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My Paperwhite has 8gb of memory. I usually have at least 6gb of space available; this morning I loaded it up with several books from the public library in preparation for going to the shore next week, and I'm now down to 5.9gb of space. So why would I need 16gb of memory.
I suspect that the driver behind increasing the amount of memory in a Kindle is based on two factors:
1. In the marketing sense, more is perceived as better.
2. The price of memory is dropping pretty rapidly, and the technology behind memory is allowing the size of memory chips to increase pretty dramatically. While the largest SD card you can buy today is 1TB, there was an announcement last week that 2TB cards will become available within the next few months. But as the cost per byte drops, market demand will shift toward larger blocks which means that the time is coming when it will no longer be economically viable to manufacture smaller memory increments. So I suspect that Amazon is simply anticipating that within the next year or so, they will be forced to drop the 8GB offering altogether, and are preemptively shifting their focus toward larger sizes.
So the bottom line is that while we may not need more memory, we are still going to get it.
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