The latest generation, Kindle Paperwhite, Kindle Scribe 2, Kindle Scribe 1, and Kindle and the upcoming Kindle Colorsoft, all have something in common. When you plug them into USB into your PC or MAC, they no longer appear as external drives. This prevents users from using file managers to back up their books or to sideload new books onto the Kindle. Amazon has also removed the download and transfer via USB option for purchased ebooks from the content page. This will likely prevent people from stripping the DRM from the books and sharing them on piracy websites. This is not
Reminder: don’t buy things from Amazon.
Like, anything.
“But fast shipping!” No. Stop. Most places now have pretty good shipping, often for free if you happen to buy a certain amount. It’s OK if the thing comes in 3-5 days and not tomorrow. You will survive.*
*I know there’s a couple of niche cases where some people do need things quick and Amazon serves that purpose. But 99.999% of things are not that.
B&H and Home Depot have been two solid services for things they sell. Former is computers and photography. Both of them ship pretty damn fast.
Honestly, what convinced me to start using them was how increasingly difficult it is to get quality items on Amazon. Sifting through garbage gets old fast.
Shout out to B&H. I bought my drone from them, and they offered the same model bundle at a slightly lower price than Amazon and also offered next-day shipping for no charge.
They also have a physical retail store and real live people you can call if you have a question, unlike either winding up talking to a chatbot or being redirected to Mumbai after a 45 minute hold.
I don’t know these guys from a hole in the ground other than that, but they beat Amazon and that was good enough for me.
Agreed, and there’s also the bonus of much less likely to get a counterfeit item.
Kobo and Boox are better at making eReaders anyway.
Cut Amazon shopping and subscriptions out of my life years ago and haven’t regretted it.
One thing amazon does that’s really useful is shipping to whole foods where you can pick up your item instead of it coming to your door which is really useful if you know someone will try to look through your mail
Amazon is slower than pretty much everyone else in Germany, and it’s been like that for literal decades. To get almost universal next-day delivery nation-wide a shop needs to do exactly two things: Have the parcels ready by evening, and not be located in the absolute boondonks (which would mean two-day delivery).
Amazon, unless when ordering via premium shipping (included in prime but not worth it for that), takes days to even pack the parcel. Then they can spend a day or two sending it from one of their logistics centres to the other until handing it over to the actual parcel service.
What they do have going for them is the mindbogglingly huge selection. Pretty much the only upside, if you need five small things from what would be five different stores each having their order minimums for free shipping amazon is the sane choice.
Yeah, I try to avoid Amazon as well, and just cancelling Prime went a long way toward motivating me to shop elsewhere. But we still order from Amazon a fair amount (far less than before we cancelled Prime), it just takes a bit longer.