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 poorly-implemented color, and tiny or excessively large form factors with little in between. It's kind of crazy just how much they don't seem to care.
The subtext of the article indicates that the problem isn't discontinuing support alone, but discontinuing support without offering those customers a reasonable replacement for their old devices that had keys and buttons. (Even if it's just a couple of buttons.)
These Kindles were not getting firmware updates (outside of maybe security certificates), they weren't getting new features or patches. You could just get new content.
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 to have the latest model or because I wanted to give one as a gift. They are all amazing devices.
I’ve never thought, “boy I better go online and complain about this one.” I’ve just been too busy buying and reading books on them!
That was in December, I have not bought a single book on Amazon since then, and the kindle app is not installed on my new phone. Just in case anyone from the relevant AMZN department is reading this.
Kindles last a month on a charge or two. It's very light. It's affordable.
It doesn’t show colors, but I have an android tab to read papers and technical content, anyway.
I tried looking at alternatives, but low price + extreme power efficiency + being able to sideload books is just great.
My current kindle is my third one, and is the last. I will never ever pay for a kindle to Amazon, due to its user hostility.
Oh, and also you cannot move ebooks between accounts, even not with a lot of friction, eg. support tickets, which would be a fair way to game piracy and unwanted lending, which was some inconvinience for me in a situation. Not a huge monetary loss for me, rather a reminder that when you pay to Amazon (or Valve, or any other contemporary DRM-burdened vendor) you are only leasing...
On one hand, there's folks using the vendor's OS, which looks like an abandoned custom-made Linux distro, where compiling anything is a nightmare. It's not really made to be hackable, but just to read books purchased via their partners.
OTOH, there's a near-mainline kernel, which works nicely, and hacking on the device becomes much nicer, but e-reader-oriented software seems to commonly rely on kernel APIs only present in the vendor's abandoned fork, and won't work on a more mainline Linux. But this is a great target for actually developing stuff.
I'm tempted to write my own minimal e-reader-focused DE, but honestly, I don't want another project on my hands and would like to use something that's already there.
In contrast, my iPhone changes with each update, but often I find not for the better – I hated the new control center at first, and while I made it mostly match the old one, the tap targets are smaller than they used to be, on my 4.7” display.
I put it into airplane mode years ago, and just never turned wifi on again. I use Calibre to add books to it. (I use a little usb-c to micro usb adapter).
There are places and ways to get books without DRM and still pay the authors. It's a faff first figuring things out, but once you do it a couple of times, and discover the treasure troves of standardebooks.org and the gutenberg.org, it really just becomes routine you don't even have to think much about.
In my experience it's a better device without the internet, no device updates, no weird book updates (books updating is an oddly unsettling concept to me).
Also battery life got way better, I get a few weeks of battery life as long as it's in airplane mode. (Sometimes a couple of months if I'm using it lightly.) Granted I usually leave the backlight off, there's sunlight and lamp light, you don't need backlight.
I've forgotten about it for years at a time, charged it up, and it kept working just fine.
eReaders that are really just eReaders (and not an android device with apps and nonsense) are a rare case of buy it for life devices. The best kind of device. Kinda like a good watch, I now expect an eReader to work for a decade or two. I would also expect battery replacement as a part of long term ownership, though I haven't had to replace my battery yet.
Anyways, you don't need Amazon to enjoy a kindle. Hek, it honestly gets better without Amazon meddling with it at random, and the device phoning home or w/e nonsense background traffic it runs over wifi.
Much love for Calibre!
I had a pocket book 2 for 15+ years but destroyed the display recently :/
Looking for a replacement now that is black&white, has a very good paper like screen, long battery life and allows me to read any .epub/.mobi without DRM or other bs restrictions.
I don’t need colour screen, don’t need audio support and no integrations with any shops or anything like that.
Kindle is ruled out, I looked at Kobo but the screen appeared low quality compared to my old pocket book.
Anything you can recommend here?
