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Comment by esrauch | Hacker News Reader

Amazon seems to use images of text an awful lot. Anyone know why that is?

Maybe they have an internal tool that generates text/image composites like this from something like Markdown. We did that for one of our product sites; it was pretty handy.

I worked at Amazon for a while as an intern, but I didn't see how a ton of the external facing stuff worked like this. So in some ways, this is mostly speculation.

I notice one big thing about image-based announcements: I'd rarely hear about the publicly first, and I'd definitely not hear about them internally in an official way. Leak-proofing things.

I suspect the reason for images is because it's simply harder for PR/management types to make a decent looking webpage that works in multiple browsers. It's way faster to export an image from whatever software they use to generate it.

And I suspect it avoids deployment headaches.

Images lookup service may show this, increasing barriers to being paraphrased (meaning official looking and link on it) and solid metric with SEO juice if hot linked.

It's akin to infographic SEO (You can look it up).

I keep trying to copy the text to share with someone, but failing. Maybe they don't want people to know.

Looks like they have standardized on a 475 pixel width headline image for each section. In this case, it has lots of text, but usually it has product photos emphasized with headline text.

Very frustrating for anyone who is on mobile or happens to like how their text renders. These images are flat out difficult to read in places.

But since I bought an MP3 album a while back, I effectively have a free cloud to store my 40GB of music in. I'll take text-ful-images for that.

Are you planning on actually using it? I uploaded some music to Amazon's mp3 when it first launched and more to Google's MP3 and I have found very little need to use either one. I obviously can't fit all my music on my phone (an android) but I generally am ok with the music I have at any particular time and swapping.

I don't stream much with it on my phone. But it's great to be able to download the album(s) I want to the device without needing to connect to my computer.

Also, can never have too many backup copies of my music.

> Also, can never have too many backup copies of my music.

That's going to be my primary use of this service. I already have ways of accessing my music on my home machine remotely. But an additional offsite cloud backup of 150GB for $20 a year? Sold.

I hate syncing my Fascinate with my computer. Almost more than anything. Data sync across two computers, a laptop, a chromebook and an Android phone is a nightmare.

I currently serve my media off of SubSonic but the interface is tired, the API is restricted and pay-walled, and the Android app sucks. Amazon solves all of this.

I definitely will be using it. Plus I can buy cheap-o Class 6 SDcards.

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