[robhu]

I would guess the high megabyte charge is there to encourage authors to keep their file sizes down, and the reason for this is presumably because Amazon have to pay for book downloads run through their 'Whispernet' (3G) Kindle service.

[derefr]

In other words, the charge is to incentivize people like nateberkopec to do exactly what they did: compress their JPEGs better.

[dbcurtis]

well, except it makes books with screenshots worthless. I bought an e-book on Mac Server. The print book is great because it is full of usefull screenshots showing exactly what you need to do. The Kindle book is a useless collection of smudges. Amazon has taught me to avoid an entire class of technical books on Kindle.

[sebular]

I feel like I've heard a lot of general hate toward the Kindle when it comes to anything with visuals. For starters, it's in black and white, but that's obvious, and nobody's going to try to sell or buy a coffee table photo book on the Kindle.

But the bigger issue with the Kindle platform is the inability to mimic the usefulness of a large, graphics-heavy reference book. It has a tiny screen that isn't good for viewing larger diagrams, and its tools for quickly flipping through pages or jumping back and forth between specific parts of the book are pathetic when compared with using a real book.

In terms of popular digital devices, the Kindle is the most puzzling to me. It was an innovative and groundbreaking technology when it was introduced 8 years ago, and all we've seen since then are the most boring and incremental improvements. Some have even been major missteps, as evidenced by the removal of physical page-turning buttons, only to have them return in the latest model.

Imagine if smartphones, tablets, wearables, or laptops had undergone such a severe lack of innovation in the past 8 years. How the product leadership of the Kindle team isn't fired and replaced with people who have real vision is a complete mystery to me.

I thought Bezos was supposed to be a hard-ass, but from an outsider's perspective it seems like he's totally fine with them barely lifting a finger to collect their paychecks.

[djrogers]

You d realize that you can read a kindle ebook on a tablet, phone, laptop, or retina iMac?

You're clearly conflating Kindle (the device) with Kindle (the ebook store).

[MicroBerto]

Can you embed links to the full size image?

[dbcurtis]

You can link out. But one of the things I like about Kindles for reference books is the ability to use it where you are, and not have to have an internet connection in order for it to be useful. Also, Silk isn't that great of a browser.

A bit off-topic, but I couldn't get at all interested in Kindles until the Kindle Fire, because that was the first time it would render O'Reilly books correctly, or render something like a resistor color code correctly. I love having a programmer's reference library in my laptop bag.

[emodendroket]

Well that explains why Kindle books typically have maps that are so compressed they are completely illegible I guess.

[nateberkopec]

I suppose so. But they're still charging 10x what I pay per MB for my cellphone. I use Ting, which runs on the same Sprint network as Whispernet, and I get 4G.

[Xylakant]

Amazon Whispernet works in most countries (even down in southern africa) and allows multiple re-downloads of the same book. Most people probably don't download a book ten times, but twice is fairly common for me (multiple readers). Comparing the price with the raw bandwidth price on a single network is not a fair comparison.