MEET THE NEW KINDLE, SAME AS THE OLD KINDLE

TL;DR - I replaced my 2013 Kindle Paperwhite (price : ¥9,000) with the latest 2024 model (price ¥27,000). The only non-cosmetic difference was that in the newer model the wifi connection to the online kindle store actually worked. Wow!

My Kindle History

As with many new technological innovations, I was an early adopter of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. I had one of the first models, which was awful, and got destroyed when I sat on it in a café. Undeterred, I got a new Paperwhite in 2013 which cost a very reasonable ¥9,000.

Over the years I used it on and off, but for me it just couldn’t replace real books. Where I found it useful was for travelling - you can have many volumes on hand with no bulk. Also good for reading books of lesser importance that I didn’t particularly want on my shelves, embarrassing me if any one should happen to see them next to the highbrow stuff. It has also been handy for things that are not readily available in physical format, such as the kind of niche material I like to dabble in.

While the actual reading experience on a Kindle has been fine, and the ability to instantly check words in a dictionary or add notes or underline things useful, there’s just something very clunky and unnatural about the navigation and page-turning. It’s a chore, compared with leafing through a book, with many mistaken taps and getting lost as a result, especially in big files. Long experience has not make this aspect of operating a Kindle any better. But still, a very useful device and great adjunct to my pursuit of reading.

However, although my old Paperwhite still works perfectly, for many years it hasn’t been able to connect with the Amazon Kindle store, and thus, buying books directly on the device is no longer possible. Not that it was much fun anyway, seeing as how it was always displayed entirely in Japanese, despite the fact that my Amazon Japan iPhone app and desk top site are available in English.

The End of Importing Books?

So, I’d been considering getting a new Kindle for a while, not only to allow me to connect directly to the store, but also to hopefully speed up the clunky performance. But there’s also another, more pressing reason : the cost of books.

A few years ago I used The Book Depository, who not only had an amazing inventory, but also delivered to Japan for about ¥2,000 per book. Then Amazon bought them, and killed them. Just closed it down, the bastards.

Next I found Awesome Books - while not quite as good as The Book Depo, I could still get books for about ¥2,500 a pop - acceptable. I last did a big order with them in April. However, when I went to look for something in their store a couple of weeks ago, I couldn’t believe what I saw - their prices had more than doubled!! Books now average ¥4,500, and that’s before delivery fees. In light of this insanity, I can no longer afford to feed my 40 book a year habit.

Hence a renewed look at the Kindle. E-books are cheaper…or are they? Well, yes and no. There are some amazing deals for works which are out of copyright - such as Delphi Classics, who offer attractive complete works editions of the kind of Victorian novelists I’m into, all for just a dollar or two. I also found a Penguin Classics edition of George Meredith’s ‘The Egoist,’ a fairly obscure tome, for just ¥199 - that’s about $1.20. And while that is exceptionally cheap, we must bear in mind that the production costs of ebooks is so much less than that of their physical counterparts. In fact, after initial formatting, there are no production costs at all.

Sadly it seems that more modern works are much more expensive. While I get it that living authors still need to be paid, charging the same for an ebook as for a physical copy is nothing short of a rip-off. Sadly that is what I found when I looked at the works of Icelandic novelist Halldor Laxness - annoyingly both versions priced at around ¥2,500 on Amazon. OK, so this price is way better than Awesome Books and I could just get the real book, but add in the postage costs and you’re looking at ¥3,000.

A New Kindle

And so I decided to get a new Kindle. And what do I find - the prices have gone up since 2013 when I bought the last one. That’s understandable, but a threefold increase??? Yes, I paid ¥9,000 for the old one, and the new price? ¥27,000!!! OK, this is partly a result of the depreciation of the yen, but still, that just has greed written all over it (in e-ink). Well, surely it must be stuffed full of new features, right, and way faster than the old one?

I bit the bullet, ordered and received the new device. In the twelve years separating the two models, the only tangible differences were superficial ones such as a ‘warm’ mode for the backlight, and the new Kindle is a bit bigger. That’s it. The same clunky navigation and page turning. The connection to the Kindle store works now, too : so that’s a threefold price increase to fix something that should have been functioning properly in the first place. Also - the store is still entirely in Japanese! I tried to sneakily sign in using my UK Amazon account, but it saw through my ruse and now I’m back to endless recommendations for manga and soft porn titles in Nihongo - great!

To be fair, the device itself is very nice, and if it were my first one, I would have been very happy indeed. But seriously - the glacial progress of the Kindle is astonishing. I know there are now colour ones and ones you can write on with a pen, but these are double the price again, so no thanks.

The Silver Lining

OK, so I’ve been whining a lot about the price of this thing - and it is indeed a scandal that something so similar to the twelve year old iteration should cost three times as much - but I must come clean and reveal that I didn’t pay ¥27,000 for this. I actually paid ¥118. Yep, that’s $0.78 in American. So I can’t really complain too much. How did I manage this feat? Well, my credit card is overworked and accrues large amounts of points that can be used for such non-essential purchases as this. It’s the same way I got my turntable.

Without the credit card points there’s no way I would have bought it.

Still - what is it with these companies (I’m looking at you, too, Apple) who continually increase their prices while offering the most minuscule of feature upgrades and don’t fix or improve basic functionality? Even more astounding is the way they have convinced millions of people to regularly upgrade their devices regardless.