Quote:
Originally Posted by FrustratedReader
Books from Smashwords or gutenberg.org work on a Kindle without conversion.
It's a seriously bad idea to use Amazon's Cloud, or rely on it or download direct to Kindle.
|
Why? If the Amazon Kindle cloud goes down it will be headline news: if it stays down it will be a PR disaster for Amazon. If the actual Amazon cloud goes down it will be far worse (bear in mind that the 'Amazon cloud' is a part of Amazon Web Services, and if that goes down you'll know it because half the web will stop working and thousands of companies will be in deep, deep trouble). Bear in mind that when Amazon remotely deleted
one book because its seller wasn't allowed to sell it, it was such a PR disaster that they swore never to do that again (and haven't, and that was nearly ten years ago). It seems unlikely that they'd do anything that made
everyone's books go away.
The cloud is likely far more reliable than the Kindle it is talking to. The only real worry is Amazon going bust, and frankly at this point they are so gigantic that they'll only go bust on a timescale of decades. (You can still back up your books in case of Amazon going bust, but it seems quite unlikely.)
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by FrustratedReader
ALWAYS download to PC (Windows, Linux or Mac, even a tablet / Phone is possible with a filemanager app and a microUSB to USB host adaptor, the Kindle looks like a USB memory stick to EVERY device that can take external USB memory) so you have a backup.
Do not give copies of stuff to Amazon's Cloud. Also Sync has privacy issues and can mess up collections/shelves etc.
|
Are you seriously suggesting that people buy a Kindle, a device whose
primary use case is making it easier to buy books wherever you are and read them straight away, and then not use it to buy books from the device's own vendor, even though that route is orders of magnitude easier for non-tech-savvy newbies than sideloading? You don't seem to give any reasons for this: if this is DRM worries, why not find out if the newbie in question actually worries about DRM (I doubt it, since a Kindle is meant to replace paper books and backing up paper books is not a commonly-done activity).
More of a concern to me is what happens to independent booksellers, second-hand book market, inheritance of books by the next generation etc -- but again this is not something you can solve by telling individual people
who have already decided to buy Amazon devices to buy them but then boycott buying actual books from Amazon. This is distinctly quixotic, probably doomed to failure, and just makes you look like a single-issue crank, frankly.
(Note: I am a free software developer and sideload a
lot, and like my stuff to be free to such a degree that my phone is running 100% free software, but even I think you are radically overstating the case here, extrapolating your personal use case to everyone's with no grounds to do so, and probably driving people to do the opposite of what you suggest.)