> Or (and this is incredibly aggravating) when you select a word in the Kindle, depending on how common a word it is, the option that comes up highlighted by default is either “full definition” or “start highlight”. Since e-ink’s refresh rate is so slow, you typically don’t see what’s actually come up until you’ve pressed the button for the second time. So I often “double click” on words to highlight them, but some percentage of the time this kicks me over into the dictionary and I have to hit back twice to get out.
I'm on my third Kindle. The latest one, sans keyboard, is the first to have this problem. It's so annoying. Literally sometimes I'll be in the middle of a great passage and try to highlight it and then I'm brought to the dictionary page for a word like "the".
Is there anyone on here who is on the Kindle team and knows when a fix for this will come out?
*Also, as a general commentary, I think the Kindle is a revolutionary device. Moreso than the iPad. I think Bezos knows full well what he is doing and would prefer to keep it under the radar how absolutely amazing and big this thing is going to be. It shocks me that Apple hasn't come out with an eInk reader yet. It's an order of magnitude better for reading than an iPad.
After reading ebooks on my iPhone and now iPad, I couldn't go back to the kindle. The UI was just so terrible and slow. I use white on black for night time reading, and can still fall asleep.
Incidentally, this is the same reason I could only use Duck Duck Go for one day before going back to Google search. The Google search UI has just spoiled me with its responsiveness.
Have you tried the latest one? It's noticeably faster. Worth the $79. (And I'll get the touch screen as soon as it's available).
> I use white on black for night time reading, and can still fall asleep.
I've heard this from multiple people. I should try it.
I read my Kindle on occasion for hours and hours. Not only does it not hurt my eyes, but it's so light. The iPad is quite heavy.
I really wonder if Apple will ever come out with an eInk screen. After reading how upset Jobs got over Android ripping off the iPhone, I kind of think that maybe they never will and that they'll just let Amazon have that market.
> I really wonder if Apple will ever come out with an eInk screen. After reading how upset Jobs got over Android ripping off the iPhone, I kind of think that maybe they never will and that they'll just let Amazon have that market.
Are you saying that Apple came with iPod because no one had made an Mp3 player before?
Apple made iPhone because no one made a phone before?
I guess I don't see how they could improve the Kindle drastically this late in the game.
The Kindle should be faster, lighter, and the UI should be a bit easier (but the touchscreen version due out at the end of the month could solve that already).
Amazon's already reduced it almost as much as can be. I feel like if Apple came out with an eInk reader it would be tough to be anything but a "me too" product. Perhaps they could do color eInk? I think it would take an advance like that to make it worthwhile.
Color eInk isn't being done because it's a technical problem, not a design problem. Everybody knows color eInk would be cool, we don't need Apple to step forward and say "You know what, color eInk would be cool!"
We just need somebody to invent a feasible one, make it and sell it. You'll then see it in Kindles quickly enough.
Color eInk isn't being done because nobody is willing to bet the farm on it. Everybody knows color eInk would be cool, and we DO need someone like Apple to step forward and say "You know what, color eInk would be cool! And here's a billion dollars, make it happen!"
Nail on the head. It'd be nicer if page back/forward were faster though. The latest version is a big improvement and I can't wait for an even faster page switch.
To me the Kindle has two killer features: the screen (because I can read it like paper for hours) and its weight (can hold it for hours like a paperback book). Those two things made it a 'wow' device. The 3G access made it effortless.
None of those things seem very clever and have been pretty easily duplicated in the Nook. The software itself (and this applies to Kindle and Nook) is rather ugly and it feels slow to react. Both need Apple to come in and make them work.
Please leave my Kindle alone. I don't want it to be fancy. I want to read books on it. Cheap, long battery life, and a screen that reads like a book is as clever as I ever want from it. I have no intention of replacing my kindle anytime soon. I don't care if a new version comes out that's 10 times faster... I'm completely content with the one I have.
When I want to use an iPad (for something other than reading books), then I'll just use my iPad.
The first question I always get from people who haven't seen a Kindle before is "can you go on the internet with it?" sigh
"No- it's just for reading books. Nothing else."
The problem is, I realise that it can go on the internet. It's just so damn slow that it makes everything else look way better. Not offering web browsing would stop feature creep.
Although I agree that removing non-primary features would help have a more honest comparison, there is a great advantage to the Kindle having a web browser.