Brazilian Government just released a great public library of e-books: https://meclivros.mec.gov.br/
An Android e-ink reader would be perfect for it. And I'd use kindle app to read my kindle ebooks. But I don't really see people using them.
For actually reading ebooks, I'm using Koreader instead of the built-in reader because I find the UI a bit easier to get my head around. I mostly use it for PDFs related to classroom learning, but have the odd epub knocking around from project gutenburg etc.
It has Google Play support, so I can use the Libby app to access my local library's ebook collection (including offline access to travel guides - so useful). I also use the Sefaria app to read Hebrew scripture (also supports offline). These apps tend to use the battery faster than Koreader and having scrolling controls instead of page-turning controls is a bit of a pain, but quite manageable.
I haven't tried the Kindle app, but I'm sure it would work fine.
You either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain.
Planned obsolescence is always bad.
I do get the argument about lockdown. And there's some mediums I feel more strongly in that area. I suppose Amazon just has me exactly where they want me :)
Removing some old book I had was the first major red flag.
Go to your router settings and blacklist the Kindle's mac id.
Sleep peacefully that your kindle will never be bricked or wiped by a software update.
Wasn't the original concept of the Kindle that it shouldn't need to be replaced by newer models?
Why -- Aren't they also claiming productivity enhancements with AI? ;-)
And did they calculate how much environmental damage may result the decision?
Yes, like many industries I have worked in I can imagine that they are unable to cooperate because of petty greed and short-sightedness: they would rather have the whole market taken away from them than endure the possibility that some of their direct competitors get a small, temporary advantage.
It should not be hard to create truly interoperable systems that can cut Amazon out of the equation. It isn’t a technology issue. We have technology that easily solves every conceivable aspect of distributing, paying for and consuming ebooks.
This should be the ultimate opportunity for the publishing industry. Especially given that Amazon isn’t investing much in development of devices.
Totally agree that a manufacturer should provide both options - I'm just surprised to have non-standard preferences.
We have several different ecosystem e-readers in our household and all are used via USB and Calibre. The "extra time used" is won by multitude with approach where the reading stays in the center and uploading is once in a while event.
This creates a barrier for addictive bookshopping, though a reader with plenty of books allows the change of minds, not just the endless booscrrolling that a connected device enables.
All these stories of people who have been using the same Kindle for 15 years is not an Amazon success story because those people have not been buying Kindles. It's true even though Amazon makes far more on the margin of sending special locked up text files that were written by someone else.
Ofc there's the high seas, but I'd quite like to support the authors and I can afford ~£10 for a book now and then. But are there any stores as good/convenient as the Amazon one?
Its clock no longer tells correct time; but it’s fine, a book doesn’t have to do that - and I have a watch.
it magically started keeping charge recently and is working as i last remembered. i haven't been keeping tabs but the underlying computing of these kindles has been largely the same, TI-84 like, outdated scrap that happens to be enough for the slow refreshing screens.
while it's unlikely for anyone here complaining to own an affected device (that is still their daily driver), i hope they do have a major overhaul incoming which necessitates this. the main pain point with access to your purchases is indeed frustrating, but very few things in computing has lasted me this long.
From day 1 it was super laggy. Once I opened a book to read it was fine, but everything up to getting to that point was lag upon lag.
This was a new device of a new generation.
I find the Kindle UX better on my iPhone or iPad.
Turn the page
It's like people have to be taught the same lesson about SAAS over and over and over again. Like what did they expect, to not get rug pulled eventually? Crazy. You own your shit or you don't. Simple as.
Primarily use two of these for a prepper book cache. (Two is one and one is none.) The battery lasts about a month on low cost chargers, and a pair of 32GB SD cards holds my entire collection. (A redundant pair since two is one.) Whole thing sits in an EMP bag in the bugout bag of my car, so I always have my library everywhere I go.
Exporting to PDF used to be pretty straightforward; the newest encryption is a lot harder to bypass but is still possible:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/1q1uza4/successful...
