Quote:
Originally Posted by Pajamaman
There is no practical or technical reason for Amazon to closing down their devices so tightly.
|
When I owned the first Kindle Paperwhite I was extremely annoyed by how locked-down Kindle is.
And that was at the time when there was a jailbreak available and lots of hacks could be applied to make the use more bearable. I had them all (*). Perhaps if Kindle was my very first reader I would get used to their way of displaying text and managing a library, but at the time I got Kindle I was used to other, much more configurable readers and I wanted the books and library look and behave the way I liked.
Once upon a time it was possible to create a text file on the user-accessible partition and get left justification, narrower margins or alternative fonts or smaller jumps between font sizes. All gone now.
It would be relatively easy to make a system that would let us have a user-proof collections system and allow hackers and tinkerers to have their own. Just require the user to manually create a configuration file so that he can use collections created by a third-party tool such as Calibre.
Yet, I understand their desire to lock the Kindle platform down as tightly as possible.
I have installed an alternative firmware Duokan to my Paperwhite. I was able to dualboot between Duokan and the original Kindle firmware. Somehow, I did not like Duokan, so I was using the original firmware with lots of customizations and third-party readers.
I am sure that when management at Amazon saw Duokan they experienced a nasty shock and decided to lock down Kindle completely. Duokan basically hijacked the hardware and even replaced the Amazon e-book store with a Chinese one. They [Amazon] can not let that happen. They need users to purchase books at their store. This the only reason for the existence of Kindle [sold with a *very* thin margin, I believe].
(*) I am, very obviously, NOT their target demographics ;-)