would it actually benefit them), but... Spotify and Netflix aren't owned or created by a syndicate of all the major publishers, so that's not actually a counter point. There's a huge difference legally speaking between a company negotiating with lots…

Have we really come to a point where the only business structures we can envision are huge monopolies playing zero-sum games?

Imagine if every publisher offered every book to every service that sells it to consumers? And are free to sell their own and other publishers books? They could even include Amazon. Yes, it would require DRM and a bit of software infrastructure, but guess what: they could choose to fund development of an open source system for managing this.

They can do this. But they won’t. They’d rather be beholden to Bezos and not even try.

I’ll repeat myself: they’d rather get collectively screwed than risk that a competitor might get a small advantage.

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

#332

Post by gradstudent »

lostlogin wrote: post #67
crtasm wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kobo's devices let you bypass the account signup via a single option in a config file. Whether you do so or not it's easy to install koreader and start writing plugins for it. You can also hack on the linux OS they use

You can also sync to your own library - eg calibreweb. It’s not too disgusting, and over-the-air is nice to have.

How do you sync over the air with calibre-web? My understanding is that you can only use sideloading, or a device that supports reading on the web?

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

#333

Post by u_fucking_dork »

kuschku wrote: post #263
u_fucking_dork wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are — all non-flagships do still have headphone jacks, even the Pixel A lineup kept them for many many years after the mainline Pixel phones dropped them. And the reason most phones keep these is because wireless headphones are in the end luxury. They're not necessary, they're not even significantly better, but they're in the end a class symbol.

They are significantly more convenient. No wired to tangle or snag on anything. Seamless handoff between all your devices. It’s genuinely a better user experience.

They don’t sound better, but if you care about sound quality over ux then you’re even luckier nowadays than any time prior because you can plug an amp/dac into your phone

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

#334

Post by kuschku »

u_fucking_dork wrote: post #333
kuschku wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are — all non-flagships do still have headphone jacks, even the Pixel A lineup kept them for many many years after the mainline Pixel phones dropped them. And the reason most phones keep these is because wireless headphones are in the end luxury. They're not necessary, they're not even significantly better, but they're in the end a class symbol.

They are significantly more convenient. No wired to tangle or snag on anything. Seamless handoff between all your devices. It’s genuinely a better user experience. They don’t sound better, but if you care about sound quality over ux then you’re even luckier nowadays than any time prior because you can plug an amp/dac into your phone

I see this every day in our video calls. There's always

1. The user whose jabra headset is intermittently cutting in or out, or whose airpods are empty, who then switches to macbook speakers & microphones

2. The user user whose left airpod is still playing music from the iphone and only the right airpod did the handover correctly

3. The user whose airpods manage to noise cancel his own voice away

And this isn't every now and then, I see at least two out of these three users every single day. No matter which company, which client, every single day, for years. This is not an exaggeration, it's absolutely maddening.

And honestly, I don't care about the cable tangling or snagging if it at least reliably works.

Then there's the other issue of latency. Wireless headphones, even airpods on MacBooks, have horrible and unpredictable latency. The OS tries to hide it from you, but if you're doing live video/audio/broadcast, they're absolutely useless. I do volunteer work in that field, and over the past years it's gotten worse and worse with volunteers bringing wireless headphones, which they can't use for critical audio/video work.

And honestly, I don't care about the audiophile grade quality, we had good enough quality for free in every device, there was no reason to remove the 3.5mm port. Every current-gen midrange phone still has them, and Sony even keeps them on the flagships (which is why I buy Sony, and recommend everyone else to do so as well).

It's great that the best-case scenario is better. But like with FPS, the experience is primarily determined not by the average, but by the 95th percentile.

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

#335

Post by timc3 »

paulcole wrote: post #249
lynndotpy wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Crying" is needlessly dismissive and it doesn't strengthen your position. I'm happy there is a mass of popular sentiment that consumer devices are better with buttons. I think they're to whom we can credit the return (or addition of new) buttons to cars, to phones, and to all manner of appliances (induction stoves, thermostats, ACs.) In either case, it looks like the last Kindle with buttons disappeared only late 20…

> I'm happy there is a mass of popular sentiment that consumer devices are better with buttons There is not. It’s the same 11 people who have a hobby of posting online about how much they miss buttons.

We must be operating in completely different circles, because I can’t remember the last time I came across someone that didn’t prefer buttons in a lot of sensible scenarios.

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

#336

Post by ZeWaka »

stevewodil wrote: post #85
ZeWaka wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are newer ones with physical buttons.

There are but it's discontinued. There is no current generation model with page turn buttons.

damn - didn't realize they discontinued the Oasis, rip

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

#337

Post by anonymars »

kuschku wrote: post #329
anonymars wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This very much depends on region Also I think the more serious issue is the SD card slot. The missing headphone jack is annoying, but you can work around it with an adapter. Not so for the card slot

You can work around the SD card just as "easily" as you can work around the card slot, as you can just always keep a usb-c sd card reader plugged into the phone. Obviously, both of them are absolutely silly "solutions" to problems that wouldn't have been necessary in the first place.

You can keep the adapter attached to the headphones and it's not an insurmountable hassle

You certainly can't realistically keep an SD card dongle permanently sticking out of your phone to store your photos/etc.

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

#338

Post by Aloha »

_doctor_love wrote: post #136
Aloha wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm supporting a 30 year old product, the oldest one in the field are 20+ years old, we still support them. I'm just in the process of developing a lifecycle policy, being able to cut off support for a 12 year systems would make my life much more full of joy.

(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…

You try building software with a version of Delphi that wont run on something newer than windows 7 and tell me how well that works out for you.

Some of those customers cannot be upgraded without hardware replacement, we can sell them a brand new system that will do everything (and more) their old one will, but they dont want to spend the money, and we are happy to take the money for support (the old CAPEX vs OPEX argument).

Some of this is sorta easy, its COTS hardware, but we also have much older systems that due to component obsolescence I simply cannot build replacements anymore. 10+ years of support ought to be enough for 90% of the products out there, at some point the answer really is “upgrade your hardware” - we didn’t sign up to indefinitely support not just hardware (much of which we cannot build spares for) much less the software ecosystem around the hardware.

Long term I plan on increasing support renewal costs for systems that are older than 10 years old to encourage hardware refreshes.

Like I still have to have XP VM’s to build firmware for older products, when is it reasonable to cut off service and support?

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

#339

Post by Aloha »

happyopossum wrote: post #133
Aloha wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm supporting a 30 year old product, the oldest one in the field are 20+ years old, we still support them. I'm just in the process of developing a lifecycle policy, being able to cut off support for a 12 year systems would make my life much more full of joy.

Presumably that “support” you officer is tied to a nice fat multi-year support contract, no? You can’t equate that to providing ongoing updates and support for a $100 hardware device indefinitely.

It is, but I cant build them spares (not even thru broker bought parts) anymore. At some point you have to force the customer to say goodbye.

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

#340

Post by Aloha »

Zambyte wrote: post #306
NetMageSCW wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are companies that will make deals with tens of thousands of book publishers and provide storage and access for millions of books, magazines and comics? I suppose they will do it for free?

How do you know what Aloha does?

I dont think they read any of the parallel posts.

For (others) reference the oldest bits of code in our software are from the mid-late 90’s and the oldest systems still paying for support rely on parts to build that is not available at any price, its all just made of unobtainium, whereas I can sell them a brand news that does everything they have today and more.

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