A few rants about ereaders & ebooks

These are some recent thoughts and rants about ereaders and ebooks. I may be wrong on some things but you can correct me if I'm wrong. These are from the point of view of a kindle paperwhite reader. (The correct term should be e-reader but I don't like that plus I had been using ereader so why change?)

01 - Ereaders are expensive. I waited to buy my kindle ereader during a holiday so I can save some money but I didn't really save anything because amazon makes you pay to remove advertising from their kindles (at least the regular and paperwhite models) which is the dumbest thing in the world. A product that comes with advertising should have made me not want to buy it, right? I guess I'm one of those dumb consumers because I brought it and paid more to remove advertising because who wants advertising on their device? But at least, I didn't pay the full price.

02 - The problems with ereaders, once you choose one, you are sort of stuck within their eco-system which means you mostly use just one format of ebooks. I chose to get a kindle ereader (over nook and kobo) because I had the strange idea that the kindle format is more widely used and it was probably true when I brought it a few years ago but I guess it's changing a bit.
    Just because a device accepts this or that format, didn't mean it's easy to get them onto your device. Amazon did add support for epub books. The whole DRM (Digital Rights Management) issue does make it harder to get epub books onto a kindle. Some people remove the DRM to get books onto their kindle which legally is not legal, at least, not in the U.S. Lots of books comes DRM-free but most are not so it's sort of a headache if you don't know how to get epubs on your device. I was never able to get epub public library books onto my kindle but I can do it with regular DRM-free epub books. Books that are not kindle format aren't even labeled books, they are labeled documents.

Thoughts on using the kindle after 4 years

I had my kindle paperwhite for about 4 years so here's an update on using it.  (My previous post about about using the kindle is here.)
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The Bad
01 - Still didn't like how they changed the home screen to two separate sections — The Home page is basically advertising because it's the kindle home store in a smaller format. You can check out recommendations but that's it. Plus I see the same cover with what's-his-face (some guy who messed up twitter) and it annoys the heck out of me. The Library is where your books are. I only visit the Home section when I don't feel like reading what I have.

My kindle experience so far

I had my kindle for a little over two and half years. I brought the Paperwhite, the second least expensive version and without the ads but I did brought it on sale so basically I paid full price because the discount barely covered the amount to remove the ads. I think it's ridiculous people have to pay to keep advertisement off a device they are already paying for. Overall, I like reading on the kindle for most of the time but as with most devices, they have their pros and cons. Here's what I like and dislike about my kindle so far. (I know I should probably capitalize kindle but I don't care.)

The Sadness of Missing Back Covers for Ebooks

(Left) What I usually see at the end of an ebook. (Right) Popup notice to rate the book. Both are for Premeditated Myrtle by Elizabeth C. Bunce.

I now mostly read ebooks and I like it enough to keep on reading them. One thing that I miss is the back covers. Sometimes when I'm at the end of an ebook, I just keep tapping forward hoping to see something but there's nothing. Not to say there aren't any ebooks with back covers, it's just that, they are rare. Of all the ebooks I had read (less than 50), I only saw one back cover.
    Usually a paperback and hardcover have a back cover that had a blurb about the book and a UPC code. The back cover is usually used as a promotion/advertisement space to entice readers to buy the book. With ebooks, readers won't see the back cover unless they had already brought the book (or borrowed from the library) so I suppose this is why the back cover is no longer used

The rare back cover of an ebook. This is for the book, The Mystery of Black Hollow Lane by Julia Nobel.

For ebooks, the last page is either credits (such as publishers' info), acknowledgements, the book content list or the occasional book excerpt of another book followed by some popup box about rating the book or something else depending on which e-reader you're using.
    For me, the back cover of a book is a sign that the book has ended. Credits or acknowledgment to a pop-up box to rate the book does not do that. I guess this is another reason why ebooks will never be like paper books.