Quote:
Originally Posted by sjfan
IMO this is the biggest divide, and it's not one that's going to be talked through. To me, the Amazon ecosystem and its tendency to drive people to proprietary formats and single-vendor lock-in is the Kindle's single biggest negative. "Avoid the Amazon ecosystem" was one of my handful of top considerations when looking for an e-reader, along with screen quality, battery life, and storage space. I similarly have avoided the Apple ecosystem when there are reasonable alternatives, though I'm not a zealot about either--I had an iPhone 3GS back when the Android alternatives were ridiculously behind the curve, and I'd buy a Kindle if the hardware were leaps and bounds ahead of the competition.
For you and many others, the same ecosystem and (to frame it from the alternate perspective) its ubiquity, ease of use, and wide array of available books is a positive feature that makes it stand out as a plus.
When you have a fundamental disagreement of whether a core feature is a plus or a minus, you're never going to get agreement on "what would make product A better".
Which is fine. They're both in the market, so we can choose according to our evaluations of the relative value of various features.
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Plenty of Kindle owners avoid the Amazon eco system if they choose to. The Kindle can read MOBI format files and there are multiple sources for freeware that allow you to convert Epub to Mobi if desired and then side load it. Also programs to remove protection from ebook files so they can be usedon any compatible device, if desired. So the ability is there. At the same time the Kindle environment allows simple email transfer of personal files to the cloud account for your Kindle device or devices and even independent publishers, given your Kindle email address, can email books to it.