Amazon announced earlier in the year that they were not going to make anymore e-readers with buttons, because their customers wanted touchscreens instead. “Once the current inventory of Kindle Oasis sells out online and in stores, we will not restock the device,” Amazon’s Devon Corvasce says in a statement. “Today, all of our devices are touch-forward, which is what our customers are comfortable with.”
The Kindle Oasis and Kindle Voyage were premium e-readers during their time. They had the latest e-paper technology, had page-turn buttons, and the hardware themselves were not made of cheap plastic, but aluminum. The Oasis was the first e-reader to gain Bluetooth functionality and was able to purchase and listen to audiobooks via Audible with wireless headphones. This is now standard across the entire Kindle line. The Oasis and Voyage had the largest screens when they were sold, and now basically all the Kindle e-readers, such as the Paperwhite and Scribe, have massive screens.
Amazon is competing on price, in a race to the bottom. Their e-readers are all made of cheap plastic, they don’t have large batteries, and the internal storage options are abysmally trim. They make things so cheap that they recoup their costs by selling e-books. When the Kindle Basic goes on sale, it can easily be found for less than $60. Their most expensive e-note, the Scribe, goes on sale almost monthly, because the regular price is too much for the average person. Their color e-reader, the Colorsoft has been the genuine innovation in almost five years, but has had a rough go with its broken screens and discolorations.
The Amazon hardware division is reportedly losing billions of dollars annually. They subsidize the prices to gain market share, but many of their devices have been flops. Echo Frames, Alexa+, Fire Tablets, Fire Phones, Amazon is losing billions a year on all of this stuff and has resulted in 10,000 people being laid off a couple of years ago and a hundred executives last week.
I think Amazon has lost sight of what its customers want out of an e-reader. People like being able to flip the page of a book at the touch of a button. Why do you think all of these Bluetooth page-turners sell hundreds of thousands of units per month? People like page-turn buttons. However, Amazon recently issued a firmware update that allows users to tap the side of the screen to move forward a page, but not to turn back. People prefer premium materials because they tend to last longer. People still buy those old Sony e-readers because the build quality is unmatched in the modern world of e-book readers.
Amazon should release a new premium e-reader with page-turn buttons. There is room in their portfolio for such a device, and it would sell like hot cakes. All of their competitors in the space, such as Rakuten Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Pocketbook, Onyx Boox, and many other brands, offer numerous models with page-turn buttons.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.