You can download books straight from the internet to your device. You can go to the Project Gutenberg website (http://www.gutenberg.org/) browse for a public domain book, and download it straight to your device. You don't need to use an intermediate computer.
I can't speak for the ugliness, but as for the slow to react...
I think the reason it feels sluggish are two reasons: The screen technology has a slow response time. This is alittle difficult to fix, due to the nature of the technology: an electic field turns on or off causing tiny balls to be pulled to the top or bottom of the screen causing light to be reflected/absorbed. Due to the size of these balls (microns), it can take much longer to reorient these balls then the molecules in liquid crystal (nanometers).
The other reason it probably feels sluggish is that the processor is a little slow. Fortunately, amazon has been able to work around this a bit by caching the next few pages. (But if you go backwards it can sometimes take a bit longer to load).
I love my Kindle and can forgive the response times which I'm sure will improve, but on the other hand I agree with John, the software's low quality. It's nowhere near my iPhone in terms of polish, thought or fairly obvious testing.
For me these things bug me:
The keyboard is missing some obvious keys like comma and apostrophe. You have to go into [Sym] for them but you use them all the time when making notes. They're important keys that have been inexplicably relegated to the extra menu.
There's no first letter capitalization when you start typing a note or start a new sentence. Extremely irritating.
The bookmarking system is confusing, inconsistently named and clumsy.
Some things take a silly long time to figure out, like switching between your present page and the chapter list and back. This is mainly because the menu in a book has silly options in it (Turn Wireless Off is the first option? wtf?).
The arrow rocker doesn't work at all well in landscape mode.
Some things require a full screen refresh while others do not (opening a menu doesn't, closing it does). It's just that little bit jarring.
You can't zoom on pictures enough, very irritating for books which have little maps of battles or such like.
I've had it go titwozz more than once when plugging it into my PC. Is it charging, is it not, screen suddenly resets.
Apple wouldn't have let any of that obvious stuff go out of the door, you notice pretty much all of it within the first few days.
Its more the update circuitry that's responsible - it row-scans like an analog TV. Combined with the relatively slow eInk update rate you get the very-large product of a second per frame or so. There is nothing inherent in eInk that demands row-scanning; its just the choice made by the first commercially-available eInk screen.
Patents exist for better eInk displays: http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20080238894
I look forward to a fast-updating book reader. One day I may even be able to flip through an eBook! Until then they have a long way to go, to reproduce the book-in-hand feel.
I've been using a Kobo since just after release, which has slower page turns than a Kindle. It's annoying for maybe the first hour, then it feels perfectly natural as I hit the "next" button as I'm reaching the bottom line so the screen refresh is occurring as my eyes scan back up to the top of the page.
> The software itself (and this applies to Kindle and Nook) is rather ugly and it feels slow to react. Both need Apple to come in and make them work.
Yeah, and I'd lose the ability to side-load books, and would have to void the warranty on the device to be able to read books from non-approved sources.
As someone who's never bought an e-book from Amazon for my Kindle, no thank you.
iBooks supports ePub and PDF, iOS supports MP3 and AAC and can play h.264 encoded videos. Apple sells music without DRM (just like Amazon) and videos as well as books with DRM (just like Amazon). Loading your own media without DRM is never a problem.
Apple is about as permissive as Amazon when it comes to selling and playing or displaying media.
You might be confused by apps. Apple is indeed less permissive with them.
Are you inferring it's not possible to read material from a non-approved source on the iPad or iPhone? Because that's not the case. Neither is it the case with videos or music for that matter.
Nope, I know all of the above (have both devices).
I would think that when the primary use-case is reading, then books are to e-readers what apps are to smartphones, and I'm not really a fan of the "single point of acquisition" model.
If we want to know what terms Apple would apply to ebook readers and sell books under, we don't need to reason by analogy from the restrictions on smartphone app loading and the terms they use to sell apps for smartphones. They already sell ebooks and make ebook readers, which allow sideloading.
Does eBooks have iCloud support for non-Apple books yet? Amazon now allows me to upload all of my non-Amazon books by email, and I can re-download them onto any Kindle device like books I purchased from Amazon.
Actually, iCloud does support sideloaded books. In addition to some iBooks, I have a good number of DRM-free ePub and PDF books that are taking up a good portion of my free 5GB in iCloud.
I agree, I have exactly the same complaints as the author of the article. Some of the issues, like the "full definition" one, are so frustrating I can't believe that Amazon let them through.
