I might be the only person you know who doesn’t shop on Amazon.
That’s not to say I never did. I had prime, many years ago. I even had a couple of those little IoT buttons that could automatically order products inside a cabinet cupboard. I think I used one to order breath mints once.
Of all the things they have done and still do, there’s only one consumer level service from Amazon that I miss: my kindle.
Amazon got the experience of using the kindle extremely right. The page turn is fast and satisfying, the distractions are few, books load quickly. Except for the fact that Amazon makes it, it’s the perfect device. So of course the baby must go out the window with the bathwater. It wouldn’t be acceptable to say “I don’t shop on Amazon… Except for this one way in which I do.”
In case it’s not abundantly clear, I take disproportionate amounts of psychic damage from small inconveniences. Maybe Steve Jobs and I would have gotten along, because even the most trivial of ways in which a product can get something wrong will absolutely ruin it for me. Which is why I’ve never quite found my stride using an iPad mini to replace my kindle. Oh it’s a fine device. I’d probably even recommend it. But I don’t use it to read very many books, for about seventeen smallish reasons.
All of which is to say I think it might be time to reevaluate the eReader ecosystem.
By which I mean I already did that. Because there’s really only a handful of players, the kindle is still dominant, and they all suck in one way or another.
But I think there’s a path forward with Kobo. It appears to have the best support for sideloaded books, and for a variety of reasons that’s the way I need to be able to get my books on to a device. It also has the best support for getting my highlights back off through the stack of services I prefer using.
Unfortunately, they’ve spent a lot of effort on their new pen ecosystem which looks cool but doesn’t really seem to have a good export story. It doesn’t help me to be able to “draw” on a digital book if that drawing is trapped forever on the kobo’s screen. Sorry, Rakuten, this ain’t that.
All other things being equal I’d rather have a device that does one thing extremely well, and then carry as many such devices as needed. Almost nobody builds those devices anymore, there’s no path to hockey stick unicorn trajectory golden parachute baked brie on rye simply being the best at solving a real problem these days. Also it needs AI. Sprinkle some AI on it. Bitches love AI.
Which means, realistically, a device that’s competent at the thing I care about, and then does a bunch of other stuff I don’t. It’s fine to have features I won’t use, as long as they don’t impact the experience. They usually do, because product managers literally can’t help themselves. But we all fall far from the grace of dogs. I, too, have sinned. Etc.
Is this a long-winded way of saying that I’m probably going to buy myself an eReader at some point this year? Probably. Will I still buy a new iPad mini if they announce them? Probably also yes. And carry both every time I catch a flight somewhere. But I think that’s probably a worthy trade, in the hope that by specializing my use case for each they’re marginally better at what I need them to do than the current mini is at half-doing both.