[The Cunning Tower by Wilfrid: April 9, 2015]
The hidden costs of relying on Amazon's fragile Kindle e-reader are becoming clear.
I don't have an e-reader right now. Oh sure, I had one up to a couple of weeks ago, and I've had one since 2011, when I attended a presentation by Jeff Bezos announcing the Kindle Fire.
No, I never had a Kindle Fire. I just wanted the most basic Kindle--affordable, easy to use, pocket-sized, and convenient. Like the Everyman Library, I hoped it would go with me and be my guide, in my most need go by my side. As it turned out, it wouldn't.
Watch and enjoy a video I made in 2013. My second Kindle had just died on me. The first one, as I admit in the video, took a little bit of a knock, but the second one just never worked properly.
Here I am, barely two years later, and my third Kindle just ceased to be. That's pretty much it: it ceased be.
One moment it was working fine, the next a message saying "Your Kindle needs repair," but not a hint how to go about repairing it. Unsurprisingly, it turned out that Amazon hadn't a clue how to repair it either. Online chats had me powering it off and powering it on again, always ending up with that same bland, annoying message. But guess what? Amazon would sell me a replacement! Yes, it was outside warranty, so that message which came out of nowhere was going to cost me $78.
$78 for a "certified refurbished" Kindle, with, yes, a one year warranty.
Now hold on just a moment there, Amazon. This would be my fourth Kindle since September 2011. That's more than one Kindle per year (the only good news is that the first failed within warranty). If I came up with the seventy eight bucks, I'd be buying a device I'd actively be hoping would fail before the warranty is up...because fail it surely will.
This brings me to something else I distinctly remember Jeff Bezos saying at the Kindle Fire launch. Don't worry about how much content you can store on your Kindle, because Amazon will host all your purchases in the cloud. For free.
Really? The Kindle, of course, exclusively hosts content purchased from (or via) Amazon. And you can't access that content in the cloud using anything other than a Kindle. So it's being hosted for free?
No.
If you have to buy a new Kindle every time your Kindle fails--and let's say your Kindle fails every eighteen months--then it's costing you more than $4 a month to store and access your content.* Because you wouldn't count a brick and mortar storage facility as "free" if you couldn't access it without (repeatedly) being charged for new keys.
Okay, so $4 a month isn't much. Or $48 a year. Maybe not, but it's not free, and it's a coercive charge--coercive because you may well have many hundreds of dollars worth of content stored in Amazon's cloud, and unless you keep replacing your fragile Kindle, it might as well be stored on the moon. (I wonder, incidentally, what Amazon's response would be to a request to stop storing my books in the cloud and give me the files).
I don't know what I've spent on e-books over the last three and a half years, or what I'm likely to spend in future. But do I want to spend $500 (plus, because prices will surely rise) to store that content over the next ten years?
That's a proposition from which I'm backing away. If you're in a hole don't keep digging. And it's why I don't have an e-reader right now. Books really do furnish a room.
*Obviously it could be less if your Kindles fail within the warranty period, or if you're much luckier with them than I am.
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