Why no SD cards?

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by gevaisa

Has Amazon ever explained why the Kindle ereaders don't have SD card slots?

I think it just comes down to simplifying and streamlining support. From Amazon's point of view, you can introduce a lot of support issues from an SDCard slot. (I have no way of knowing for certain, but this is my guess.)

[kaufman]

Originally Posted by gevaisa

Has Amazon ever explained why the Kindle ereaders don't have SD card slots?

I think it comes down to 3 things (in decreasing importance):

1) The overwhelming majority of their users don't have enough books to fill up internal memory, much less to need an SD card. So they don't want to spend the money on something that only a small minority will care about.

2) The had a lot of problems with the SD card on the first generation kindle, and they didn't want to repeat that situation.

3) They want to encourage people to use their cloud to lock them into the Amazon ecosystem.

Originally Posted by gevaisa

I would love to try a Kindle but I'm a terrible ebook hoarder who feels naked if I don't have all my books with me when I'm out and about.

I feel exactly the same way. You should do what I do. Keep all your books on your phone in Calibre Companion, and then just put a smallish subset on your eReader.

[Ghitulescu]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

Every tablet or other LCD device I've owned to date has had an SD slot. None of my Eink readers have.

So you don't have an Apple.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Ghitulescu

So you don't have an Apple.

... or the majority of current high-end Android tablets. Few have SD card slots these days.

[Anthem]

Originally Posted by kaufman

3) They want to encourage people to use their cloud to lock them into the Amazon ecosystem.

Lock-in or no, the Cloud is an amazing convenience.

[Ghitulescu]

Originally Posted by Anthem

Lock-in or no, the Cloud is an amazing convenience.

When an eBook is less than 1MByte (no embedded fonts), I wonder why would it be a nuisance to carry a SD or USB stick with, that has probably more space than the cloud has, and doesn't ask for network (WiFi or LTE), in vacations even for free (as for roaming costs) and so on. And it doesn't depend on the whims of a provider (be it Apple or any other) and it's also secure.

You loose that stick, got another one for peanuts and reload it from the home archive. Yes, the stick or SD is only a "working copy"

While it may be luring now, clouds are nothing else than a storage in someone else's house. You're bound by his rules, to the degree he'd choose to implement. He can even use your goods from that deposit, dump them (locking your account), or let other people have access to them.

[mgmueller]

Originally Posted by gevaisa

Has Amazon ever explained why the Kindle ereaders don't have SD card slots? I would love to try a Kindle but I'm a terrible ebook hoarder who feels naked if I don't have all my books with me when I'm out and about.

Thank you very much!

I guess, there's a simple explanation:
Amazon wants to sell content.
That's even their motto: "We don't want to make money when selling the product, we want to generate profits when the product actually is used" (or something like that, quote from Jeff Bezos).
Meaning:
They want you to buy your books from Amazon.
I do so. I've got around 1000 eBooks from Amazon. On my Paperwhite with 2GB, I could fit about 700 of those. On the newer model with 4GB, there should be storage space for close to 2000 original eBooks from Amazon.
There won't be many consumers, having more than those 2000 eBooks. If some have more (a friend of mine has hoarded more than 30000 PDFs), it's normally not original purchases, but (illegal?) downloads from 3rd party vendors.
Amazon doesn't want you to sideload too many books from 3rd parties...

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by mgmueller

I guess, there's a simple explanation:
Amazon wants to sell content.
That's even their motto: "We don't want to make money when selling the product, we want to generate profits when the product actually is used" (or something like that, quote from Jeff Bezos).
Meaning:
They want you to buy your books from Amazon.
I do so. I've got around 1000 eBooks from Amazon. On my Paperwhite with 2GB, I could fit about 700 of those. On the newer model with 4GB, there should be storage space for close to 2000 original eBooks from Amazon.
There won't be many consumers, having more than those 2000 eBooks. If some have more (a friend of mine has hoarded more than 30000 PDFs), it's normally not original purchases, but (illegal?) downloads from 3rd party vendors.
Amazon doesn't want you to sideload too many books from 3rd parties...

I really, really doubt this.

Amazon puts no restrictions on what you can sideload. Take a look at B&N to see how to prevent too much sideloading from 3rd parties.

Anyone with >3500 average-sized books (the amount the Kindle storage can hold) is just as likely to have gotten it from Amazon as any other vendor -- unless we are talking about pirated books. I suppose it is theoretically possible Amazon restricts the storage in a ridiculous belief that anyone going over the limit is obviously a pirate... but I doubt it.

More likely, Amazon is primarily concerned with marketing to the people who don't buy a ton of books. "There won't be many consumers, having more than those 2000 eBooks." Or more like, about a few hundred. And Amazon doesn't care where the minorities get their books from, they simply do not consider it worth their time to expand the storage for "won't be many consumers".

[mgmueller]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

I really, really doubt this.

