alt Hacker NewsWhat does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?
Comments
Buying the physical book from Amazon isn’t a great way to stick it to Bezos. Just have your local bookstore order it for you, it’s easy.
Nothing is going to happen. Amazon is like a very large redwood tree that is all grown. It has no interest in fire, drought, animal life, human culture, or anything else you value. Your old Kindle is as one of its pinecones on a mantelpiece somewhere.
Great! You currently have just one other comment pointing out that Bezos is no longer CEO, as if that were a piece of information that would make even the slightest difference in this matter. Unfortunately, my comment isn't any more sympathetic either. These people couldn't care less whether you can continue reading the digital books you've already purchased on your existing device or not. And yet you insist on paying for these books instead of just pirating them outright. Sorry, but that's exactly what Nietzsche called "slave morality." You're making a virtue out of clinging to the very structure that disadvantages you. And that whole "commercial incompetence" thing can't really be true, can it? The company dominates e-commerce, and the guy has enough cash to fly into space in his own rocket. So the business hasn't gone under yet just because it missed out on a few book sales to nerds with old devices. I find your whole perspective kind of baffling. I realized right from the start that I would either buy digital books as fully functional PDFs or continue to buy paper books that I could put on my bookshelf, because anything else would amount to exactly what you're describing now. And a small suggestion for improving your workflow: first check to see if the book is available on a torrent site, and only buy it afterward.
It’s cute he thinks Jeff Bezos thinks about this. Whoever made this decision has probably never met anybody who has met Jeff Bezos.
I have an older kindle and I can still load it with epubs by emailing the unique kindle address. I think there are other ways too, via USB for example.
My understanding is that it's only downloading via the amazon kindle store that is no longer supported for devices that are considered end-of-life, which makes sense to me personally. The kindle web browser is probably based on an ancient android version of chrome. That browser is not going to last forever.
It's an exceptionally odd decision, but planned for approx. a year now.
- First they stopped allowing download of purchased books for cable-transfer to kindle in 2025.
- Then they amped up their effort to avoid jailbreaking by suddenly releasing more firmware updates than before.
- Now they stopped supporting a wide range of kindles.
Amazon obviously assumes that they sufficiently killed the competition so they don't need to worry about customers leaving.
As for me, I managed to exit on-time, applied a jailbreak on my kindle touch and now buy my books elsewhere...
I’ve got an old DX. The fact that it doesn’t have net access anymore is now a security feature and an anti distraction mechanism. I can load what I want by USB. It doesn’t do epub3 which is a problem, but it does PDFs and conversion tricks are possible.
The Amazon ecosystem isn’t uniquely untrustworthy, but it’s not where I want to keep future electronic purchases.
For those of you who don't want to pirate, there are legal means to do this.
1. But the book on kobo or ebooks 2. Convert it to mobi and transfer it Kindle using calibre
on the other hand 14 years of usage of a ~100$ device sounds ok. these days you need to be happy if things last more than a few months…
Never been happier that i bought a kobo instead of a kindle years ago
I used to read the New York Times on my kindle. It was great: delivered each morning, no waste paper by the afternoon, a simple subscription, etc. I was on my 4th kindle at least, which says more about the use I got out of them than their endurance. And then the service disappeared for reasons I never really understood.
I extracted my books from my kindle over a year ago. Never buying books from Amazon again. EPUB on iOS works great.
Kobo e-readers can connect directly to library e-book stores and download many titles directly for free from libraries.
tbh the dev support/infra for the old devices was probably more than the money they were making in sales on those devices. They noticed and just decided to cut them off and that was the extent of that decision.
Shoutout to https://libro.fm/ which is a non-Amazon Audible that lets you:
- Buy nearly any audiobook that's on Audible or other services
- Donate to your favorite local bookstore
- Get the downloadable audio file without DRM
I’m the worst of the worst. I only buy second hand paper books. Then I give them to someone when I’ve read them!
This is incidentally after a kindle phase terminated by Amazon after I returned too much of their third rate junk that didn’t work for me to remain a profitable customer.
Fuck ‘em.
[dead]
I buy paper books. So far zero have been stolen by Jeff Bezos. They take up a bit of space but there are always trade offs.
> Well, from now on the workflow will be:
> - Find the book I want on Amazon.
> - Buy it.
> - Find the same book on a torrent site.
> - Download it.
> - Physically copy it onto the Kindle via a USB cable.
Wait a second... you're rewarding Amazon and the publisher for their bad behavior by continuing to buy from Amazon? Nothing about this plan is discouraging the problem.
Cut out the middlemen. Torrent it and send the author some money.