Amazon`s Kindle Redefines Electronic Books - Criticism
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Negatives and Criticism
Now let’s talk about the drawbacks and negatives of the Kindle. While I agree that it certainly is a revolutionary device, it’s by no means a perfect e-book reader that solves all of your reading-related hassles with its portability. Moreover, the path taken by Amazon is predominantly similar to monopolization.
First of all, the Kindle’s main drawback is its price— $399 for nothing but a device.
We understand that particular actions are meant to be taken to prevent fraud, copyright infringements, and the breaking of copy protection, but designing an almost totally centralized, limited, and closed device based on proprietary formats and charging 10 cents for automated processes that take less than a second, is simply not a business-favorable strategy in 2007-2008. After all, open-source projects are heavily developed.
Additionally, there is the problem of the lack of native PDF support—may I ask why? Amazon’s online email-based conversion for PDFs is experimental and fails more often than not, or even if it succeeds, your converted PDF ends up displayed incorrectly. Likewise, Kindle has MP3 support -- finally, something that’s mainstream! -- but you cannot disable the Shuffle function. That means that you are limited to randomly listening to all of your tracks.
The Kindle is also limited to the continental United States. The device is neither sold nor marketed outside of USA, nor would its wireless EVDO subscriptions work on other continents. The carrier is Sprint.
Amazon also charges $0.99 to allow RSS subscriptions per month for each blog. The charge exists even though the user is able to visit any of these blogs manually with the experimental web browser. So the fee is just for RSS syndication. Subscriptions to newspapers cost between $5.99 – $14.99 per month, while magazines $1.25 – $3.49 monthly.
A somewhat minor flaw in software is related to justification. The texts are always justified, that’s fine, but apparently hyphenations are ignored. This might be fixed.
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