Amazon puts no restrictions on what you can sideload. Take a look at B&N to see how to prevent too much sideloading from 3rd parties.

Anyone with >3500 average-sized books (the amount the Kindle storage can hold) is just as likely to have gotten it from Amazon as any other vendor -- unless we are talking about pirated books. I suppose it is theoretically possible Amazon restricts the storage in a ridiculous belief that anyone going over the limit is obviously a pirate... but I doubt it.

More likely, Amazon is primarily concerned with marketing to the people who don't buy a ton of books. "There won't be many consumers, having more than those 2000 eBooks." Or more like, about a few hundred. And Amazon doesn't care where the minorities get their books from, they simply do not consider it worth their time to expand the storage for "won't be many consumers".

For their own content, they constantly refer to the cloud.

In my case, I only can download about 700 of my 1000 Amazon books to my Paperwhite 2. But having opted for the 3G model, I could download any of the missing 300 books on the fly wherever I am.
Adding another 2GB of internal storage makes sense. It's only a few Euros (manufacturing costs) and some huge books (in my case travel companions and Garfield and Dilbert cartoons) quickly can make you reach the 2GB limit.
But why should they add an SD card?
4GB at some stage (3 years?) might increase to 8GB. But who, on an Amazon reader, could make use of 32GB or 64GB? I'm pretty sure, there's very few buyers with more than 5000 from Amazon purchased books (and of course they have that kind of data). So anything above, let's say, 4GB, for 99% of its users has to be sideloaded/pirated content.

Why do others offer SD card slots on their readers?
They can't compete with Amazon regarding content sales (who can, at this stage?), so they have to make their hardware more interesting.
How so? By opening it for all kinds of content.

[mgmueller]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

...I suppose it is theoretically possible Amazon restricts the storage in a ridiculous belief that anyone going over the limit is obviously a pirate... but I doubt it....

They don't "restrict" it. They simply don't add more, because it hardly could help their sales but might make their readers more interesting for side loading.
If they'd be interested in that, they easily cloud add ePUB support, for example.
But they (as Jeff Bezos openly states) are not interested in hardware sales per se, they are interested in using their hardware as a vehicle for content sales.

Why would anyone, who's mainly interested in side loading, buy any Kindle at the moment?
Kindles use the "wrong" file format and without SD card it's not that open and flexible and for some of my hoarder-friends 2GB are way too limited.

[JSWolf]

The thing is, the Kindles that had audio capability did have a need for an AD card slot and taking it away was bad form. Audiobooks and music can take up a lot of space so having the SD card slot was good to store audiobooks and/or music on SD and not internal memory.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by mgmueller

They don't "restrict" it. They simply don't add more, because it hardly could help their sales but might make their readers more interesting for side loading.

I think that is more than enough reason without assuming what comes next.

Why would anyone, who's mainly interested in side loading, buy any Kindle at the moment?
Kindles use the "wrong" file format and without SD card it's not that open and flexible and for some of my hoarder-friends 2GB are way too limited.

That is a side effect of the fact that Amazon has no reason to go out of their way to cultivate sideloaders. Sideloaders will tend not to be interested in any device that has not been specifically tuned for sideloading. Kobo has decided to cultivate that audience, and more power to them I say.

But Amazon can achieve the same effect either by having it in for sideloaders, or by simply refusing to devote so much as a single brain cell to the mere issue of sideloading.

This of course does not take into account that in terms of syncing sideloaded purchases... well, they are actually the only vendor who did anything in that area.

All in all, I am more inclined to believe that Bezos has an evangelical approach to the concept of "the cloud", rather than any sort of malice for sideloading.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The thing is, the Kindles that had audio capability did have a need for an AD card slot and taking it away was bad form. Audiobooks and music can take up a lot of space so having the SD card slot was good to store audiobooks and/or music on SD and not internal memory.

You should not be treating a Kindle as a music player. We have phones for that.

In a pinch, maybe. You do NOT need to carry your whole library around like that.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

As a sidebar, SanDisk just released a 512GB (1/2 Terabyte) SD chip...($800 US)

When they get a lot cheaper, they'll be my surrogate external hard drives...

And guess what, it won't work in most portable devices because they want a mico-SD card. The best you'll get is 128GB if the device will handle it. 32GB sure. 64GB maybe, 128GB no idea.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

You should not be treating a Kindle as a music player. We have phones for that.

In a pinch, maybe. You do NOT need to carry your whole library around like that.

Most phones don't have an SD card slot of any kind. So you don't always have that much space for audio/video/audiobooks.

If you are going to be someplace where you don't have WiFi access, then you might want a larger library just so you have more choice of what you want to read since you cannot download.

Audiobooks can take up a good amount of space. Take the audiobook of Command Authority. It takes up 419MB which is almost 1/2 a GB. Put on 4 audiobooks of similar size and you've run out of space if you can even put on 4. Might be only able to put on 3.