After the announcement I decided to switch to physical books
- use Chrome, by Google, a company earning money with selling ads and wonder why the adblocker is not working
- use Kindle, by Amazon, a company that earns money by renting out DRM-protected content, that sees the Kindle just as a vehicle to (1) sell more of that content and (2) as a vehicle to lock you to their platform
Please for the love of the universe, just start to factor in the incentives a company has when selling you a thing. Before buying my Kobo reader 12 years ago (still going strong!), the first thing I researched is how to get out of Amazon DRM hell. The answer is: get a reader by a company that sells readers as a main business and has an incentive to make sure they work and use it together with something like Calibre, so you have all your books if you lose the thing somewhere. If you're going to the powerful quasi-monopolist, that may be cheaper in the short term, but what about the time you lose when they eventually hold your whole library hostage or decide to drop support on something you relied on? You're not the person picking when that happens.
If I sum up how much I spent on books in 12 years that Kobo has paid for itself 50 times over and I still don't think there is any reason to replace it with something newer.
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On the other hand, I view my kindle as an appliance, and I don’t need it to have updated functionality. I think this is true of many electronics: digital cameras, printers, misc USB peripherals, etc. I believe Amazon could easily support the APIs it uses, and keep delivering me books that I’ve paid for or borrowed.
Financially, I suspect the kindle devices have a much longer lifetime than iPhones do, and Amazon is still making $$ off of old kindles.
If there were TLS concerns, a partial disablement (ex: can’t buy books from the device) would be way more acceptable than a complete cutoff. I’ve seen suggestions that it’s a DRM issue, and if that’s the primary motivation, it’s pretty disappointing.
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.
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 change. 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.
> 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.
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 negative, especially when factoring in opportunity cost for a business (help the old users or spend that time/money making a new feature for the majority)
my thought on it is if its a subscription, maybe for some software, the longer someone uses the old version the subscription cost could go up slowly, or if its a one-time purchase, after x years they could just buy a support ticket or something...? for ad-supported software i have no ideas...
You can’t equate that to providing ongoing updates and support for a $100 hardware device indefinitely.
They replaced the product, but they kept buying the parts and updating the software for the old one. And customers were absolutely still sending back their broken ones getting at cost replacements.
It was like looking at a well engineered, thoughtfully maintained hole in the bottom of a cruise liner.
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Source? I've never heard of this, and I used to work there, including building the OS from source (though my contributions to the OS were pretty minimal). If you just put a .mobi file onto the storage, how does it have any idea where it came from?
> If you don't allow the device to connect to the internet, yes
Why is that a problem for a device which has been EoL'd?
(They have also been scanned and are available on archive.org; the copyright is long expired and they're public domain.)
Now, even Nintendo destroys your hardware if you do something they dont like.
Like every one of these terrible companies, Im 100% sure that if they could update the NES firmware to destroy the console or sabotage it, they would.
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I used to be able to read books on it and watch Netflix.
My iphone is a boat anchor next to the sleek, slick iPod.
TV, refrigerator, recorder, whatever electronics, broke down and I or my parents would take it to one of several repair locations around town.
Software coming in eproms or disks meant QA was actually a thing to get right, not as online updates that eventually stop.
Sad even
I think there is a smaller argument that the newer Kindles don't feel as nice. The Oasis was the pinnacle of e-reader hardware design, and it'll be sad when they stop supporting it, but it certainly won't be worthy of a news article or this kind of reaction.
To me it would. If they don't have a similar device released by that time.
It would get me motivated enough to finally de-DRM all the books on my device (or pirate copies I can't otherwise decrypt) and copy them to a third party something like a Kobo Reader or whatnot.
I am firmly in the Kindle ecosystem sort of by accident and inertia, but if they were to end support of the only device that meets my needs (page turn buttons and waterproof - which for the latter to be useful you need the former) it'd be the end of Kindles for me forever, and I'd certainly bitch a lot about it on-line!
