- Posts tagged Kindle
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Another Nit for Amazon.com: Search Results Artificially Limited
I don't know why I've taken to this trend of nibbling away at Amazon.com and their amazing Kindle apps and hardware lately. But here's my second one in less than a week.
I discovered by accident the other day that if you search in a Kindle book on a Kindle app (in my case, running on an OS X box and an iOS device), the search results are limited to the first 100 hits. On the Kindle device, on the other hand, all available results are returned.
Why?
I'm not a heavy-duty programmer but I think I understand programming the Mac and iOS apps well enough to be pretty sure that memory constraints wouldn't be an issue. Not only are both machines pretty robust in terms of memory, but managing virtual memory on an app isn't all that difficult. So even the amount of available RAM shouldn't limit the result set.
Is this just a silly ploy to get me to buy a Kindle? I already have one, folks! Just let me find all the results I need on whatever app I'm using a Kindle publication on.
Why would I need more than 100 results, you ask? If I'm doing research and I'm looking for references to a particular word or phrase that appear in, e.g., a specific section or chapter of a book, and that section appears after the first 100 results the app returns, I have no way to get at the additional results as far as I can tell. No excuse for this and it is in my way.
The Mystery of Pricing Kindle Books
OK, let's see.
Don't you think?
This new book I wanted to read on my Kindle apps costs $30 at retail (except of course nobody pays that, even in person at a store). Amazon.com offers it for $16.66 and, for most buyers, shipping and handling that would presumably bring it back up around $20. I assume that at that price, Amazon makes a profit.
So why does an electronically downloadable version -- with no printing, shipping or handling costs -- cost $14.99, only $1.67 less? Does this feel like price gouging to you? It does to me. It's good, old-fashioned American greed. (The book I was trying to buy was Age of Greed by Jeffrey Madrick, BTW). That's charging what the market will bear rather than charging to earn a reasonable profit.
So I didn't order the book. I'll wait for my local library to get a copy and check it out. For free. It won't be as timely or convenient, but it's a tiny protest. The price of an electronically delivered book should reflect the savings made by the publisher and the reseller so that the profit or mark-up on these books are not significantly higher than those on printed copies.
Don't you think?
Apple Proves it Cares More About Profit Than Users...Again
Well, Amazon.com and BarnesAndNoble.com both caved in today to Apple's outrageous and ludicrous -- and quite probably illegal -- rules preventing sellers of iOS apps from offering their users the convenience of in-app purchase of books and magazine subscriptions. The high-handed budding monopolists in Cupertino demonstrated once again that their primary passion -- which was once user experience and convenience -- is now squeezing every drop of profit it can out of those whose content drive its platform's successes.
So now i as a heavy user of Amazon.com will no longer be able to search for and buy new books within the Kindle app from which the "Kindle Store" button has been removed in the update announced today. For now, at least, I'm simply declining the upgrade. It's inconvenient for me because now I can't do an "Upgrade All" when it and other apps have updates available, but for now it's my little way of protesting Apple's despotic behavior.
Someone is going to have to convince me this isn't monopolistic behavior. Apple seems to me to clearly be attempting to leverage its dominance of the smartphone/tablet software channel to force developers and vendors to cut it in on revenue they gain from products sold outside the apps they market through Apple. Classic bundling as far as I can tell.
I hope Amazon, like its Canadian counterpart Kobo, decides to write an HTML5-based app and circumvent the Apple App Store altogether. If they do that, I'll download the new app and delete the App Store version in a New York nanosecond. This heavy-handedness will provide app developers even greater incentive to escape the AppStore altogether, particularly when new avenues of distribution like Facebook and its new game platform are appearing with astonishing rapidity.
Heads up, Apple! Your short-sighted greed will cost you dearly if you don't wake up and smell the Web apps.
Two Weeks Past Deadline and Kindle's Still on iOS
Well, we're nearly halfway through July -- and as of today 12 days past Apple's announced deadline for iPhone and iPad apps to toe the line on in-app links to external Web sites for content purchase -- and there's been no change that anyone can detect in the Apple AppStore.
As regular readers know, I raised the issue of the June 30 deadline imposed by Apple demanding that stores like Amazon.com who offer an app (in this case the Kindle ereader app) that includes an inline link or button that takes the user outside the app to purchase content or add-on products, remove those links or face expulsion from the store.
Speculation in the industry as to what is actually going on here seems to center on the possibility that Apple's terms are sufficiently vague that either Apple has decided it probably can't enforce them and is simply looking the other way or there is some high-level, legal-based negotiating going on. Either way, it appears, that for the moment at least, all is well in Kindle-Apple Land.
