The Incident

Lately, I've become quite angry with the Amazon Kindle ecosystem. Quite specifically, I had an issue with a particular book that wouldn't let me advance beyond a certain page. I was about 20 percent through the book and it was quite engaging, so I really wanted to finish it.

I tried rebooting my kindle, and removing the book and re-adding it from my archive, both via the web interface and the kindle itself, all to no avail. I finally contacted Amazon support, only to have them walk me through the same processes I had already tried. After quite some time using their online help system, they finally concluded by stating what I had been hoping not to hear, "you need to purchase a new kindle." I protested strongly, it worked fine for every other book on my device, save this one. Surely, there must be something else that could be done.

Some Background

I should take a moment to mention that I own a 4th gen Amazon Kindle -- the one that still had physical buttons (though not a keyboard) and not the touch screen (which I despise). I really liked this kindle and did not want to purchase a new one, as that would mean "upgrading" to a flaky touch screen. I know many people like the touch screen, but I just don't. I've tried to use my wife's paperwhite and find it too easy to accidentally flip multiple pages when I didn't intend to. I did not want this experience in my daily reading.

I should also mention that I was hesitant to enter any eReader eco system for a couple of reasons:

  1. I've always felt that reading is, and should be, a very physical experience. One should experience the feel and smell of the pages and the book binding glue.
  2. I didn't want to be locked into any particular ecosystem and it's DRM which would mean that I couldn't move my books to a location/device of my choosing.

The convenience of eReaders, however, is what convinced me. It's just so handy to have an entire library available on a device that is roughly the same size as a typical paperback book. So, I compromised, and bought a Kindle since I was already quite deep in the Amazon ecosystem as a whole (prime shipping and the like).

Now, however, I'm considering breaking away from the Amazon ecosystem and going with something more open -- perhaps the https://us.kobobooks.com/products/kobo-clara-hd

Going Forward

I have resolved to probably get the Kobo eReader. It has its own ecosystem with its own DRM, but it's far more open and supports other types/formats like EPUB more natively.

The downside, of course, is I either have to simply abandon the hundreds of dollars of books I've purchased via Amazon, or find a way to remove the DRM https://www.cultofmac.com/173945/how-to-read-kindle-books-in-ibooks-and-keep-your-library-in-the-cloud-how-to/ and port them all to another eReader. I'm honestly a bit unsure as to the legality of this. On the one hand, I did purchase the books. On the other hand, it's Amazon, and there is probably something in the terms of service that states that Amazon retains ownership of the actual content and that I'm just purchasing access as long as I own a Kindle device or something.

In any case, I'm about ready to consider myself done with Amazon's Kindle ecosystem. I'd rather purchase EPUB formatted books from the authors directly and/or simply use public domain content from a site like http://www.gutenberg.org/

If I do end up going this route, I'll post an update of what I did and how, in case readers are interested in also pursuing the abandonment of the Amazon Kindle ecosystem.