Planned Obsolescence is Everywhere

 Monday I talked about Amazon sabotaging one of my books.  And then August 1 I was trying to load another book when Amazon was sabotaging not just me, but everyone by suddenly making it so you couldn't download a MOBI file to preview your book on a Kindle.  And they replaced it with...pretty much nothing.  You could download it as an HTML file, which seems pretty useless, especially since it parses your book into like 7 files.  Or you can use their previewer, which is great if you want to sit at your computer and read the whole book off the screen.

I think a lot of it is they wanted to force people into using their "Kindle Create" app.  I put my book in there and really all it did was make my titles huge.  If you play around I guess you can get fancy drop caps and insert pictures and stuff like that.  It's not really anything I have need for.  And I still couldn't put it into a file that my old Kindle Touch could read.

In the end I had to go outside Amazon.  You can use other programs like Calibre or there are sites where you can instantly convert a DOC to MOBI file.  Another way I tried is I set up the book on Draft2Digital, downloaded the MOBI, and saved it as a draft instead of putting it for sale.  Still, it irks me because when I did it through the KDP page I got a file that was the same as what people would get when they bought the book.  By this point I don't usually have formatting glitches but it's still good to be able to check.

This planned obsolescence always chafes me.  Like with my Planet 99 Publishing website last year, I had to completely rebuild my page because Wix decided it wasn't going to support whatever template I had been using for that page, so they froze it, making it so I couldn't add any new books.  I literally then had to spend hours and hours rebuilding the whole page just because of some stupid company's arbitrary decision.  Which my thought is:  why can't you just let me keep using it without your "support?"

A lot of the time the problem is companies get rid of something and replace it with...nothing.  For years there's been this ongoing push to get rid of Adobe Flash.  But the problem is there are still sites that use Flash and Adobe has replaced Flash with...nothing.  So it keeps sending me messages about uninstalling Flash but if I do that what happens when I go to a website that still uses it?

I don't know about other car companies, but I heard a while ago that GM is no longer putting CD players in their cars--unless you buy it as an option.  Because everyone uses satellite radio or streaming now, right?  My car has a satellite radio in it but I never used it except occasionally on free previews.  It didn't really have much of an advantage over traditional radio.  I mean you still get commercials and you still have to flip around a lot to listen to songs you like.  As for streaming, I have the audio jack in there I can hook up my phone or MP3 player to but usually I use that with my Kindle and listen to books.  When I'm not listening to books, I use the CD player because it's easier than getting my phone or MP3 player to work, especially if I'm on the road.

Starting about 15 years ago companies stopped making VCRs because everyone has DVRs right?  I never really wanted a DVR because there wasn't much stuff I wanted to record, so I never had need of an expensive subscription.  Now days most everything is streaming either on some service like Hulu or Netflix or Amazon or it's on the Internet so I suppose it won't be long until DVRs are also put out to pasture even when there isn't really a replacement.

Video games are another area where this can really be annoying.  When I played NHL 95 on my SNES there was a fun practice feature that I liked to play around with.  But in the next versions of the game, they eliminated that.  I did eventually buy NHL 2004 for my PS2 and it was pretty good, but EA Sports lost my business for a few years because they eliminated my favorite feature:  the Create A Player.  That had been a feature since at least NHL 95 and then for...reasons they got rid of it.  Which was total BS.  I made entire teams of players and now I can't have any?  Also other people would use it to update rosters for rookie players or players who came up from the minors during the season.  Now you have to wait for maybe EA to put them on an update?  Lame.

EA has the same issue with The Sims series.  It was cool in The Sims 3 that you could manually recolor hair styles, accessories, and outfits, but in the Sims 4 you were limited to whatever color palette EA or the creator of the item came up with.  I think in the Sims 2 basically any hair style would work with any age character but then in The Sims 3 you needed to have separate ones for adult and child characters.  In The Sims 4 they completely eliminated the toddler age group for a while, until I guess popular demand forced them to put it back in an update.

I don't mean to pick on EA because I'm sure other companies do it.  Microsoft does that whenever they update MS Office.  Stuff gets moved around or eliminated and it's a pain in the ass trying to find the button or feature that you're used to using.  The Blogger page I'm writing this in was revamped a year or so ago and really it's not an improvement at all.  They just moved stuff around and changed the look so it's prettier.  And we could probably make a pretty lengthy article about all the bullshit changes Facebook makes, almost none of which have really been for the best.

The common denominator in all of these things is a problem of a company not really thinking it through and knowing their users.  They just listen to some focus group or some "efficiency expert" or some other dumbass.  Or some programmer geeks think it'd be cool to add some useless feature and to make room for that, why not remove something people like me actually use?  

Or maybe a company eliminates something like VCRs or CDs in cars to try to get you to buy a more expensive product.  Or phone and computer companies stop supporting a version of their phone or operating system to strong-arm you into "upgrading" to a new phone or operating system you don't really need.

Writers can run into the first issue of not really knowing their audience.  They might kill off a character people really like because they don't realize how much people like that character.  In my case with a lot of Eric Filler books I'd write a story that didn't end Happily Ever After or have too much "punishment" for some whiny crybaby readers.  Early on it was that I didn't really get how important that was to some people but now if I do it, it's more that I don't care.  I mean sometimes you just have a story that can't work out Happily Ever After, so fuck it.

The problem of strong-arming people into upgrading isn't so much a book problem.  Though it can still happen, like how publishers all but eliminated the "mass market paperback" that retailed for cheaper to put most paperbacks into a larger and more expensive format.  This is something seen more with college textbooks for instance where every year a company will change maybe 1% of an expensive textbook just to force students to have to buy a "new" textbook instead of being able to buy a cheaper used one.  Professors are usually complicit in this scam by requiring the new book instead of allowing the old one that is 99% the same.  That was always a pain in the ass back in college because accounting textbooks back then could run like $150-$200 and I'm sure it's double or triple that today.

Is there anything you can do about it?  In most cases, not really.  You can complain to the company, but they probably won't do anything unless you can get a lot of support.  Good luck with that.