Culture

Informative Kindle 2 review at Amazon

Gadget Queen, an owner of a Kindle 1 and 2, posted this review of the Kindle 2 at Amazon. It confirms the suspicions I had a while back that you will be paying more than once for the same content.

Says Gadget Queen:

1. I have a tremendous volume of Kindle content (public domain and Amazon). I discovered that I could not directly transfer from my computer backup for Kindle 1 to the new K2 …All my content had to be reformatted by Amazon and re-downloaded from their site specifically for and to the Kindle 2…

2. All of my previous issues of magazines and newspapers were lost (ie, I could not re-download them specifically for the K2) because Amazon does not back up subscriptions on their server for more than 6 days. SINCE I PAID FOR THE CONTENT, I SHOULD BE ABLE TO HAVE THAT CONTENT ALWAYS AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD. Sorry, but I won’t consider buying any more newspapaers or magazine subscriptions to the Kindle 1 or 2. Several (Wall Street Journal, Reader’s Digest) are less expensive online (with print edition also included) and have ALL content (not MIA content pictures, charts, quotes, etc).

4. Although Amazon says it keeps you content on their server, I found many instances where I could not download my books to my computer because the item THAT I PAID FOR was not available for download to my new Kindle2. Amazon said the book had been “pulled.” Excuse me, but I paid for it, pulled or not, it should always be avaiable to me since I paid for it. When I asked for a refund for the pulled item now unavailable to me, SINCE I COULD NOT GET THE ITEM REDOWNLOADED, I was told that a refund was not possible. LESSON LEARNED: I now back up ALL my Kindle content on my computer. Since Amazon says “Don’t worry, your content is safe with us.” I respectfully disagree. Also, some authors issued new versions of their books for K2. However, then the original version for K1 “disappeared” from the server so I could not even download it to K2, nor K1. Same filename, so if I had been in a Whispernet area, the original would have been completely overwritten without my realizing it! Imagine, I bought a K2 Users Guide in May 2008, before it come off the engineers drafting table, instead of in February 2009!

She has other complaints, but the worst is that some books that she had already bought formatted for Kindle 1 disappeared. They can, of course, be bought again in their Kindle 2 implementation, but how often does a Stephen King novel change?

Other items she bought disappeared completely and were not re-formatted to the new Kindle (magazines and newspapers).

I do not want to, and will not, pay for the same book more than once simply because the technology behind the reader has changed.

I am ignorant of Sony’s reader. Are the same problems found with it?

Sony has an access at Google for books, but the software only runs on a mysterious platform called “Windows”. I’ll try WINE and see if it works (doubtful).

Categories: Culture

3 replies »

  1. Hello Matt, Amazon states:
    “We store all your purchases from the Kindle Store on Amazon.com, so you can access your books and other content from multiple Kindles, including Kindle (2nd Generation), as long as the Kindles are registered to the same account.” … “We make it easy to transfer books and subscriptions from one Kindle to another.”
    http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200316870&#library

    And the same goes for Sony and MobiPocket ebooks, they also are placed in a personal, online library from which you can re download.
    An interesting feature of the Sony PRS-505 and PRS-700 is that it allows you to read public domain titles from Google in an EPUB format: “The eBook Store from Sony is excited to present free public domain titles from Google to our customers in the U.S. and Canada.”

    I think Gadget Queen should get her money back, I do not understand how Amazon can interpret “all your purchases” by excluding downloads that are “pulled”.

  2. Oh well. Maybe someday. The idea of electronic books is a good one, but right now Amazon is too big to care — they need some competition.

  3. Yes, people keep talking to me about this Windows too. The same people keep talking about something called viruses that they are protecting themselves against all the time at great expense. Someone I know got one of these viruses, and he said it took him a couple of days to cure himself. Which seemed pretty quick to me, but there you go. I am not sure if the two are related. Maybe you can only get copies of this Windows in places where you catch viruses? Or perhaps these are just very sickly people.

    It is very odd, and I think we are best to stay well clear of it all. I have wondered if it might actually be that it in nothing to do with computers but is a code word for some very curious and dangerously infective sexual practices. That is why people are so insistent that you will like it if you try it?

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