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Amazon Wants to Make Sure You’re Eating Your Vegetables -Er- Reading Enough

Screenshot_2015-07-12-13-50-56For a company that readily admits to knowing everything about their customers, including both authors and readers, Amazon has shown itself to be remarkably tone deaf of late.

A reader has told me that Amazon has been nagging him about his reading habits. You can see a screenshot of Amazon’s nag screen at right.

He says he sees it every time he opens the Kindle app:

Over the past several days, I have experienced something noteworthy on my Kindle Android app: every time I start it up, I get a splash screen asking me if I want to sign up for “weekly reading reminder” notifications from Amazon.  No matter how many times I select “not at this time,” it keeps coming back every time I open the app. EVERY TIME.  I even tried tweeting @AmazonKindle.  No response.  Even companies like HP respond to tweets, albeit by PR droids who can’t actually do anything for you.

I haven’t been able to replicate this myself, and to be honest I have not found any other complaints about the nagging., but I do see that my Kindle Android app has an option under the settings menu for "Reading Coach". I’ve never noticed that option before but it sounds a lot like the one that Amazon is nagging my reader to use.

Furthermore, I would bet that others have seen the reminder/nag screen at least once. Have you seen it?  What kind of notifications is Amazon sending you?

While I did have fun slapping Amazon for their nagging, that is a problem which will be fixed about 15 minutes after someone on the Kindle team sees this post (or my tweet). And so I’ve already moved on to curiosity about the notifications.

Has anyone gotten one?

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Comments


Reader July 12, 2015 um 5:18 pm

A reader has told me that Amazon has been nagging him about his reading habits.

My solution for such annoyances has been to preempt them by connecting my Amazon e-reader to the Internet as little as possible. Which is why Amazon ads don’t bother me: you only see them if your wireless is turned on.


puzzled July 12, 2015 um 5:29 pm

That 15 minutes will translate to 3 weeks in actual people-time.


George Naylor July 12, 2015 um 6:11 pm

No, I’ve never seen one of those notifications. But then again I’m constantly reading so maybe Amazon feels I don’t need any help in that area.


JC July 12, 2015 um 11:13 pm

Never gotten that prompt. Either the device is infected or the app installation has been corrupted or the user isn’t connected to the internet after he clicks no so the response isn’t sync’d with Amazon. I also don’t get the not responding bit… Every time I’ve emailed support from within the app I get a response fairly quickly.


Russell Phillips July 13, 2015 um 3:39 am

I haven’t seen that one, but I have seen a similar one, asking if I wanted to sign up to Kindle Deals. Like your reader, it kept popping up even after I selected the option to sign up. It stopped appearing after a few days.

Screenshot of the popup that I had:

Russell Phillips July 13, 2015 um 3:39 am

Sorry, my link appears to have been stripped. Trying again: http://imgur.com/T6WQa6L

Nate Hoffelder July 13, 2015 um 5:45 am

Yes, it ate your link. That was weird.

Thanks for the screenshot. I had not seen this one, either. Perhaps Amazon is testing it selectively?

Russell Phillips July 13, 2015 um 5:49 am

It’s possible. I opted to get the notifications, but haven’t seen any yet. It’s probably been about a week, so either they didn’t process my opting in correctly, or they don’t send them out very often.

I opted in mostly to see what the notifications would be like, so I’m not too bothered about the lack of them 😉


JC July 13, 2015 um 8:05 am

A workaround would be to go to Apps, selecting Kindle from the list and disabling notifications. It’s not like you need notifications from a reading app so it’s not going to remove anything important. This stops all pop-ups and nag screens from Kindle.


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