People don't buy Kindles for the hardware. They buy Kindles because they work with a store that has the books they want to buy (and the hardware is good enough and cheap enough).
Without data I believe that more than 99% of ereader users have no idea what a MOBI or ePub file is and have never attempted to manually move a file onto their device. Instead, they go to a digital book store, click "buy", and content appears on their device.
Amazon does that as well as (better than?) any competitor, and crucially their store has the books people want.
I don't want a subscription store filled exclusively with LLM-generated trash. I don't really want to have to find which of a thousand websites will sell a DRM-free copy of something so I can buy it, download it, transcode it in Calibre into a format my device reads, and transfer it to my device. I'd much rather pay a few dollars, click a button that sends some money to the author and sends a book to my device.
This whole comments section reeks of "I don't understand why anyone uses Windows when Linux is so easy to get to", managing to simultaneously assume every user has a degree in computer science and overlooking all the rough edges.
The alternative I see mentioned here is kobo. I haven't used/owned a kindle so I don't know what amazon do better than the kobo store. I can say that I've bought over 50 books on the kobo store, can't recall a single instance of it not having a book I wanted.
Another reason people (e.g., my mother in law) buy kindles is that the price of ebooks is very often much less from Amazon than from the Kobo store. My mother in law wants to be like us and so she recently bought a kobo. But then she bought herself a new kindle as well simply so she can buy cheaper books and then transfer them (which she hasn’t figured out how to do, and which according to this thread will no longer be possible).
I don't think you can download ebooks from the Kindle store and transfer them to a Kobo unless they happen to be specifically DRM-free ebooks (which very few ebooks are, and basically none from the big publishing firms)? And even then a format conversion would be involved.
(If you mean transferring them to the Kindle reader, you can of course download the books directly on-device.)
Without data I believe that more than 99% of ereader users have no idea what a MOBI or ePub file is and have never attempted to manually move a file onto their device. Instead, they go to a digital book store, click "buy", and content appears on their device.
Amazon does that as well as (better than?) any competitor, and crucially their store has the books people want.
I don't want a subscription store filled exclusively with LLM-generated trash. I don't really want to have to find which of a thousand websites will sell a DRM-free copy of something so I can buy it, download it, transcode it in Calibre into a format my device reads, and transfer it to my device. I'd much rather pay a few dollars, click a button that sends some money to the author and sends a book to my device.
This whole comments section reeks of "I don't understand why anyone uses Windows when Linux is so easy to get to", managing to simultaneously assume every user has a degree in computer science and overlooking all the rough edges.