New $50 Kindle Fire won't recognize third-party ebooks

[colinrosenthal]

A fair point. In fact I usually read DRM-free ebooks with Google Play Books so I can sync my reading position between my iPad and my Android phone.

[robotech]

For the average person, digital devices are hard to sideload things onto. We techno-geeks (and honestly, few people who read Boing Boing aren’t techno-geeks) often can’t wrap our brains around this idea, but the average person tends to have a lot of trouble with the whole concept.

I mean, just look at The Martian. The only reason it’s a Ridley Scott film now, rather than just free Internet fiction Andy Weir posted to his web site as a hobby, is that some of his readers wanted it on their Kindles but even though Weir made it available for free download from his site, they were too lazy to work out how to sideload it themselves—they preferred to be able to buy it from Amazon, even though they had to pay 99 cents to do it. After Weir put it up on Amazon, enough people downloaded it to make it a bestseller, then the traditional publishers came calling, and now it’s a Ridley Scott film with a 94% tomatometer rating and a $56 million opening weekend—all because people were too lazy to sideload the e-book for themselves.

And then there’s the way that Baen had been selling e-books for over a decade, DRM-free—all you had to do was buy it. They even set it up so you could email it to your Kindle direct from their web site. But even that wasn’t easy enough for the average person. People kept asking them, “Why isn’t your stuff on Kindle yet?” Eventually they just had to wave the white flag and completely change the way their e-book store worked so that they could get their e-books onto Amazon, because that’s where all the average-person customers had gone.

Yeah, you and I find sideloading easy as pie, but the average person doesn’t. A lot of people have trouble internalizing the idea that anything that’s so easy for them could be hard for anyone else, which is why so few people are any good at tech support. And that, more than anything else, is the rock upon which Amazon built its church (or, rather, its business)—if they buy books from Amazon, they don’t have to worry about figuring out how to sideload them. They press a button and boom: they magically have their book. If you make something so easy that even the average person can do it, then all the average people will buy your product.

It’s weird, but even now, all these years later, Kobo still makes it a royal pain in the neck for people to find their purchased books, and Barnes & Noble has weird restrictions on downloading purchased e-books outside its apps and sideloading non-B&N titles. Neither of them approaches the simple, one-click simplicity of buying an e-book on Amazon and then picking up your Kindle a few seconds later to start reading it. And that’s why Amazon has the lion’s share of the e-book market now.

And yet, on its e-ink Kindles, Amazon happily supports sideloading even so. I use Calibre to load my entire 1,200+ e-book library onto my Paperwhite, and every book works just fine. But their Android Kindle app simply doesn’t index the same Books folder on the SD card that it does in internal memory. Given that every other Amazon media app on the Fire tablet does, it just seems like a strange oversight to me.

[colinrosenthal]

All very true. The world seems divided between those who think this is empowering - because, hey, now anybody, anywhere, can read anything or listen to any music without having to be some weird technonerd - And those who find it creepy and disempowering for all the reasons every BB-reader is familiar with.

[enso]

@robotech

I mean, just look at The Martian. The only reason it’s a Ridley Scott film now, rather than just free Internet fiction Andy Weir posted to his web site as a hobby, is that some of his readers wanted it on their Kindles but even though Weir made it available for free download from his site, they were too lazy to work out how to sideload it themselves—they preferred to be able to buy it from Amazon, even though they had to pay 99 cents to do it. After Weir put it up on Amazon, enough people downloaded it to make it a bestseller, then the traditional publishers came calling, and now it’s a Ridley Scott film with a 94% tomatometer rating and a $56 million opening weekend—all because people were too lazy to sideload the e-book for themselves.

And then there’s the way that Baen had been selling e-books for over a decade, DRM-free—all you had to do was buy it. They even set it up so you could email it to your Kindle direct from their web site. But even that wasn’t easy enough for the average person. People kept asking them, “Why isn’t your stuff on Kindle yet?” Eventually they just had to wave the white flag and completely change the way their e-book store worked so that they could get their e-books onto Amazon, because that’s where all the average-person customers had gone.

I’m a Kindle user and I buy a lot of third party books so I have some perspective. The fact is, the first act when I finish a book and I’m in my bed reading is to put my kindle on wifi and look at my (Amazon) cloud archive. Side loading involves me going to another room, pulling out a computer, looking for the book that I want, and then loading it. Not much work but a lot more than just pulling it down from Amazon. The same goes for book purchasing. Someone mentions a book and I can pull out my kindle, buy it now from Amazon via the kindle, and have it download to my device within 60 seconds. Convenience.

(Yes, you pretty much make these points. I agree.)