If they end support for it 12 year after release but offer a reasonable upgrade path? I'd grin and bear it. 12 years is a decent amount of time for a $200 device.
Yeah, it's the smells wherever you go problem.
And the sad part is that there's no best of both. You can't get a kindle paperwhite with buttons.
So until they can figure out how to make touch screen work in those conditions, any device released without page turn buttons is useless to me.
It's not a preference thing for me. It's simply a physical requirement for my environment.
Yes, I do understand I'm a rather niche use-case and don't really expect them to pander to me. But I will be vocal about it just so they know I exist! There are at least dozens of us!
The fact I can continue to buy refurbished Oasis units whenever I leave one in airplane seatback pocket is the only reason I'm still on the Kindle ecosystem. The second I cannot make that work it's off to third party for me and they will lose an infinitesimal portion of their captured audience for future book purchases.
There's multiple touch zones (which aren't visible or marked), there's multiple gestures you can interact with, and it's so slow and janky enough that you never know what will happen when you touch it.
Will it go forwards? Or backwards? By one page? Or a dozen? Will it open the settings? Or change the brightness? Or just close the book? You never know.
I want to lose myself in the book, I want to forget the device even exists, not fight the device for half a minute whenever it decides to go forward by 11 pages, open the settings, change the font and brightness just because I wanted to go one page back
The problem with a buttonless word is that it doesn’t have buttons.
Anyone who’s ever even seen a button from a distance has immediately known a world with buttons is superior to a world without buttons.
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is it kindle, no but can i read a book on it yeah. easily.
Also "but people buy it anyway" is terrible way to disregard legitimate criticizm without thinking
To be fair, I don’t think the criticisms are illegitimate by your definition, I just think they’re pointless and from vocal crybabies.
I’m sure Amazon has enough actual customer data to make their product decisions based on what moves the most volume.
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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
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?
In my experience soft DRM is very common, hard DRM not so much.
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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.
Also, koreader!
The newer battery is nice and usb-c is a big upgrade instead of finding my last mini usb (or whatever it was). I think I'm down to just one last thing on that stupid cable (a camping lantern).
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Just US and UK have family accounts.
I keep it offline in airplane mode permanently from 2016 and haven't seen a single ad in a long long time.
I have my 2016 one setup without a password so when I open my cover the device unlocks, so I never really even see the ad unless I try.
The ads are only shown while it's off, they're static black and white images, and 99% of the time they're for books. Totally unobjectionable.
If they were in the actual UI and for stuff like cars and perfume I might mind, but they aren't so I never cared.
Speak for yourself. Aside from the principle, some of us don’t want to be advertised to in the comfort of our own home/bed/while we’re camping or whatever. Ads don’t have to be actively flashing, spaz-inducing insanity to be objectionable.
Not to mention that by definition an ad like this WILL be seen and attended to, even if only momentarily. That in itself is also objectionable.
But then I also understand that'd increase the price by 10% and only help right handed people with weak hands so... c'est la vie.
You can... turn them upside down to become a left-handed device. That way you can be weak-handed with either hand!
Those have been around since day 1 afaik - my second gen kindle had them over ~12 years ago
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On the plus side, with your setup, you can have the lowest friction ebook experience possible on planet Earth by installing koreader, and then the z-library plugin.
I sold my color eInk device after trying it for two days, and went back to B&W.
I have a Kobo I keep at home. I love it, but don’t want to risk breaking it while carrying it around in my backpack, and it’s too big to comfortably hold on a crowded BART (let alone to dig around in my bag to get it out and put it away). The X4 is always in my pants pocket during the commute and small enough to break out wherever I am. Also, it’s small enough to not feel fragile, and cheap enough that it wouldn’t be devastating if I broke it anyway.
The only missing feature is a backlight for reading at night.
Pocket Book still makes eink ereaders, though. Is there something wrong with their offerings if you stuck with one of their products for 15 years?
I’ll also take a look at the newer pocket books - I only stuck so long with my old one because it worked perfectly fine and there was no reason to get a new device.
