Quote:
Originally Posted by jswinden
... So there is little need for adding complexity to the hardware and increasing the price even if by only $0.10 when most consumers would neither need the extra memory nor want to pay for it. It seems to me to be overkill to have 32 GB of storage on a Kindle. Even if your average eBook was 4 MB, that would be roughly 8,000 eBooks. Even if you read one book per day, it would take you nearly 22 years to read all of them. You might live that long, but the Kindle likely won't!
|
Your calculations fail to take into account how much space amazon now wastes on each book for thumbnails, highlights, reviews/goodreads, xray, indexes and other such. Well over the size of the book itself, in most cases. On the older Fires with 8GB storage, they gradually fill up just with the thumbnails, leaving no space at all for an actual book or app; I don't imagine there is much difference on the eink kindles, if you use the thumbnail view (assuming, of course, the stupid things are smart enough to not download thumbnails for those of us that lock them into text only home pages; it not, they fill up with useless dreck for every Kindle, eventually).
An SD card slot solves the "kindle won't last that long" issue, as well as "where is that book I wanted" problems. And the "what size Kindle should I get" issue, as they only need leave enough room for a hundred books and the indexes, then bump you to adding an SD card if you need more room.
Of course, they took them out to reduce call support and because eliminating audio removed a lot of the high-storage users from using Kindles. No doubt they had hundreds of call an hour where people put books on the card, then moved the card to a new Kindle, then it didn't work (not to mention the poor design that required shutting it off to change the card).