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The All New Kindle - ripoff!

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zridling:
Carol's anger is righteous. It's 2011 and the planet, countries, currency, and economies are more connected than ever in history. Virtually every gadget is made in China, so there's no good reason for it to cost more, not even £12 or £25. I order things from the UK all the time and I get the VAT removed at checkout. It's silly.

Renegade:
Carol's anger is righteous. It's 2011 and the planet, countries, currency, and economies are more connected than ever in history. Virtually every gadget is made in China, so there's no good reason for it to cost more, not even £12 or £25. I order things from the UK all the time and I get the VAT removed at checkout. It's silly.
-zridling (October 03, 2011, 12:21 PM)
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+1

I've got a few things to say on the topic coming up soon. I'll post in the Developer's Corner for that though.

xtabber:
Amazon is being less than up-front about the new Kindles.  For example, the Kindle Touch has been widely touted as undercutting the Nook Touch at $99 vs. $139, but the $99 price is only for an ad-supported version, which you will only find out by actually going to the product page. The regular Kindle Touch is the same price as the Nook Touch at $139.

Contrary to what is widely reported in the tech press, none of the new products, including the Fire, are being sold at a loss with the aim of making it up in sales through Amazon's Kindle store.  The pricing is not even terribly aggressive, given what is available to knowledgeable tablet/e-reader shoppers. Of course, the tech press is not exactly knowledgeable when it comes to this kind of thing.

The biggest problem that I see with all of the new Kindles is that they are locked in to the Silk browser, which means that Amazon will be scanning ALL of a user's web browsing, not just purchases at Amazon,  for data mining purposes.

One reason I use several different browsers is to keep one free of all cookies, so that when I go to a site like Amazon and search for something , I don't get steered to what the vendor thinks it can sell me. Amazon and most other big online vendors always do this, although, in Amazon's defense, I will say that they at least don't switch prices You'd be surprised how many sites display different prices on the same item when they know who you are vs. when they don't.

Carol Haynes:
which means that Amazon will be scanning ALL of a user's web browsing, not just purchases at Amazon,  for data mining purposes.
-xtabber (October 03, 2011, 01:55 PM)
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That's one of the things that would definitely put me off using Silk - everything you browse goes through and is cached on their system. Not only do that have the opportunity to monitor browsing habits even more effectively than they do now but they can tie every single page you visit to you personally. That isn't providing any kind of service - it is called stalking!

I'm sure it is illegal to do this sort of thing in the UK (even with a user agreement). Maybe that's why Fire isn't being sold here. France is even more neurotic about privacy - hey guess what they don't sell Kindle in France at all!

I'd say wait for the law suits (and probably huge class action suits at that) to start rolling in! Amazon's customers aren't religious like Apple's which is presumably why Apple hasn't had huge class action yet over the huge amount of data mining on iPhones, iPads and now even iPods.

xtabber:
It seems that with the new Kindle, you can buy the cheaper "Special Offers" version for $79 and then, at a later date, pay the additional $30 cost to remove the special offer advertising. That brings the cost up to $109, which is exactly the same as buying the reader without advertising. Don't know if this will also be the case for the Kindle Touch and Fire when they come out.

That's certainly a smart way to get people to try the Kindle for cheap, then pony up for the full price once they are hooked.  But it also suggests that there is more to the Kindle/Silk symbiosis than first meets the eye.

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