[Sats]

Originally Posted by jhowell

Amazon gradually improved the conversion of books to KFX for years and were able to handle most of the back catalog. For some reason they stopped doing that a while ago. Perhaps they reached a point of diminishing returns.

I agree that they could just do something simple at this point such as ignoring unhandled formatting or rasterizing books that do not convert properly into fixed-layout. On the other hand the code to handle the older formats is already in place and it likely costs them next to nothing to keep it that way.

I defer to you knowledge in this regard. I guess my bias (that for me books are mostly just text+pictures and formatting be yeeted) shows here.
It is indeed often cheaper to keep a system than it is to dismantle it, if it can be kept unchanged.

Originally Posted by jhowell

It depends on the reading platform. Amazon recently added some new comic formatting options to KFX. Platforms that do not support those fall back to receiving older formats, another reason for them to keep those formats around for a while. (They could produce different KFX variants for those platforms but that does not appear to be done currently except in regard to image quality.)

Odd that their K4PC was not supporting those new formatting options, then. I guess they were already getting tired of it.

Edit:

Originally Posted by davedeacon

A few responses:
Amazon doesn't say it can't update the old devices does it?

I was specifically replying to the quote here. I do not believe it is from Amazon, no, and i find it ... odd. I am also pretty sure they have "backdoors" into old (well, all) devices, assuming they felt like messing with them and they were online.

Originally Posted by davedeacon

I find it hard to believe publisher are demanding they stop supporting pre-2012 devices because of DRM concerns. And even if they did, Amazon could simply not make those books available in their store and simply put a message "not compatible with any of your devices".

I doubt the publishers are demanding much (aside from textbook and Indian publishers that do demand stronger DRM). But when calculating profit, I think it might be better on average for Amazon to be able to claim "higher security". Spin-positive, so to speak, in addition to decreasing maintenance burden.

Originally Posted by davedeacon

Think you've missed the point somewhat when you talk about old monitors. Same for toasters, kettles, microwaves etc.

Monitor was a bit of an aside. I did have 2011 tablet and laptop until 2024-2025 though. And only my carelessness killed them.

Originally Posted by davedeacon

I'm sure devices exist which run on software now rather than being simple circuits but they're not going to require updates to keep up with the latest bread, water etc in the way that devices which exist purely to consume software/content do.

And that is why I like books in .txt format. No updates necessary. Or basic html/markdown, if going for fancy. Not that I get such often these days.

Originally Posted by davedeacon

I'm like you - keep stuff going until it literally doesn't turn on. I've used old windows laptops with broken monitors as linux file servers; I've happily used phone roms such as cyanogenmod when Google stopped supporting the phones etc.

I am not that diligent, alas. Still, I used most of my devices until they failed, aside, I think, from portable consoles.

Originally Posted by davedeacon

But the market doesn't work that way. You'd end up paying more for your 2026 Kindle if Amazon were forced to endlessly support every last Kindle just because it was technically possible to do so.

That is true. It would have been nice if they would say "we'll support it for 5 (10) years and then release last update that untethers it and makes it into an open Linux machine", but I guess there are no incentives for that.