The Kindle hardware is great and all but I'm still wishing Apple would get in on the game. Apart from better software they'd address the issue of an elegant screen protecter (as with iPad 2), and the iCloud already synchs highlights to books between devices (even if you didn't buy the books direct from Apple).
"And this is all before I’ve even got to the disastrous incompatibilities between the Kindle device, the Kindle for Mac app, the Kindle for iOS app, the Kindle Online Reader (read.amazon.com), and the kindle.amazon.com social network — all of which are full of gruesome interface annoyances of their own."
I just bought a Kindle, and besides my first attempt at buying one resulted in returning it to Best Buy because of a damaged screen, I love it. I had been reading Kindle books in my iPad and also loved the app experience. Mostly, the ability to highlight and annotate at will, and have an online repository of that to refer to, were the little details that sold me.
But what are the incompatibilities that he refers to?
However, on the $79 kindle, the details are definitely flubbed. The page turning/return/home screen keys make no logical sense. I apparently ordered one of those "Special Offers" by total accident...I must have pressed a confirm button when I meant to press whatever the hell stands for the "Cancel" button.
At $40 (for an interior design class), that's almost half the Kindle retail price. Not a bad monetization plan, I guess.
I'm 100% sure you can cancel whatever you accidentally ordered on Amazon.com.
Just like One-click ordering, the point is to make a purchase easy and let only the people who don't want to go through with it cancel, not to bilk people out of money via misclicks.
I'm 100% sure you can cancel whatever you accidentally ordered on Amazon.com.
Amazon, in my experience, are very good with returns & customer service.
However, for the record of other readers, if you're in the EU, then you are legally entitled to a refund on anything you buy online within 7 days, even if you buy it non-accidentally and you've just changed your mind.
So this "Special Offer" was a LivingSocial deal. I would agree with you but I looked over the email many times, and my own account page. There is not only no easily visible option to cancel, there is no email contact. I have to call to complain.
Even more befuddling is that every Amazon purchase I have ever made has resulted in a confirmation email minutes after the purchase. This "Special Offer"'s confirmation came to me at 2AM, well after I went to bed. I'm willing to chalk this up to me mistakenly hitting the buttons and ordering the offer while awake and that there's a delay to process it on the LivingSocial end. Either way, it was not reassuring.
Amazon seems to delay the confirmations on some of their digital purchases; definitely MP3s and maybe video (IIRC). Believe at least in those cases, it's to make the CC processors happy (batching lots of small single purchases). Apple does the same thing for the iTunes/App store, though it seems to be on the scale of days instead of hours there.
edit: to be clear, by "delay the confirmations" I meant to say "delay the actual purchase"; the purchase(s) doesn't actually get charged until their time threshold hits.
Nothing makes CC processors happier than many tiny transactions. Apple and Amazon defer and batch transactions in order to save a fortune on transaction fees, which traditionally involve a fixed cost on the order of tens of cents, plus a much smaller percentage of the total. It's a huge bite of a ~$1 purchase.
Yep, I've cancelled digital audiobooks from audible (owned by amazon, if memory serves me right) and even books sent to the wrong address in europe (full refund).
You can also go to the folder "assets", under "system", delete all contents then chmod 444.
That folder has all the special offers. The Kindle turns the permissions back to the default, but since I don't usually turn on the wifi, I only have to deal with the kindle asking me to go online to see the special offers.
"At $40 for an interior design class"? What is the connection between interior design and the kindle? And/or what is the connection between the monetization plan of a night class at a CC and the kindle?
He has a Kindle with Special Offers, and at one point accidentally bought one of the Special Offers that came up, said offer being $40 for a class on interior design.
His post seemed fairly straight-forward, so people appear to be downvoting you for asking a question that a cursory re-reading of it should have made clear.
It was not clear to me that he purchased one of the offers by accident. I thought he meant he accidentally ordered one of the subsidized kindles by accident.
Do the special offers have anything to do with your reading materials? Do you have design/architecture books on the kindle? Do you think ther offers targeted towards your demographic?
I'm beginning to develop a theory that this kind of Apple-fandom is somewhere between being an audiophile and a mentally contagious form of OCD.
I've had complete strangers, totally normal people (picture the exact opposite of a stereotypical techie), raving to me in a shop about how great their Kindle is because they saw me play with the demo device. That's a home run in anyone's language.
