Guy Rutenberg

I’m an avid Kindle user for more than a year. However once in a while, I come across something like this when I shopping for a new book:

As you can see, Amazon sells Kindle edition for higher price than a paperback. This book of course isn’t the only example for this ridiculous pricing method, and if one browses the Kindle store he will surely find more.

This really upsets me, as there is no honest reason to price an electronic edition higher than a real dead-tree paper edition. In both cases, the author and the publisher get their royalities and share of the profits. But the Kindle editions doesn’t have many related expenses, like storage, transportation (from the publisher to Amazon), and above all printing costs.

I don’t know who is to blame for this absurd thing, Amazon or the publisher (or even both). But the few things I know are that this bad for everyone, the customer because he pays more and Amazon/publisher as in the long run, this encourages piracy as the customer feels he’s being unfairly treated thus he will be more willing to play an unfair game as well.

I am Your User suggested a method to eject your Kindle in Linux. While his method works, you don’t need to specify the partition number. E.g.

$ sudo eject /dev/sdd

where /dev/sdd is the device file of the Kindle.

But what if you want to reconnect it back without plugging in and out the usb cable? You can add the -t switch.

$ sudo eject -t /dev/sdd

Even though it prints the following error:

eject: CD-ROM tray close command failed: Input/output error

it works, and the Kindle reappears in KDE.