Comment on Amazon is considering shoving ads into Alexa+ conversations

MisterMoo@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• tomkatt@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Not this one. I’ve been a Prime member for many years out of convenience (and because I live in the rurals and need to ship a lot of things to the house). Amazon completely fucked it up for themselves with regard to my subscription this past year or two, I’m done.

  • Removed the ability to download and sideload Kindle books
  • Ads in Prime Video
  • Followed by even more ads in Prime Video
  • Now this, and I don’t even own an Alexa device

  I’m done. Subscription is cancelled. Video was already trashed, but I barely used it. Now though… I’ve jailbroken the Kindles, converted all my books to EPUB, and installed KOReader. Wasn’t a hard transition since I’ve had a Boox device as my main reader for some years now anyway. I’ve started buying my books from Kobo and other sources.

  Looking into other services for online purchases and shipping. It’ll be less convenient, and I’ll still buy from Amazon in the event I have to, but I’d like to minimize that now.

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  • Fredselfish@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    How do you jailbreak your Kindle?

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    • tomkatt@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Depends on the model and firmware, but for most, Winterbreak is the current method.

      Do note if your Kindle is updated to version 5.18.x currently it’s not possible to jailbreak. There is ongoing work on a new exploit though, and a new jailbreak method (or update to Winterbreak) is expected later this year.

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  • MangioneDontMiss@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I have a prime subscription, simply for the delivery and grocery discounts, but the ads on their streaming service have convinced me to stop using it entirely and just pirate all their shows / movies.

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    • tomkatt@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I never found much worth watching on Prime, to be honest, even before the ads issue.

      As for Prime, I still benefit from the Prime shipping, but a lot of stores on Amazon ship free now even without Prime, and given where I live, 2-day shipping is not a thing. It’s usually more like 4 to 7 days. I’m generally in no rush either way.

      My main benefits were shipping and books, plus free games on Prime and GOG. But now the shipping is almost irrelevant, they’ve screwed the book thing, so all that’s left is the games, many of which I won’t even play.

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  • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Never had issues sideloading epubs with Calibre on my PW.

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    • tomkatt@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      No, Amazon took away the “Download and transfer via USB” option when downloading your books. Making it more difficult to strip DRM, but also to conveniently add it to multiple devices.

      Regarding sideloading EPUBs with Calibre, it’s not really doing that. Under normal circumstances Kindle can’t read EPUB format at all, so Calibre will convert it to a native format, either MOBI or AZW3 generally. But with a jailbroken Kindle and KOReader, you can actually read EPUBs natively. I’ve actually converted my entire collection to EPUB and deleted the AZW3 and KFX files.

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      • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Oh my bad.

        Any reason why those formats are worse than epub?

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