While I've been feeling quite a lot of 'Amazon is just AWFUL' for awhile, I'd been buying Kindle ebooks for a LONG time, and this series (The Frontiers Saga) is one of my regular recurring purchases, but I'm going to vent a bit about what Amazon just did to a bunch of their customers as a justification for my thesis that Ryk Brown ought start publishing on Kobo as well...
Many moons ago, I bought a fancy new-fangle e-reader: The second generation Kindle, sometimes known as the Kindle 2. I've been a paper books guy most of my life, and I was a little leery of 'not paper' at first. Truth be told, re-drawing the screen was slow and stuttery, the device wasn't that fast, it was pricey and in places like the beach water while it had always been an issue became a more EXPENSIVE issue. But dmn could you load up twenty books on the thing and take it on a plane or on vacation and have everything you could reasonably want to read fit in a small footprint at comparative feather-weight and that alone was a strong sell, despite the initial investment. I was promised free cell service with 'whispersync' to be able to download anything from my library, for LIFE, and between that and the fact that the ebooks were slightly cheaper than the paper books things were looking up.
Over the next year or so, my wife developed a taste for the device and had me buying books for it and eventually I heard about the larger-screen Kindle DX that was to make newspapers and textbooks feasible and be more useful for people with poor eyesight. I started socking away my pennies and eventually dropped a staggering $400-450 on the device and a third-party leather cover for it (because Amazon did not have one for the device at launch, believe it or not, and not ruining the screen on a bit of expensive kit was pretty much a prerequisite. I gave my wife the Kindle2 (still tied to my account) and switched to the DX for my everyday carry. It featured speakers and could play MP3s too (a novelty that was tested and then quickly abandoned as they are MUCH larger than ebooks and storage space is constrained), as well as mail-to-device of PDFs, which was neat as a lot of work-related whitepapers and tech docs were available in that format.
Things went well for a period of time until late 2021 or early 2022 (I cannot now remember the precise date) when they withdrew their 'for LIFE' cell support. There was an excuse about the carrier dropping 3G support, but having twice replaced a battery for the devices I could swear they sported what looked like replaceable cell modules on the interior near aforementioned batteries, so replacing those with a 4G cell card ought have been possible, no? They claim no.
That left me with ONLY an annoying workaround where I find the secret nobody-can-navigate-to-it-but-maybe-google-knows-where-it-is 'manage your digital content and devices' URL and periodically click 'other' 'download and transfer via USB' then pick the SPECIFIC device I want to load the book on from a popup to download each purchase ONE AT A TIME, sorting by kindle, and then plug them in and copy to each device for them to gain access to the books again. It was slow and annoying, and if I downloaded a purchase and forgot which device it was for before I got around to the manual copy process they went on but did not appear in the menu on-device. It was annoying, and inconvenient, but again 'relative featherweight' footprint easy on the eyes with great multi-book capacity, so it was tolerable.
Well, February 13, 2025 I got an email from Amazon informing me that as of February 26, 2025 they were removing the download and transfer capability. Less than two weeks notice that they were effectively taking a virtual ball-peen hammer remotely to my perfectly good, working, quite expensive e-Readers. For no reason - They ALREADY had built the 'workaround' manual transfer capability and they aren't going to be shutting down their webservers, I am certain. They have the money I paid for the hardware and the money I paid for all those books, but I can't use the two together anymore. I was incensed.
After wandering around their site for a bit looking for support options for a not-super-recent purchase and Kindle-specific support, I wended my way through multiple support staff on the phone as I wandered from 'wrong group' to 'wrong group' until eventually I was talking to the Kindle support staff bout an issue they 'had not received calls about' previously. Well, what with the passive discouragement of contact about their dictate from on high that my working devices were no longer allowed to work I wasn't exactly surprised, but still I thought *someone* would have called besides myself.
After explaining several times why 'You shut down the cell service and then you shut down the manual copy workaround with VERY little notice' was a problem and explaining that I would NOT be switching to reading off a tiny cell phone screen and that a backlit laptop screen was similarly awful at night when the ambient light is near-zero and the backlight doesn't go low enough they proudly proclaimed that I could still use any WiFi-capable Kindles and after a quick facepalm I reiterated that I did not OWN any WiFi-capable Kindles and that I would now never buy one from them again. In fact, unless they reversed course it was quite likely I would never buy an EBOOK from them again, and I was rethinking Prime to boot at this point.
And the tale might have ended there, but I decided I would try and be clever. I searched the Internet to find the oldest Kindle that had WiFi and found 2 generations newer it arrived in the Kindle 4. Amazon sure as hell wasn't getting paid for a new device, but if an older used one was fine, then paying some random stranger in the midwest for their old Kindle would be fine!
Well, as usual, the whims of Amazon dictated things were not actually as presented. I received my old Kindle4 today and after I connected it to WiFi I got an unhelpful error message about not being able to connect. After three updates, manually, over USB file copy one-at-a-time-then-menu-select 'update' this behavior changed. The registration still fails (OTP to phone# even when your account has OTP 2FA disabled and the device software deliberately does not allow to enter the OTP but now the store tells me (I paraphrase): 'Sorry! Your kindle is old, so go pound sand!'
So at this point I'm done. I'm not buying a new kindle. I'm not buying another secondhand USED kindle. I'm not buying ebooks from Amazon anymore after repeated instances of bad-faith actions to drive constant device sales have convinced me the company cannot be trusted and must not receive any more of my money. I don't know how many formerly loyal customers are seeing red and deciding to cut them off, but I hope it's a lot of them. They treat their customers poorly, and I've read things that make me think the same is true of the authors. 'Join our walled garden and we'll pay you more' followed by 'sorry, that doesn't cover the rate for unlimited borrowing we implemented without your agreement'.
And THAT is my case for not being Amazon exclusive. I signed up for Kobo (they sell an e-Ink reader too, but I wanted to see if the content I wanted was on sale there (It appears not); There is some OLD Frontiers Saga ebook content available but nothing recent. I would buy the books as released from Kobo or even paperback (but not at Amazon) but if the content is walled garden, as of February 26 it is unfortunately dead to me.
( </rant> lol)
