Friday, December 11, 2015

THE COMPLETE PEANUTS & Amazon's Kindle-Incompatibility Scam


Here's the story:  back in November, i was looking to maybe buy a volume of The Complete Peanuts for my Kindle Keyboard on Amazon, but i couldn't even select it to buy -- the website was saying that my Kindle couldn't handle the format.  Rats.

So in December, i was able to order a Kindle Voyage.  Now i can get The Complete Peanuts, right?

Almost.

One day on Amazon, i see an offer for all 24 volumes of The Complete Peanuts (for $500+ dollars -- more than twice the price of the new Kindle) and figured i would take a look.  But the file for each volume of the series turned out to be over 200 Mb -- that's over 5 Gb for the whole set, and the Kindle Voyage only has 3.25 Gb of storage.  So even if i didn't have any other books on the new Kindle (and i have like 1200+), all the volumes of The Complete Peanuts wouldn't even fit on it at once.

Ample reason to return the set and get a refund.

Except now the Return For Refund button has disappeared (maybe just for the holidays?).  No problem; i just called the help line (in India), and they took care of it.  Money refunded.

But of course i still have the files on my computer.  So i figured, why not try one on the Kindle Keyboard and see how it does.  The files were .AZW3 files, just like most of the Kindle files i already had, so why not?

At first the book wasn't showing up (i'd connected the Kindle to the USB port on my computer and copied the file to the documents folder).  Uh-oh.  But then i searched for it (with the search function, which found it) and opened it.  It worked fine!  It was compatible with the Kindle Keyboard.  Hah!

(Good thing i'm used to file-handling!)

On the Voyage, when you open up one of The Complete Peanuts volumes, it's displayed with a whole bunch of strips all shrunk down & squished onto one page; you have to double-tap the screen initially to get it to show the strips one at a time (and zoomed in so you can see them properly).

So not only is the comic format compatible with the Kindle Keyboard, it's easier to read it on the Kindle Keyboard than on the Voyage, because the Kindle Keyboard automatically detects the comic format (and you couldn't do the double-tap anyway, since it's not a touch screen).

So now i have all 24 volumes of The Complete Peanuts -- and i got them for free! -- and the only limitation is i can't fit them all onto a single Kindle at once.

So much for Amazon's Kindle-Incompatibility scam!

Now for lots of Charlie Brown and company!

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