Comment on Kindle Is Making It Harder to Switch to Rival eReader Brands.
major_jellyfish@lemmy.ca 4 days agoThere is a whole community of people out there who will pretty much refuse to buy brand new electronics. And thats for very obvious and valid reasons.
Kindles can be found for dirt cheap if not free 2nd hand. And so many users have a kindle for this reason. Myself included. Id never throw out or discard an electronic device that continues to work. For the same obvious reasons as why i dont buy new ones.
And so this information is super relevant and important to users like me. Regardless of how much people like you might be convinced that “we had it coming” or whatever.
utopiah@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Sure, it’s the same problem with most of electronics, it’s the console business model, or ink printer, where the device itself is “too” cheap and companies make money on content. Unfortunately it comes with shackles. I’m all for breaking the shackles but unfortunately has to be aware of what they are getting into, not just the trouble but also potentially supporting the company promoting DRMs and more.
I work in XR and Meta/Facebook is the embodiment of that problem. The Quest is too cheap compared to alternatives like Lynx (standalone designing in France, unfortunately still running on Android but at least rootable) or even the “old” now Valve Index, which in addition to its price also requires a gaming desktop.
So… it’s a money making machine for corporations. Hopefully recycling is done in a way that provide 0 support for the corporations locking down its device, promoting its marketplace BUT also, sadly less realistic, doesn’t also prevent companies who try to sell genuine alternative that do NOT promote such business model from existing.
utopiah@lemmy.world 4 days ago
TL;DR: get a 2nd hand reMarkable, PineNote, Bookeen, etc…
major_jellyfish@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
Easier 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. 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.
utopiah@lemmy.world 1 day 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.
Pika@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
unfortunately though, due to the same issues there isn’t a very large second hand market of those either. Like the cheapest remarkable second hand I could find was still 300$ and the cheapest pine note was 270$ for preowns.
when you compare it to the kindle which has preowns starting at 40$ it’s a hard buy
Echolynx@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
I got a secondhand Kobo on eBay for less than $100, almost in new condition (the seller just forgot to include the charging cable, but luckily I had plenty of spare micro-USB cables). It’s a 2018 model, but it has 8 GB of storage, plenty for most people, and a nice 6" 300 PPI screen with warm light and dark mode. It’s more than sufficient.