Voyage to Nowhere: The Amazon Kindle Story

Re:Voyage to Nowhere: The Amazon Kindle Story by fpgeek on Monday April 13, 2015 @01:21AM (#9366061)

While there are plenty of mediocre aspects of the Kindle ecosystem, there are plenty of excellent ones as well. For example:

1. Return policy. Amazon has the best ebook return policy in the business. It seems essentially the same as their physical book policy. The last time I checked, Google Play was next-best (7 days no-questions-asked, regardless of jurisdiction) and everyone else grudgingly had a return policy where it was required by law (i.e. Europe) and none otherwise.

2. Sideloaded books. AFAIK, of the major ebook retailers, only Amazon and Google will let you sync books you didn't purchase from them to your cloud library. Other retailers might let you read sideloaded books in their clients, but you have to use Dropbox or an equivalent for backup and syncing across devices.

3. Client support. If it supports third-party applications, Amazon makes a Kindle client for almost anything you might want to read an ebook on, plus they have a web-based reader. Meanwhile, Google and Apple are busy paying "strategy taxes" for platforms it isn't in their interest to support, and B&N and Kobo don't quite have the resources to keep up.

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Re:Voyage to Nowhere: The Amazon Kindle Story by ursidae on Monday April 13, 2015 @02:17AM (#9366187)

One frustrating thing about side loaded books, you cannot read them with Kindle for PC, Kindle for Mac, or Kindle cloud reader.

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Re:Voyage to Nowhere: The Amazon Kindle Story by elemeno on Monday April 13, 2015 @04:14AM (#9366485)

I was under the impression that you can, though they might show up under Documents rather than Books - assuming you've side-loaded by sending the files to your kindle e-mail address. It's not something I try to do very often though, so I might be mistaken - they don't seem to appear in the Cloud Reader though.

In any case, since you can just open the files in the desktop version of Kindle, it doesn't seem like it would be such a big deal.

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Re:Voyage to Nowhere: The Amazon Kindle Story by lucian1900 on Monday April 13, 2015 @05:43AM (#9366710)

It's annoying because I rely on Kindle's progress syncing. Why do some of my books randomly not support this useful feature?

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Re:Voyage to Nowhere: The Amazon Kindle Story by radicalbyte on Monday April 13, 2015 @02:28PM (#9369419)

Amazon's service is fantastic; I buy from them even if they're a little more expensive purely for the service.

I have a Paperwhite and I couldn't be happier with it. It's the best manga reading device I own and it does a pretty good job with PDFs.

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Re:Voyage to Nowhere: The Amazon Kindle Story by encoderer on Monday April 13, 2015 @11:37AM (#9368208)

Eh, I use both the Nook and Kindle apps for my iPad -- daily -- and Nook is just as good. It's the hardware. If i wanted to buy an e-reader, i wouldn't want to invest in B&N hardware.

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Re:Voyage to Nowhere: The Amazon Kindle Story by ForHackernews on Monday April 13, 2015 @12:39PM (#9368656)

What negatives have you found with B&N hardware? I have a Nook Simple Touch, and I've been very happy with it.

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Re:Voyage to Nowhere: The Amazon Kindle Story by encoderer on Monday April 13, 2015 @12:43PM (#9368700)

That it's unclear what future investment will be made in the ecosystem.

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Re:Voyage to Nowhere: The Amazon Kindle Story by ForHackernews on Tuesday April 14, 2015 @12:13AM (#9372059)

Unlike the Kindle with its proprietary format, the Nook reads standard ePub files. Even if B&N went out of business tomorrow, the Nook would remain a perfectly usable device.

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