But Aaron, who seems to have trained himself to appreciate the finer details, has this joyous experience ruined for him in much the same way a wine snob can no longer enjoy an even passable glass of wine.
I guess the missing factor is how much effort is expended on these nicities versus the return on that investment.
If the text below a main icon is cut off, is that a sign of how shoddily the entire thing is put together, or is it simply not important, compared with the many benefits the device gives you?
Its just annoying, even insulting, that something that could have been fixed, permanently, for everybody, was let out the door with that stain on it. Unlike wine, software CAN be (nearly) perfect for everybody, every time.
There's a theory of interpersonal relationships that says you need 4-5 positive interactions to balance every 1 negative interaction, if a friendship / relationship is to be sustainable. I'd argue that with devices and software, that ratio goes way up - maybe at least 10:1 or 20:1. That's why even a small annoyance can balance a largely positive experience.
I've since given up hoping people will stop thinking that tiny, tiny fonts are awesome. Cause I guess nothing makes the article you wrote more awesome than making it impossible for humans to read. Readability, ftw. http://www.readability.com/
iPhone and double tap font. There's something amusing about reading this particular article on an iPhone more easily than on a computer. Your right, it reads terribly on the desktop computer next to me.
I love my Kindle. One of the best tech buys in recent memory. The thing I want to be able to do is share books with my wife as if they were 'real books'. In other words, one of us at a time gets a lock on it, but there's no time limit.
It'd get kind of awkward quickly, as I read books at a much faster rate than she does, so I'd always be loaning myself books from my Kindle, while she meanders her way through my books.
All in all, not an ideal solution given what the technology should enable us to do.
I really wonder why no ones mentions typography. In terms of great typesetting the Kindle is somewhere in the 60's. Since at least LaTEX (not talking about Adobe and Apple products) ligatures and other niceties found their way into computers. Any by all means - this is a dedicated reading-machine!
I still love my Kindle, mainly for jgrahamc's reasons.
I used to be quite skeptical of Kindle and a dedicated book reading device until I was gifted a Kindle. My wife got tired of my buying hundreds of books and having it fill up the house and the Kindle TV ad did the trick.
Now that I've used it for a few months, I'm a Kindle convert. I carry it with me all the time - conveniently fits into my coat pocket and weighs so little - and I whip it out whenever I'm a line or at an airport and all those otherwise wasted time.
It has remarkable battery life - I normally get 2-3 weeks between charges - and more if I turn off WiFi. The more I use it, the more I like all the small details which while quirky and not quite upto iPad levels of overall usability adds up to a very convenient book reading experience. I used to lament the space wasted on the physical keyboard but I'm not such a fan of the new touch Kindles.
I wish they had the same "attention to detail" on their website. One reason I stopped buying from them was every time I went to the website I was bombarded for offers for Amazon Prime, Credits Cards, Free Shipping and other products.
The problem was that if I clicked on any of those offers the website would eventually work out I was a non-US user and tell me I wasn't eligible. But Amazon already knew that when they showed me the offers in the first place.
Any site that has 30% of their frontpage taunting me with cool stuff I can't buy obvious doesn't want me as a customer.
So far I've had a pretty frustrating experience with the Kindle (Kindle 4 no keyboard, no touchscreen) from the get-go. Sure, the box was nice, but as soon as I powered it on it was frustrating.
Since the Kindle was a gift, I had to enter in my Amazon account information before I could do anything else. Total buzzkill. I wanted to flip through a book and see what the screen was like and how it worked, but instead I have to laboriously type in my 35-character password like I'm using an NES controller.
After that, there's no sample books on there- you'd think they could put a public domain book on there for free. Every MP3 player I've ever bought comes with a few sample songs. Ok, fine. Now I have to hook it up to my computer via USB. Put an epub file on there. It doesn't support epub? Ok, fine. Put an RTF file on there. That doesn't work. Ok, fine.
Finally put a .txt file on there of a book I'm halfway through the paper version of. Apparently the Kindle has a weird concept of pages for txt documents, so I have to hit the "Next Page" button 97 times, or guess what "location" I'm at (1456 out of 4452 I guess?) and enter that in.
All of that frustration, in the first 30 minutes, just to get an idea of what it is like to read on it and page through a book. Never had that kind of experience with an Apple product. "Unboxing" experiences with Apple products have become a religious experience for a reason. Amazon is still far short of that.
