Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
Amazon has an It Just Works mentality... assuming you use their apps/devices, which are available everywhere.
|
You know, if you're willing to hold the other vendors to the same limited standard that you're requiring of Amazon, they're just as hassle-free. Barnes & Noble and Kobo have
always worked fine if you're willing to limit yourself to their devices or apps, which are available on all the same platforms as the Kindle apps. If I want something that works great on a proprietary device and isn't portable without running it through Calibre first, both Kobo and Amazon fit the bill. If I never cared to move a Barnes & Noble book from either the app or a NOOK in the first place, then none of the download link or DRM stuff would have made a difference. As it is, I can retrieve the books from the NOOK app just as easily as I can with Amazon, with the added bonus that they're still unmangled epubs.
You can certainly argue that even though both Kobo and Barnes & Noble promised to make their books available to other platforms, they both failed in various ways. Not only did Amazon not try, though, they actually took active steps to
prevent using their ebooks on other platforms. I'm not going to begrudge them the original mobi thing, since epub wasn't really viable yet. Once it was, though, and the capabilities of their new devices moved beyond mobi, a consumer-friendly company would have just moved to epub. Instead, they just wrapped the same information in a proprietary shell to make portability more difficult instead of less. That's not some sort of fluke, either, as they did the same thing to PDF. Instead of just delivering a PDF to a device that already supports PDF(!), they wrap it up and call it "Print Replica", which is just like a PDF, except you can't use it on other devices (or even use the table of contents on a Kindle).
Apparently, the big mistake that Barnes & Noble and Kobo made was in not training their customer base to have low enough expectations. Amazon certainly proved
that to be a much better strategy for commercial success.
I don't have any problem with you buying whatever you want from Amazon, but if you're going to compare other stores to them, hold everybody to the same set of standards.