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Originally Posted by conan50
I had a print book library of about 2,000 books. One of the things that greatly appealed to me was the idea that I could carry my entire library of ebooks with me. My "Reading Now" collection on the Kindle has about 100 books just in it. I'm never just reading one. I sample several at a time.
Here is my argument: The first Kindles had more storage for smaller size books. Now we have ebooks that have much more formatting and larger file sizes, but Amazon has cut the Kindle storage size in half. That is a problem for some of us. My wife reads just one, and only one book at a time, and I get that, but not everyone reads that way.
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The Amazon AZW3 format is a pretty good equivalent to EPUB, and the second of the
two (not half a dozen) Amazon formats is MOBI which is only supposed to be a fallback for older devices and non-updated books. There is also AZK (iOS app only) which is the Google Play books of Amazon -- some incomprehensible app format full of javascript -- as well as the Print Replicas
which fulfill the same role as Adobe PDFs.
All three formats (AZW3, MOBI, EPUB) are roughly the same sizes. If books are bigger, it is because there is more in them (either text, images, or embedded fonts) and not because the format is intrinsically bigger. In act, my few ADE ebooks average 3-4X the size of my Amazon books, for no good reason -- a conversion in calibre makes it much smaller. Amazon seems to have higher standards for using space in ebooks wisely.
In short, books are no bigger than they used to, except in terms of how the authors/publishers make them... a problem that applies equally to every bookstore.
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My bigger concern with Amazon right now is that they are, seemingly, pushing people further and further into their ecosystem. Prime is practically shoved down our throats now, and I see a day coming when anyone who really wants access to Amazon is going to 'need' Prime. Amazon uses a half-dozen different ebook file types. There really is no reason why they could not use Epub like nearly everyone else does. Finally, it is all about the Cloud. They honestly do not want you to have over a thousand books on your ereader. They eventually will want you to buy cloud storage from them. Same with Google to be fair. Like Amazon, you don't see sdcard slots on their tablets either.
Maybe I'm a control freak, but I would rather keep my ebooks on my ereader, and I've been rethinking the whole "locked-in" situation and trying to figure out where I want to invest, and why, when it comes to ebooks in particular, but also with movies and music. I think across the board there will be big changes as everything is eventually in the cloud and we will pretty much own nothing, and be paying rent on the things we do 'own'.
Rant over with :-)
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Prime is not being shoved down anyone's throat. Please explain to me why I need Prime any more than I did 3 years ago. No old stuff is being made into Prime exclusives, only new features are being added to the Amazon ecosystem, and start off as Prime features. These are all also things that anyone else who does offer them charges membership fees for as well.
Amazon is fine with you having 1000 books on your ereader. This is possible with the PW1/2, and easily with the Touch/Keyboard which can hold about 3500.
At a certain point, they have judged that the vast majority of Kindle owners do not need the extra storage,
based on the fact that they never use it, and have saved everyone money by lowering the cost of making Kindles, allowing them to keep charging the same low price after adding on new features (think frontlight) that people will actually use.
Don't keep all your books on your ereader. Keep them on your hard drive (dedicated storage exists for a reason) and merely keep the next few months worth of reading materials (taking into account lengthy TBRs, keeping favorites handy, eclectic tastes and being in the middle of 6 books at once, I manage to do precisely this) on your ereader. Rotate as necessary.