Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

We've had a bunch of Kindles over the years, each showing various aspects of evaluation and often improvement. Our first Kindle had a real keyboard, solid with clicky buttons. It also had a charger, a speaker, a headphone jack, and the ability to play music and audiobooks. The latest Kindle Paperwhite has none of these. It has a backlight! Don't mistake me, a backlight is a great thing to have on an e-reader. Its one of the several reasons I purchased this new Kindle, but I also bought it for the extra memory to accommodate promised audiobooks, only to find no clue to them in the start-up feature walk- through. There was no more than a single slip of paper included with Kindle and that directed me to the user's guide that Amazon graciously offered to lend for a while (or sell me for $11). That manual too had no mention of how to load and play music or drama files. Accessing customer support led to much waiting, and several hang-ups between brief chat sessions with a rotating series of Audible (yes, Audible, not Amazon) support staff. Finally, the truth came through: yes, from now on, when using the Kindle, "audio" means "Audible". Got years worth of audiobooks? Sorry, you need to buy new "Audible" books! Downloaded ten new albums from Amazon? Sorry, not permitted on Kindle! O.K., yes I'm also biased. I purchased a test Audible membership some time back, I found the audio quality to be so bad that I completed and closed my membership as quickly as possible. But now it seems that the once great e-reader -slash- good-enough audio player is settling down to be a proprietary audio book player with space for books when available. Sorry, I don't think that's a product we want or need. And any hardware product that ties itself to Audible will not be keeping it's place on anybody's reading list.