Scott Watermasysk has a blog entry about a few things he thinks could be done to improve his Amazon Kindle. Like him I love this device and I’m ever so glad I bought it because I’ve been travelling a lot this year and always having something to read along in a small package has become a must have affair.
Scott makes some good points about getting the Kindle into more people’s hands and he points mainly at some marketing issues and improvements to make the Kindle a better value. Indeed the point about Kindle books often being only marginally cheaper than paper books irks me at times pretty badly given that it must be significantly cheaper for publishers – and Amazon itself – to not have to print, stock, package and ship physical books. The discount tends to be somewhere between 10-20 percent for most books (often less), which seems really low to take out all of book production and handling.
I love having paper books to hold and read, but they do accumulate and take up space and sometimes get thrown out (or second handed in a 2nd hand bookstore). For me the Kindle is mainly for the convenience of getting it immediately and the fact that the environment impact for paper use, packaging and shipping is reduced. After all it’s the content that counts not the package.
Everywhere I go people check out my Kindle and think it’s the coolest thing since sliced bread. Heck people often bug me when I’m reading it in public places and want to know what it is and how it works. Often they don’t even think that it’s too expensive at $359, although I think that’s a pretty steep price to pay for the honor of mostly purchasing books from Amazon (although you can also pick up books from other sources such as Project Gutenberg and a few other open source e-book sources). The interest is there, but few of those people actually follow up and get a Kindle.
A few Things that need Help on the Kindle
As I said I love the Kindle and I wouldn’t want to be without but there are a few things that do bug me about it:
- Image support.
The biggest issue by far for me is that if a book has any sort of image or illustration it’s really hard to decipher these images. There's no way to zoom and so images are usually way to small to decipher what is going on. I've been reading a lot of history and foreign affairs books lately and a lot of them contain maps that could not be deciphered. The same can be true for tables or number charts (in financial books) and other non plain text references.
- Technical Book Handling
After I wrote about the Kindle last Spring after I just had gotten it, several friends asked me how I liked it and whether they should get one. They all came at me from the perspective of cutting back on their tree consumption for 1000 page technical books which are frequently one time read and throw out material. I checked out several technical books on the Kindle and they all sucked pretty badly. The main shortcoming is that if you look at source code (unless it’s really, really short) and it starts scrolling across even a single page it becomes really hard to follow the flow of code. The font differences also make source code hard to read in the first place. Along the same lines tables and charts don’t really work well which is problematic for coding related books. I have a few design books that are mainly text and those work fine of course – it’s just as soon as non plain text content is involved the Kindle falls short.
- Too many Buttons that are too sensitive
From a physical perspective one thing that gives me problems is the handling of the book. The sides of the Kindle are all buttons and it’s way too easy to accidentally hit a button or a wrong button. The button’s functions are also labeled a bit confusingly – Previous and Back for example do to very different things and while it’s easy to figure out when you use the thing for a while newbies invariably will use the back button to go backwards. The back button’s behavior is not all that useful – it cycles backwards through ‘open’ books, but I can’t figure out how to go forward again.
The buttons are also way too sensitive. As an experiment hand a Kindle to anybody who’s new to it and see how many times they accidentally page the content you're currently on. Good luck finding that page again. Even for plain reading I've often paged too much. It’s good the device has many buttons so it’s easy to get to them no matter how you hold the book and that’d be my guess why the book is all buttons. But maybe the buttons should involve a little more effort or maybe should be smaller and not beveled off the edge which just seems to invite accidental clicking.
- Where the Hell am I?
The Kindle uses some obscure page numbering scheme and if you happen to lose your page (because you handed it to someone to check out maybe?) it’s not easy to find your way back to the place where you were. In a physical book I often peripherally track the page number I’m on because it’s a single simple number, but the Kindle’s numbering scheme is too long for that. There are no real page numbers but only something that looks like chapter and character offsets that shift by what looks like 10 for each page I actually read. It’s not very conducive to finding a particular spot in the document. Paging is an interesting problem for a device that can display different page sizes, but there’s gotta be a better solution than cryptic numbers. Like recalculating pages based on the font-sized used maybe (since that’s not likely to change often).
- Paging is slow
The above is made worse by the fact that paging is pretty slow. It’s acceptable, but noticeable when you’re reading and just flipping the page, but if you need to skip over a few pages the reader is agonizingly slow. It’s not just rendering on the screen, but the actual page flipping that’s slow – there’s a lot of ‘think’ time before the device actually switches the page.
- Book Availability
Although there is a good bit of content popular available for the Kindle on Amazon and outside of it, it still seems that I’m regularly hitting books that aren’t available for the Kindle. This isn’t really Amazon’s problem but publishers who likely don’t see it yet worth their effort to produce Kindle content (or electronic content in general) quickly. I would hope that Amazon is providing publishers some incentives to get books published for the Kindle which would seem a prudent idea for getting it into more people’s hands. This feeds back into some of the points Scott pointed to in his post in how to get more people into Kindles by ways of promotional deals and some free or cheap content.
- What are my Book Rights?
There are also some legal issues that may have to be resolved with this technology. Physical Books have intrinsic value – they can be sold or passed to others to read whereas the licensing of e-Books is to the single reader. If this really holds then the pricing for books should be even further reduced because the effective terms of use are much more limited with e-Books and the resale value is 0 especially in comparison to physical books.
In the end what it comes down to for me is that the reader is convenient as hell, and the actual reader display quality is excellent. The warts are definitely issues, but one that I can overlook to a large degree because of the convenience. Some of these points may seem fairly major, but while they are annoying they are not show stoppers. I still use the hell out of my Kindle on the road and even when I’m home. There’s definitely something satisfying about figuring out that a book I want to read is available right now and I can download and start reading immediately. Of course I don’t get the satisfaction of hearing the brown truck pull up and rip open a package in anticipation. <s>
But I think Amazon should really spend time on making sure that richer content displays better on the Kindle – I think that’s vital. I spoke with several people who wanted the Kindle for developer books and for for kids going to college to replace their text books – which both are prime targets for books that are fairly single use before they get tossed out or become obsolete. Prime candidates to reduce environmental impact of paper consumption. Not to mention delivery and packaging impact (which Amazon is often horrible on).
I’d be curious to see where this goes with Amazon or other book readers. There are not a whole lot of options out there but maybe we can hope that additional choices and a generic publishing format will eventually arise.