I can just get the Ebook or PDF files and transfer them via Calibre, simple as that, and I can also download any Android app i want. There are tons of apps out there that support eInk screens.
They aren’t bricking the devices, they are making them not work with the Amazon store and library features anymore. My Kindle Keyboard (3rd generation device) still works perfectly well with sideloaded books. It’s jailbroken and runs KOReader, which lets you read ePub directly.
It’s easier to read things on my Kindle Keyboard than on my original iPad.
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 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
It's 10 inches, which I find to be a bit too large for an E-Reader. But for surfing the web and note taking this is a terrific device. Boox has smaller Android devices.
I don't know if I love it yet but I read seven ebooks in a month on it, so I guess it's been a good purchase. The android kindle app has a neat smooth scrolling feature that works really well.
Err, no. Something “existing” is not the same as something being supported. Is the original printer still providing free translations to modern languages? Fixing typos and other mistakes? Adding chapters on a regular basis?
It’s kinda ludicrous to call the fact that a thing didn’t spontaneously disappear “support”.
Given, the kindle won't last 500 years, but the support window is in some senses longer than for those 500-year-old books, which never received a single security update.
Like great jokes, it has a point.
14 year support window is pretty good. Not being able to get a modern device with buttons, and having no way to read your books with buttons, isn't.
If your product doesn't work without support, you have villain aspects from day 1.
What is discontinued is integration with Amazon account. Which seems fair to me to be fair.
An original-model Kindle has more of its original functionality than an original-model iPad.
(Though even if that is the case, I'd still think they could have at least agreed on open standards to use, to prevent anyone like Amazon from creating vendor lock-in.)
But Amazon had advantages from its size. In terms of economies of scale for device manufacturing, publishers could have somewhat caught up if they pooled money to invest in a co-owned company that made devices (though still wouldn't have had such an advantage as Amazon, who could share R&D and production costs with any overlaps to other devices such as smart home speakers, Android tablets, etc.) But Amazon was also able to take a bigger picture approach, using cheap Kindles/ebooks to attract people into their ecosystem and then converting a not-insignificant amount of them to buying other stuff on Amazon.
Devices are not a real problem. You don’t need scale to get hold of affordable readers in bulk. There’s lots of them available and if the market were to grow, there would be even more devices. Today these devices are not very useful as putting content on them is awkward and fragmented. If that pain went away, there would be a huge market.
I think the problem is that Amazon would retaliate. And the publishing industry are too afraid of challenging them. Because they have never been able to get their act together before.
Now a fourth one (Kobo) in use and all the previous ones still fully functional and in use by close ones.
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I make a lot of use of my local library through the native Overdrive integration.
This is somewhat annoying. Please don't offer only one storefront as a place to buy your work.
For some reason, they're inclined to trust Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Kindle/dp/B0CNVCQZG1/
This is the first one that pops up if you search "kindle" on Amazon.
I'm not sure how more clearly you could show the variants with and without ads.
Damn near impossible to find DRM free books to purchase though.
My method has always been to buy physical books (which is also better to support the author, because they get a bigger % of the price you pay.
And then, there are other creative ways to download the ebook... (without buying from Amazon, or other monopolists.)
Ironically, files downloaded from "other" sources have no issue. So they're just making it harder to buy from Amazon legally.
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Been super happy with my Kobo Clara.
Got a USB expander dongle on AliExpress for something like six bucks that breaks out a few USB 2 ports and the Kobo is happy as a clam. So am I now, because the Kobo is great.
It’s not too disgusting, and over-the-air is nice to have.
Voice input or autocorrect?
Try estimating doing win11 updates on a 20 year old piece of delphi spftware with hardware full go custom ASICs be expected to lsat?
It’s ok to stop providing updates to old software and hardware.
It’s OK to not support ancient devices when writing news software.
It’s not ok to make old devices inoperable if they are using the old software and don’t need updates.
