The latest generation, Kindle Paperwhite, Kindle Scribe 2, Kindle Scribe 1, and Kindle and the upcoming Kindle Colorsoft, all have something in common. When you plug them into USB into your PC or MAC, they no longer appear as external drives. This prevents users from using file managers to back up their books or to sideload new books onto the Kindle. Amazon has also removed the download and transfer via USB option for purchased ebooks from the content page. This will likely prevent people from striping the DRM from the books and sharing them on piracy websites. This is not
Very user-hostile, but very unsurprising.
Kindle hardware can be very nice, but almost every software decision is designed to keep users within their walled garden.
No epub support, no third party app support, no ability to load non-store audio, and now this. What a waste. These things could be so much more useful than they are.
Calibre has always been a small price to pay, but if sideloading goes away, I’ll certainly never “upgrade” again, and I’ll trash my 11th gen Paperwhite if they somehow make it stop working. Usable e-ink ereaders are even doable as DIY projects now, and Kobo will probably stay less closed-off than Amazon for a good while.
That said, reading the comments and the article it seems like as long as your OS (or some app) supports MTP, everything should still work more or less as it has, which is to say kind of annoying and with Amazon pulling little microaggressions like deleting your cover thumbnails, but overall sideloading should still function.
I love love love the DIY electronics scene but for a device that’s meant to be held…I dunno. Ergonomics are usually an afterthought if considered at all. I can’t imagine a DIY e-reader being comfortable to use
Note: NOT shilling for Amazon here, I will never buy another Kindle
As much as the idea is cool, that display is also horrendous for reading. I could absolutely see it as “good enough” for a lot of projects, but not an ereader. 400x300 isn’t enough.
I saw that, too. I haven’t had a lot of headaches with MTP using my Android devices, but I’m always surprised at how there always seems to be a plan to make my devices worse than they already are.
I bought 2 Kindle 4 and 2 Kindle keyboard on Ebay for $40 a couple years ago and couldn’t be happier.
Abolish patent law.
Maybe replace it with some very strict non-extensible protection, based on time since patent registration or profit made with it, maybe something else, whichever happens earlier.
Either that or get used to oligopoly in every area of economics affected by electronics and computers and even all scientific advancement.
That this takes time to happen, doesn’t change the fact.
No argument here. It is insane to me that if I want content that isn’t locked into a particular ecosystem, I have to seek out public domain material or pick from the small subset of books that is sold DRM-free books in an open format. For anything else, money can’t buy flexibility. For most books, the only options for digital are accepting the DRM, waiting until copyright expires (good luck with that one), or privateering with out a letter of marque.
Isn’t that pretty much how parents work already? They’re extensible, sure, but only up to 20 years total. Not only that but you’re forced to document it too.
Maybe 20 years is too long.
Certainly it could be, I would like to see some proper study done into it, but it’s probably borderline impossible.
Conversely patents are somewhat unobtainable by the average Joe, I think I saw it costing somewhere in the region of 25-50k to patent something by the time you factor in the cost of a decent patent lawyer.
Maybe a 10-15 year patent period with lower barrier to entry would be a good thing.