Please stop releasing iPad apps, iPhone apps, PC apps. You got me. I love your E-Ink technology. Reading with a backlight sucks, the kindle is like reading a book. You have me 100% sold on it.
So stop porting apps over to other platforms, and start doing things right on your main product.
Folders. For the love of God let me organize the books in there! Do it with hashtags / IDE whatever. 1 book can be in multiple folders. Again, not tough. Get this done.
3G is great - in the US. Get to work on other countries. I’m in Canada. Not the Congo. Let me surf to more than Wikipedia. Loved using it in Hawaii. Let me use the internet here.
If I can play MP3s on the device, give me an mp3 player. I didn’t buy it for this, but that entire Experimental folder sucks. Give me something I can use.
Where are those Apps that you promised? Is Soduku really that hard?
DESPITE all of this, I love hte damn thing. The way it feels in my hands, the E-ink, the way is disappears after 30 seconds like a real book.
You have well deisgned the essentials, and for that you should be applauded. You updated software for longer battery life. Bravo. Now fix the crap you only did half-assed (like 1 through 4), then get to work on more stuff.
I’m sure I’ve mised others. Any other Kindle users here? any other suggestions?
Hell, I came into this thread with fists up, ready to defend my beloved Kindle.
But all of the OPs suggestions are spot on.
Most of all, I want a better way to organize my books on the Kindle. It really sucks having like 200 texts and having to go through them all sorted by alpha. Worst of all is no sort by Author.
Like a real book, you forget you are holding something in your hand, reading it. You are in the story.
I love my Kindle, but the criticisms in the OP are spot on. Also, it kinda sucked that the first two Kindles I owned died of heartbreak of psoriasis or cancer of the puppy or something. At least #3 is hanging in there.
You can sort by author. The problem is that not all books follow the same standard. First name / last name. Last name / first name. So the same author is sorted in two different ways. Which sucks.
That leads me to #5.
allow me to edit the existing tags in the book so that I can fix the author information to get them to display together.
I’m not sure about you, but when I read, I get sucked into the story, and don’t see the words on the paper anymore, as much as it is like a movie that plays in my head while I’m reading. When that happens, the book “disapperas”. The same happens with a Kindle. I can’t get that to happen as easily when there is a backlight (like reading on an iPad, or a laptop for example). I always know I’m reading an electronic device.
The Kindle solved that problem, and did it well. They just forgot to fix 1 through 5.
I was seriously thinking about putting a Kindle on my wish list. Mother’s Day is coming up, and ebooks would help alleviate my bursting bookcases. But I guess that I’ll have to make do with more dead tree books.
I am an advocate for the Sony Reader. I can not surf the net from it, nor do I want to. I use it for its intended purpose as an E-reader. It will allow me to sort by title, authors or collections. I know many Kindle and Nook owners who are very happy with their devices, but I love my Sony.
First thing to do is get rid of the DRM on your books. It is a pernicious evil that seriously compromises the usefulness of ebook readers.
Once DRM is gone programs like calibre. let you edit tags on the books. Book tags seem to have a useful feature that mp3 tags don’t. There is an author field and a author sort field. The kindle seems to sort on the sort field and display the normal field.
Folders can be done in a very half assed way after the DRM is removed. I personally haven’t tried this so do it at your own risk.
Useless to book editors as it puts all ‘edits’ at the end of the book, instead of on the page they apply to. Totally unworkable to the author and the editor.
What are you thinking? You don’t want editors using your product?
I think the Kindle is best suited for sequential reading - reading a whole book from beginning to end, then moving on to the next book. Used that way, the lack of folders and “sort by author” aren’t big deals. The list of books is sorted by last-accessed date.
The eInk display is not very suitable for “random access” reading anyway (e.g. flipping through reference books, cookbooks, etc). Even with folders, I doubt I’d use the Kindle to store many documents for reference.
I really don’t have any major complaints about the Kindle. I’ve been reading much more since I got it. My biggest nitpick is that it’s tedious to access the “footnotes”. (Actually they are hyperlinked endnotes.)
Dear Amazon, please stop trying to make more money. And once you’re receiving fewer profits, spend that dwindling amount of money on someone already locked into buying e-books from you, rather than increasing your marketshare on other platforms.
Well sure. It sounds to me from the endless parade of ipad v. kindle threads across the intartubes lately that the nook and Sony Reader are getting more attention, and Amazon should focus on competing with those. But I also think that creating an ipad/iphone app costs Amazon close to nothing and opens up an entire market for them.
I have an iphone, but haven’t really looked into the Kindle app. But I’d guess any of the functionality you’re looking for Amazon to develop would improve my experience as well.
I’ve got a very different complaint about the Kindle, and that’s that I’m having a damned hard time buying books to put on it.
I’ve pretty much quit buying fiction, because I can get it for free from the library. If I want to read it a second time, I’ll buy it, because if I want to read it twice, a third or fourth reading is hardly out of the question. There aren’t too many of those, but it’s a select group. And yet: Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels isn’t available on Kindle. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 isn’t available on Kindle. And yada yada yada.
Most books I actually want to own, though, are nonfiction. I may not want to read them cover to cover a second time, but I might well want to refer to them multiple times, with particular passages in mind. And this is where the Kindle would really shine, wouldn’t it?
But Bruce Catton’s Army of the Potomac trilogy isn’t on Kindle, or his Civil War trilogy, either of which I’d like to carry around in my pocket. David Quammen’s “The Song of the Dodo,” the classic book about evolution and extinction, isn’t available. More currently, Michael Lewis’ “The Big Short,” a book about the recent Wall Street near-crash that’s gotten great reviews, isn’t available on Kindle. (After reading a review online the other night, I clicked directly to Amazon to zap it to my Kindle right then. Except.)
I’m very much on the verge of deactivating my account and selling the damned thing.
They make it so that my Kindle book investments are not wasted; I can read my books on any of the devices. And they open up Kindle to a market far larger than Amazon could ever hope for with their hardware device.
I agree with the OP on all shortcomings of the Kindle, however
And another issue, alluded to by RTFirefly, is that they are not very forthcoming about their book inventory. At one time I imagined that there was a steadily growing catalog of eBooks and there would be some way we should be able to see new additions. I imagined that it was all about prioritizing which books were digitized because of resource constraints.
Then I came to the conclusion that it’s not that at all; it’s more about a bunch of secret back-room dealings and horse trading, where books can appear and then disappear from the catalog like the wind.
Some books I own on my Kindle are not available for purchase anymore. The only way to explain that is back-room horse trading that we are not privy to. How disappointing.