On February 26th, Kindle customers will lose the ability to download eBook purchases directly to their PC. If you want to switch to a rival eReader brand in the future, I suggest that you use the soon-to-be discontinued “Download and Transfer via USB” feature to archive your Kindle library.

  • major_jellyfish@lemmy.caEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    3Easier said than done. Had a quick search. In 45km of my home there is not one reMarkable, PineNone or Bookeen. There is 2 kobos. And around 200 kindles. Kindes are starting at 5 bucks for ones that look a little beat up. Kobos are 80 bucks. You can still avoid buying most books from amazon. Obviously not all. Even owning Kobo there are some books you end up buying from Amazon. They have the largest foreign language library. There are thousands of popular books which you cannot get in a foreign language anywhere else these days. And you have to acknowledge that most people in the world are not reading books in English.

    Sometimes you can get a solid deal. If youre super patient or lucky. But the 2nd hand market will generally always follow the market distribution of retail.

    So long as kindle is domninating. 2nd hand users are gonna be heavily pressured into buying kindle.

    I wholeheartedly agree that we shouldnt support amazon and i do think they are making kindles a pain.

    But i dont think you can expect people to just find 2nd hand alternatives like what you listed. Especially when you consider the demographic of people shopping for eraders.

    This is why i find these kinds of comment chains futile. We all love to vote with our money, but its not that simple for a lot of people. Maybe instead of this “you get what you deserve” attitude we could put more energy towards promoting the jailbreaks and trying to make those as accessible as possible for your chineese grandma to be able to do it herself on her Windows Vista. Not to mention that there is 0 value in telling anyone that bought a new kindle that they deserve whats comming. At best they sell their kindle when they buy a kobo perpetuating the cycle. At worst they trash it and contribute the already growing problems of ewaste.

    • utopiah@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      17 hours ago

      FWIW my point isn’t about shaming people, it’s to make buyers fully aware of the consequence of their actions, both political and ecological. My point is to show that actual alternatives exist and yes they are more rare and expensive (probably also because they are rare, which is by design for Amazon, they do have scale in mind from the founding of the company, they undercut in order to dominate all marketplaces!). I genuinely wish the options I listed were both cheaper and more available. Now… it’s a bit like buying clothes from Primark vs e.g. Patagonia. The pricing is radically different, and their are both selling clothes, but I’d argue they are NOT the same products, including the ecological impact. So… again, not trying to shame anyone, solely show that alternatives, with different trade off, do actually exist TODAY. Every time one person try to go with the cheap and popular, they are tipping the scale to, IMHO, worst solutions for everyone else, including the 2nd hand market.