At this point, Amazon is treating Kindle like Texas Instruments is treating their graphing calculators. Both have entrenched monopolies and have no need whatsoever to improve their product, which being able to sell them at ridiculous margin. It's laughable how much a new Kindle costs the consumer vs how much it actually costs to manufacture. If this were a non-monopolistic market then many competitors would be leaping into the fray with superior products at a fraction of the cost, but because Amazon isn't forced to grant them access to the Kindle store, it's not even possible to compete.

This is a clear example of an area where consumers are suffering from a monopolistic grip over the market.

I think some onus is on Apple, the only other player that could deliver hardware and has A complete store for books.

I understand it that they would not release any ink devices that fragment their product lineup beyond iPhone and iPad.

However, Apple‘s lack of action in providing quality reading experiences that reduce eyestrain and effectively Compete means that everyone has to deal with Amazon’s garbage.

I hate to say it but I think reading is a niche market. Not enough people do it, a lot more people want to watch YouTube then read Cormac McCarthy.

I'm with you up until the last point.

Reading is decidedly not niche in the US. Books (across all formats) are a huuuge market. They're roughly 2/3rds the size of the entire videogaming industry in this country, by revenue. The total annual revenue of the US book publishing industry is greater than YouTube's (but just barely).

To be fair, even if your claims about the market are true, books could still be niche. The reason is that books cost $20 and take a few hours to read, so let's conservatively say publishers are making $5/hr of reading time. YouTube is making pennies per hour of video watch time. So if it's true that the revenue of the book publishing industry is approximately equal to that of YouTube, then the average person is spending vastly more time watching YouTube than reading books. In comparison, books are still likely to be incredibly niche.

> let's conservatively say publishers are making $5/hr of reading time

except a huge portion of the reading market is from libraries and other free sources of content. Few people buy every single book they read new.

Wow. Then how do you explain the malaise? Could it be ebooks are a fraction of that?

E-books are doing pretty well.

It's a flat-out monopoly. Amazon has a strangehold on the market. If you only had to compete on the hardware, then you'd see competitors. But you need to compete with the entire market ecosystem, which is very hard.

It's like the mobile phone industry, except instead of two unassailable players there's only a single one.

Honestly I wouldn't even mind that, but they are making kindles worse as generations go by.

First they removed the page turn buttons, then they took a small step forward by releasing the Voyage which had pseudo-buttons (you could squeeze the sides of the device and it'd vibrate to give haptic feedback) so at least you didn't have to use a touch screen to turn pages, but then they released the Oasis which has a weird as hell non-symmetrical form factor which means you have to flip the device when you change the hand you are holding it with if you want to use the buttons.

Being able to push buttons on either side of the device to turn pages was one of the best "features" a kindle had over a conventional book for me. Not having it just feels like such a huge step back

Don't Kindles cost a lot to make simply due to the expensive display? E-Ink has a monopoly pretty much which keeps costs high

Monochrome e-ink displays are quite a mature technology at this point, and aren't very expensive. You can go on Alibaba for quotes on bulk rates for e-ink displays.

I'm fully aware I'm the minority, but I only read DRM-free books. What's a good ebook reader I can get these days that has good bang for buck?

I only read DRM-free books, and I just use a 5-year-old Kindle Paperwhite. You can use Calibre to convert ePub to mobi, and then view it just fine on Kindles.

You can also get a used Kindle Paperwhite for pretty darn cheap. I wouldn't recommend going to earlier Kindle generations prior to the Paperwhite, because they didn't have backlights which makes reading in low light conditions (like bed) a lot less pleasurable.

I already have a Paperwhite and it's quite good, but the plastic degraded and is now sticky, the CPU is slow and doing anything takes a while, and it doesn't have the very handy buttons earlier versions used to have. I was wondering if there was anything available nowadays that was much better, basically...

Oh, hrm, I have no idea. My Paperwhite is in a better condition than yours and it's good enough for me.

I really wouldn't mind having physical next/prev page buttons, though. Having to touch or swipe the screen is kind of annoying. I feel like that's a step back in UI from previous gen devices.

Yeah, I have no idea why they removed them. The swipe combined with the high response time means I never know if it registered the swipe and always go back and forth in an effort to change pages.

They probably saved some trivial amount of money on manufacturing costs by removing physical switches, seeing as how they were implementing touchscreens anyway for the rest of their interface.

Smartphones initially had physical buttons that have gone by the wayside now, but at least their screens are much more responsive!

For good ereaders there's Kindle and Kobo. Kobo supports DRM-free epub, but in practical terms, it doesn't matter a whole lot with Calibre to organize your library and convert to your format of choice.

> The entire reading ecosystem at Amazon is stagnant

They are actively malignant at this point. They are breaking embargoes now[1], and clearly won't be satisfied until they kill traditional publishing.

I dropped Prime last year, and it was substantially easier than I thought it would be.

Since then, they've just kept doing disgusting, grotesque crap[2]. At this point, I won't buy anything from them. The whole site reminds me of that cleaning-product smell at Walmart - any time I'm exposed to it, I just want to leave.

That orangey-yellow color means a fight with an untrustworthy, grubby greedhead robot that consistently fucks up delivery and makes me deal with them some more. Who needs that?

[1] https://boingboing.net/2019/09/05/amazon-breaks-embargo-on-m...

[2] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190807/20024842742/ring-...