Well, compare that to unboxing an Apple product. Like an iPad. Instantly, you have to enter your Apple ID, regardless if you bought it yourself. The device is a brick until this happens. Then, once the set up is complete, the device has zero sample content on there. No music in the music app. No videos. No eBooks. Arguably, the only sample content they provide is web access.
"Unboxing" experiences with Apple products have become a religious experience for a reason
Really? Unboxing my Macbook Air cavalcade of annoyances. First wanting my address and phone number just to boot up, then having to create an Apple account and enter a credit card number just to download the latest updates to the software it ships with. How is that a religious experience?
It's not really obvious, but you're free to skip the registration and Apple ID portions of the Mac OS X installation process. I hit command-Q, which brings up a dialog with a Skip button.
In an even nicer twist, when I upgraded to the latest model from my original Kindle, the new one showed up with all of my books already synced so I could literally just open the package, turn it on, and pick up right where I'd left off with the old one. This is pretty small and probably caused more by coincidence based on how the system works than actual intent but it impressed me a lot. I've been a big Kindle user since it came out though.
(FWIW, I use mine to buy books that I previously would've got in paperback form, allowing me to slowly begin the process of rebuilding my physical library by pruning out paperbacks and things I don't care much about in favor of high quality hardbacks.)
No, this is a fundamental difference I believe. Amazon understands the cloud, knows you have leased access to certain materials and lets you read them anywhere.
Isn't it true that media is per-device on the Apple platform? That you have to pay again for each reader you own? Even an upgrade can require paying again.
The fun bit about Kindles being registered at the factory is that if you've ever bought a Kindle book before (on an old Kindle or an app) your books get pre-loaded as well. I wish they hadn't released a 3G-less model though; it's a major convenience boost (no need to even think about a network unless you're in a very remote bit of the country)
But iTunes is required to update my ipod to iOS 5 :-)
I've never been able to get large pdf's onto my ipod without itunes. Can't email them because they're too big, and the ipod cannot browse local shared directories.
> small details that delight get buried under small details that annoy
Must point that even Apple software/hardware have their own trivial features that prove to be annoying for some users (remember no right-click anyone?).
Amazon has achieved a very usable device with the Kindle in such a short foray into consumer electronics, for which Apple has had around 3 decades of experience to build on. Here's to hoping attention to detail and UX takes giant strides at Amazon improving upon what is already a very good product.
I have to wonder: does Apple spend more time playing with each new piece of technology internally before releasing it?
I can see in the rush to launch that you can certainly hit 100% of your feature list and still not hit the things that count.
When you see something like a ".com" key on the keyboard whenever an internet address is requested, you have to wonder if it wasn't in the original design but eventually someone played with it enough and thought it up.
Unfortunately the web-browser that makes this useful (beyond buying books) is still labeled "experimental", years later. Meaning it can be dropped at any time.
I didn't know about Kindles being already logged in. That's clever--"out-Apple-ing Apple". I'd worry a bit about package thieves but that's probably mostly irrational.
I have 3g right now and just tried to highlight something in the samples for "Song of Two Worlds" as well as "SEAL of Honor" and was unable to.
I also tried adding an annotation and when I started to type a message came up on the bottom of the screen that says, "Annotating is disabled for sample content."
Maybe you found that section particularly interesting and would like to look back at it later? Maybe you're reading the book for a class and instead of taking notes in the margin, you're taking notes on the Kindle.
I actually find myself highlighting stuff all the time. You can also see areas of the book that other people highlighted, which adds a kinda neat social aspect that isn't usually present in reading.
Did you mean to ask why is this a relevant comment? Because aaronsw mentions highlighting samples in the linked story.
Why would you not want to highlight something in a sample? There is no reason why text in the sample would be less useful. A quick example that comes to mind is the foreword/introduction of a book that references a book for higher level treatment of the subject matter or another book for that is better suited for newcomers to a field.
I'm on my third Kindle. The latest one, sans keyboard, is the first to have this problem. It's so annoying. Literally sometimes I'll be in the middle of a great passage and try to highlight it and then I'm brought to the dictionary page for a word like "the".
Is there anyone on here who is on the Kindle team and knows when a fix for this will come out?
*Also, as a general commentary, I think the Kindle is a revolutionary device. Moreso than the iPad. I think Bezos knows full well what he is doing and would prefer to keep it under the radar how absolutely amazing and big this thing is going to be. It shocks me that Apple hasn't come out with an eInk reader yet. It's an order of magnitude better for reading than an iPad.