Step 1: go to amazon on a real computer and find book
Step 2: click buy
Step 3: in the post purchase confirmation it says "Want to start reading right away?" and a dropdown of your devices with a deliver button.
It's a kids device they (and you) don't want your kid to be sent 50 shades of gray accidentally.
The other flow is buy book. Go to kindle, "sync and check for new items". But again, it's a kids book, don't want to pull your copy of "catcher in the rye" to their device accidentally.
edit: common question: what's a computer... it's a dying concept where you own the machine you bought instead of rent it, typically consisting of an open source os distribution, and the manufacturer doesn't take 30% of all transactions taking place on that hardware.
edit: I want to buy it on my phone: would you be ok paying 30% more than on a pc? Amazon doesn't think so. And giving 30% cut to apple / google would end up with amazon paying apple to sell the book. At that point why ?
> I am sorry for being so flippant and unreasonable expecting to buy a digital book using my smartphone in 2023.
I feel that you are being unreasonable: you willingly bought into a closed ecosystem, and now you're mad that other people are not part of that ecosystem.
You should be mad. But not at Amazon - at Apple - that wants to charge every 3rd party book store 30% to sell a book on an your smartphone, but not it's own book store.
Microsoft was fined billions of dollars and went through years of litigation over something much less egregious.
Apple's (And Google's) digital tax is what you should be mad at.
If your device of choice is one that you don't really control but that instead is just a pile of limitations on top of constraints, I'm quite amazed by your expectation.
You drive Tesla to go grocery shopping? I strongly prefer a manual transmission diesel F350 because it can pull a loaded trailer full of construction materials over dirt road like nobody’s business.
Instead, small authors who self-publish and give Amazon exclusivity, I'm entitled to 40% of the proceed of the book. For basically access to the marketplace.
If you go to some authors discord and make small donation (often half of Amazon's price), they'll send you drm-free ebooks. That's what you should do if you really want to support author and dislike markup from marketplace monopolies.
Look I had to pick a title that would resonate with people on what they might not want their kids to read. I'm sorry I offended you that people might want to censor the materials a child might read but it's a very common use case, so much in fact that there have been class action lawsuits against companies like amazon/apple/google/sony/microsoft for not allowing parental controls (and not locking the kids out of buying smurfberries).
And yes, as a parent it's part of my job, and my right, to pick and choose what I think my kid is ready for.
> I'm sorry I offended you that people might want to censor the materials a child might read
No offense taken - I'm not sure why you think that.
I suppose people do want to limit what books children read - I still think that's generally misguided - but your points on people actually wanting parental controls are well made.
I still think parents would be better off celebrating reading comprehension than censoring books (Now discussing books with your child is a different matter).
At any rate I guess the prevalence of trash/spam on Amazon is higher than your average library - so there's that...
It's a kids device they (and you) don't want your kid to be sent 50 shades of gray accidentally.
The other flow is buy book. Go to kindle, "sync and check for new items". But again, it's a kids book, don't want to pull your copy of "catcher in the rye" to their device accidentally.
edit: common question: what's a computer... it's a dying concept where you own the machine you bought instead of rent it, typically consisting of an open source os distribution, and the manufacturer doesn't take 30% of all transactions taking place on that hardware.
edit: I want to buy it on my phone: would you be ok paying 30% more than on a pc? Amazon doesn't think so. And giving 30% cut to apple / google would end up with amazon paying apple to sell the book. At that point why ?