This is a complete reimagining of the Open Book Project, but the original mission remains:
As a society, we need an open source device for reading. Books are among the most important documents of our culture, yet the most popular and widespread devices we have for reading are closed objects, operating as small moving parts in a set of giant closed platforms whose owners’ interests are not always aligned with readers’.
The Open Book aims to be a simple device that anyone can build for themselves. The Open Book should be comprehensible: the reader should be able to look at it and understand, at least in broad strokes, how it works. It should be extensible, so that a reader with different needs can write code and add accessories that make the book work for them. It should be global, supporting readers of books in all the languages of the world. Most of all, it should be open, so that anyone can take this design as a starting point and use it to build a better book.
Check out the promo video as well:
https://youtu.be/vFD9V8Hh7Yg
It’s crazy how subsidized a Kindle is.
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.
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.
I installed that update just minutes ago! What are you using for your voice satellites?
Mass production. Plus ads on the Lock Screen. It’s $20 cheaper with the 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
That version is ad-sponsored though, isn’t it? If you wanted to get it without ads, I believe you need to pay extra.
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
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).
