this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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It’s crazy how subsidized a Kindle is. I recently paid 60€ on sale for a brand-new Paperwhite. That has a superior display, and requires no extra work. It’s even worse if you look at voice-assistants, On sale, you can probably get 3-4 echo dots for the price of the materials of a single self-built one…
Mass production does that.
It's not just mass production and economies of scale. That's obviously a huge part of it, but the cheap Kindle devices are also definitely sold at a loss with the expectation that you're going to buy a lot of ebooks from Amazon which will more than make up for it (and also some of the devices are ad supported).
...and we can be sure Amazon finds ways to monetize user data as well (they see your book purchases, downloads, reading habits, etc)
I don’t believe it’s to that level. Shitter pieces of hardware cost more on AliExpress.
and underpaid labor in asia
It's also the economy of scale. You get better prices when you're buying thousands of units.
Mass production. Plus ads on the Lock Screen. It’s $20 cheaper with the ads.
No ads. My kindle is too important for ads.
I keep mine in airplane mode most of the time to avoid getting new ads too often. Also the only ads are on the lock screen which is extremely unobtrusive if you're looking to save a few bucks
I really enjoy seeing my book cover on the lock screen ;) And just buy the kids version, it’s always ads free but costs the same as with ads.
Same as the paper white? I saw another commenter say the same. Indeed sounds like the move!
Yeah, it’s exactly the same model as the paper white. It’s been a common trick for a while now.
Call Amazon and say the content of the ads is offensive and say you want them to either remove the gambling and adult romance ads or remove it all if they can select. That worked for me and my wife.
The ads I see on my kindle lock screen all seem to be for garbage AI-generated books.
Only unobtrusive currently
Has been the same for many years. If they started popping up during reading or something I would not recommend at all of course. Wasn't worth $30 to me and I don't regret it so far these last few years (:
Right, but amazon also hasnt any reason to put pressure on yet. Wait till their profits start slowing
Wait, are they putting ads on kindle??
There have been ads on Kindle for a very long time. You can optionally pay an extra $15-$20 to remove the ads though.
I mean those Echo Dots come with a huge hit to your privacy as a cost. Not to mention how susceptible the Echo Dot has been in the past. Hell some expeditious hackers even got the Echo Dot to hack itself.
As I said, subsidized. But luckily, Home Assistant finally added the last pieces I needed to make a second attempt at building my own. I have the microphones, an old PI3, and some cheap USB speakers to make a proof of concept, if everything works, I’ll get some Pi Zero 2’s or comparable devices, more speakers, and replace the Echo’s.
Yeah I have an Rpi Zero for interfacing cheaper devices with HomeKit so I feel you. I’m just not going to use an Echo Dot when I already have a bunch of HomePods lol.
I installed that update just minutes ago! What are you using for your voice satellites?
As I said, PoC will be done with a Pi3 (which currently has Rhasspy installed from my last attempt :D), if everything works I’ll get Pi Zero2s or something similar.
I'd be interested in how well it turns out for you haha
Same ;) one thing that was a big issue with Rhasspy, was that I want to play the audio from the device I requested it from (though technically I could live with hard coding the audio player as I only need the kitchen to play music), I'll see how that works with ha.
No doubt Amazon sells Kindles with a thin margin or maybe even at a loss. But the cost to produce them is also lowered significantly by manufacturing large quantities.
You mean the ad infested ebook reader that has less and less features with each version? Yeah sounds great. Buy a Kobo instead and host your own library with Calibre.
Sounds great. Edit: although I would have more fun building the open book project.
And doing so in a sweatshop somewhere cheap.
That version is ad-sponsored though, isn't it? If you wanted to get it without ads, I believe you need to pay extra.
Nah, you buy the Kids version, it’s exactly the same as the normal version, besides a) no ads (but for the with ads price), b) free cover and c) You need to go into settings and exit child mode when you set it up.
You can ask customer service to remove it for free after purchase, or so I've heard.
I'm pretty sure it's a $30 dollar charge, from when I last looked into it. For that exact price difference you can get a Kobo, which isn't Amazon and doesn't have ads
If you want to just do it automatically through the settings or whatever, sure. But you can supposedly call up customer service, make up an excuse like the ads are inappropriate for your kid, and they will remove ads for no charge.
Sadly a Kobo doesn’t support my Kindle library without a good bit of extra steps that, from my experience, can wreck some books.
That's fair. Fwiw that's the main reason I tried to avoid kindle, so I would be able to take my library where i want and not be tied to Amazon
Yeah they usually won’t do this unless you’ve owned it for a while or purchased a considerable amount of content via the device. Also depends on how adamant you are about having them remove it.