Comment by kuboble
1 day ago
My kindle from 2012 used to have ads you needed to pay for to get rid of. It was sold as separate product with or without ads at a time. I had one with ads.
I keep it offline in airplane mode permanently from 2016 and haven't seen a single ad in a long long time.
You'll get a new ad if you take it online again, but they only persist for about a month or so before falling back to the generic 'read books' amazon ad.
I have my 2016 one setup without a password so when I open my cover the device unlocks, so I never really even see the ad unless I try.
I just realized I like how the ads in my paperbacks have been there for decades.
There are cracks for older firmware and others for newer. You can have it online and adfree with a little forum reading.
I have a similar one and I never bothered to pay to get rid of the ads or keep it in aeroplane mode.
The ads are only shown while it's off, they're static black and white images, and 99% of the time they're for books. Totally unobjectionable.
If they were in the actual UI and for stuff like cars and perfume I might mind, but they aren't so I never cared.
> The ads are only shown while it's off, they're static black and white images, and 99% of the time they're for books. Totally unobjectionable
Speak for yourself. Aside from the principle, some of us don’t want to be advertised to in the comfort of our own home/bed/while we’re camping or whatever. Ads don’t have to be actively flashing, spaz-inducing insanity to be objectionable.
Not to mention that by definition an ad like this WILL be seen and attended to, even if only momentarily. That in itself is also objectionable.
Customers have proven they'd rather pay less for the option to see ads. As long as you can pay for an ad-less experience, I see no problem with it.
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The fact that having ads on a product designed for reading is so dystopian. A great new term has recently entered the lexicon to describe this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
I'm reading a book by Asimov at the moment, printed 1989. The first page is an ad for a Robert Silverberg book adaptation of the Nightfall short story. Pages 2-3 are ads for other Asimov books. The last 5 pages are an excerpt of Edge of Eternity. And the final page is an advertisement for Voice of the Planet, a "5 episode TBS miniseries starring William Shatner and Faye Dunaway"
Have you never read a magazine or a newspaper? Ads have been in products designed for reading for your entire life.
And it’s an ad on the lock screen, not an ad interrupting your reading. I buy the ad free versions though.