[gcb0]

amazon knows about logistic, not product design.

just try to navigate their site.

also 100 for a kindle is idiotic since its useless for anything but buying amazon books.

pdf are a pain. you still get to scroll sideways for each portion of each line you are reading. its obviously done so you dont read pdfs or images there.

any other ebook or doc format that they promise worry free conversion. just send them via email. yeah right. i managed to convert exactly zero out of 100s i tried.

they should be giving those out almost for free as it is. microsoft did it with xbox and then penny and dimed their customers with great success.

[Symmetry]

It's actually a pretty good reader even if you don't load Amazon books onto it. Now, 2/3 of the books are actually ones I buy through Amazon, but Calibre is happy to load any other non-DRMed ebook I should happen to have onto it and that's pretty important when I get something I want to read from drivethroughrpg or the Hugo packet or whatever.

[gcb0]

"non-DRMed ebook" you mean the 4 or 5 that exists and is not RPG or fanfic?

you have to give that this is not a very usual demographic. for example, try to find one academic paper/journal that you can read comfortably.

[dragonwriter]

> "non-DRMed ebook" you mean the 4 or 5 that exists and is not RPG or fanfic?

The Pragmatic Programmer's ebooks, from their site, are all non-DRM, on the technical side (I think a number of other big technical publishers do non-DRM on direct-from-publisher ebooks).

(On the fiction side, I know Baen has included CDs of DRM-free ebooks -- mostly the all-but-most-recent books in major series -- with hardbacks, and also allowed them to distributed on the web.)

[taeric]

I've never really understood the complaints on their site being bad. I can't remember the last time it really frustrated me. Actually, I can. Trying to find ram for my laptop. Somewhat obnoxious. Of course, trying to find the same product on the laptop manufacturer's site was also bloody painful.

Regardless, I can't understand the criticism. Their site works remarkably well for what it is. A shopping site.

The $100 Kindle is the multimedia one. So... with Prime it actually has replaced Netflix for us. And Spotify, oddly enough.

I do agree the $200 one seems excessive in price. Though, I still wouldn't mind upgrading my paperwhite. Which I absolutely love.

[saryant]

RAM is a good example of where Amazon's design falls down a bit. For items like RAM, where you know the exact specs you need, NewEgg is hard to beat. Their power search lets you drill down to precisely what you need.

I like Amazon when I don't know quite what I want. That's where the reviews come in.

[taeric]

For me, I didn't know the exact specs I needed. I just wanted whatever worked in my laptop. Oddly, they have this down pretty well for cars. Whenever I am looking at automotive parts, it lets me know if it works for my vehicle.

If I recall, I wound up buying straight from crucial. They were the first site where I could type in what laptop I had and it would give me options for ram to buy.

[Omniusaspirer]

It's a shame Newegg is rarely the place to go for actually good prices these days. I find I'm buying something like 80% of my computer parts from Amazon now as they consistently beat Newegg on the price of nearly everything barring some extremely rare (and randomly timed) substantial sale on Newegg.

[DanBC]

> Regardless, I can't understand the criticism. Their site works remarkably well for what it is. A shopping site.

Go tontheir site and search for "microwave oven", the. Sort by price. You'll have hu dreds of items that are not microwave ovens but accessories for ovens. You'll also get items that are not mocrowVes or useful for microwaves.

Go to their site and search for, eg, sansa fuze+, the. Sort by price. You'll have several thousand cases and screen protectors.

In both cases I would have made a purchase if Amazon had returned a product.

You're not supposed to use search. You're supposed to ise the menu system to drill down through the site to find the product.

[morsch]

Search for microwave oven and you get a very sensible list of popular microwave ovens, including one they refer to as the #1 best seller. Before you can even sort by price, they ask you to select a product category, selecting which switches to a sort by relevance by default.

If you insist in sorting by price, you do get garbage results (or rather, you get exactly what you insisted on asking for: literally everything in the category containing the words sorted by price). But it's easy to limit the results to just actual ovens by filtering to something oven specific, like the power output. Which ends up giving you essentially the same results as you get when you initially search for microwave oven in the first place.

Search for sansa fuze+ and you get a similarly helpful list. I don't know why you'd ever want to sort by price here: you're searching for a specific family of products and you get there, immediately. In the unlikely case that you want a screen protector instead of the player, there's ways to get there.

Based on those two examples they're doing a pretty good job. And using -- what, exclusively? -- the category menu to find a product sounds excruciating. Starting with a search query is much faster, the category system is available as a filter in step two, at least for popular categories such as microwave ovens.