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Originally Posted by leebase
As an IT person, I'm very familiar with the truth in that statement. But seriously, it's not been "fast" anymore, we are talking a decade. A decade in which tablets have seen great improvements and they have come down in price below eInk readers.
I think the culprit is that eInk has turned out to be a niche market even among those who read ebooks (this forum being an exception).
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Amazon was ultra competitive when they entered and then dominated the market. The whole "buy a Kindle and get every NYT's best seller for $9.99" spurred on the market back when the devices themselves cost $400. That's what kicked off the war with the publishers in the first place.
But that was then, and this is now. Amazon has little competition they need to worry about.
Consider the Amazon app. It still doesn't have the wonderful features from Stanza, a company they bought many years ago. Every ebook app that isn't tied to a store (Kobo, iBooks) is better than the Kindle app.
It's not a horrible app. It's a decent app. But there is simply no incentive for Amazon to spend much time and resources making it better
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Preach on, brother, preach on!
It bugs the heck out me when I try to use the Kindle app and it goes off into lala land while it's busy doing all the internal download things that Amazon want it to do rather than let me read the frigging book. As you say, Amazon has zero incentive to change that. That is why competition is good. Really, there is also zero incentive for Amazon to improve their ebook store either. I don't think there has been any serious improvement there in the past decade.
I keep waiting for the publishers to drop DRM at the non Amazon ebook stores like the music industry did when they wanted Amazon to provide some competition to the iTunes store. I think that I would likely switch my big five purchases to a non DRM store if that happened. Of course, now, if the publishers did that, Amazon would run screaming to the DOJ about anti-trust violations.