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Comment by kekeblom | Hacker News Reader

What I think is driving this is the lack of competition. No-one is going to take on the Kindle. Not because they don’t think they couldn’t make a better device, but because the don’t think they could create a digital bookstore with enough titles to be useful.

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There is actually competition to the Kindle, although you often wouldn't know it, reading "mainstream" US-centric forums such as HN.

Kobo offers a complete ecosystem similar to the Kindle, with bookstore, devices and syncing. There are a number of regional players as well in this space.

Then, of course, there are all the device makers that simply expect you to bring your own content.

> Then, of course, there are all the device makers that simply expect you to bring your own content.

Someone on hacker news talked about using syncthing for their ebook and I had to replicate it. it sounded so much more useful than my previous experience with ebook readers, the nook simple touch.

My quest to find an e-reader that supported Android 4.4+ and both headphone jacks and SD cards resulted in a likebook Mars.

Now I can use syncthing to sync my library...ebooks, PDF, and audiobooks, automatically in the background, no account needed.

I would have preferred to purchase a modern incarnation of the very first Kindle, with a headphone jack, SD card, and keyboard, but nobody makes such a device any longer, or if they do, it is so out of date that it cannot run syncthing.

I continue to be excited about the pine phone keyboard design, because from there it is only a properly sized e ink screen away from being a tiny e-reader with keyboard headphone jack and Linux!

Maybe a tablet maker will one day add a second, e-ink screen to the back of the tablet and run the Kindle app on it.

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