Will my old Kindle stop being able to show me the books I bought and downloaded to it? Or will it become impossible to buy new books? If it’s the earlier, it’s borderline criminal. If it’s the latter, I’m unhappy but understand realities.
The point is that e-books are basically a data format plus a reader, and if the data format hasn't changed (it hasn't) and a reader is still working, what is gained by preventing that reader from being given new data to present?
amzn doesn't have to "provide support" for old kindles, but they also don't need to prevent them from downloading ebooks.
Until it dies due to unintentional software or hardware defect.
NOT when it is sabotaged by the manufacturer.
They only had a joke of a payout, and no criminal charges? Thats the console youre using as an example???
If we actually had real jurisprudence for the Public, Sony execs would be in prison for felony hacking, and the payout would have been treble the cost of console payable to each owner. Then lawyer fees would be on top of that (not removed from treble damages).
Are you normally reading in a moving vehicle or something?
Indeed I am! My primary use case for the kindle is to use it on the train.
> which has much larger touch zones than the normal Kindle software.
That may actually be the reason why. The regular software is extremely sensitive to gestures and has small touch zones, so it's easy to miss the zone, or trigger a gesture, instead of clicking what you want to click.
I also frequently have to go back a page or two and re-read a section or two, so if I read physical books I always have my fingers placed so I can go back a page or two easily, and on the kindle that works a lot less reliably (especially due to the ~500ms latency on the paperwhite).
Wheras on the Kindle 4 with the forward/back buttons on both sides it was really convenient to actually go back and forth (and instant, as flipping a page back or forth on the kindle 4 never triggered a full display refresh)
Is this something people aren’t supposed to do?
Which I can't with a touchscreen kindle with a "back" zone that's 5mm wide and easy to miss. And even then the back zone only works if I keep the finger perfectly still, as even the slightest movement is interpreted as a "forwards" gesture.
And no, it's not cheaper. They were 40€/80€ back then, which would be 54€ and 108€ respectively, and now the equivalent model costs 109€.
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 2024, a year and a half ago. This was a recent enough phenomena that these complaints make sense. Amazon still has a chance to get with the times and release an eReader with buttons.
There is not. It’s the same 11 people who have a hobby of posting online about how much they miss buttons.
This sentiment is widespread enough to be a common point of comedy and conflict, and it's widespread enough problem that consumer intelligence companies have been reporting on this for years ( https://www.jdpower.com/sites/default/files/file/2025-09/202... , https://www.vibilagare.se/english/physical-buttons-outperfor... , https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/tesla/model-y/2020/road... , etc.) If you spend time in the lobby of a kiosk-only fast-food, you are sure to hear someone complain too.
I know "touchscreens are the future and those button-lovers are rarities who will die out soon" was a popular thing to believe, but that was back in the 00s. People like b uttons.
> dismisses user wishes and calls people “vocal crybabies”
I’m honestly amazed how someone can lack so much self-awareness.
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.
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
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BTW, slapping a pop socket on the back so I can comfortably read with one hand was a game changer.
But what a sad world we live in…
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And it’s an ad on the lock screen, not an ad interrupting your reading. I buy the ad free versions though.
If you turn it upside down the left hand buttons will be way too high on the reader
I was skeptical of the "lopsided" design at first but it grew on me and is what I'd prefer in future devices from here on out.
But all you are losing is the ability to use the Amazon store and borrowing that requires DRM. It still works fine as an e-Ink reader.
Anecdotally, the OSes on the really old ones are easily jailbroken. They have never updated them to an unbreakable one that I am aware of.
More than I can say for my first-gen iPads, which would still be wonderful devices for reading books today. I have a Kindle because it is, and long has been, the cheapest e-Ink device. It’s my reading-outdoors device; I don’t use it except at the beach/pool.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Calibre/comments/1q1uza4/successful...
If publishers/authors want my money, they can release a version without DRM.
Calibre web and calibre web automated downloader remove a fair bit of the clunk.