Busy with pre-moving tasks, but thought I’d post a quick followup on the Kindle. I’ve bought 3 book so far (I’m keeping a spreadsheet, so far I’ve saved $33.22, or 47.43% off of buying the physical books off Amazon – one of them was also out of stock, so that was an extra bonus; When I get a chance I’ll have to compare the book buying rate to the past year). I also sent out an email to kindle-feedback. Here are the points of improvement I included (specifically software, and not the industrial design, which I’m sure they’ve heard ad nauseum):
- One of the first things that I did even before getting the Kindle was to queue up a bunch of samples. This is great, but even with this limited amount of titles, it’s pretty hard to find the title I’m looking for. My first set of suggestions are all related to library management:
- A smarter dashboard style listing would be nice. For example, you could have the Home screen be split in two, with a “Recently Read” and “Newly Arrived” listing. Paging to the next page would get you a traditional listing.
- Although, while full-text indexing may be out of the question, allowing searching/filtering by limited metadata from the “Show and Sort” menu, or, if there’s a dashboard, having a search/filter box accessible at the bottom of the first page would be a great way to allow a user to quickly find a title from a large (100+ volume) library.
- Along the lines of organizing a bookshelf (the potential storage capacity, even without any additional SD storage far outstrips the current Content Lister’s ability to manage), a number of improvements would make things better:
- Tagging of titles (and allow listing by tag/section, filtering by tag)
- Archiving – for example, read books
- Read % / Status – related to the former, but being able to filter or organize by which books you’re currently reading, haven’t started, and have finished – the metadata is all there, but it’s not being displayed
- Along the lines of metadata and display, the current separation of listing and managing seems unnecessary. One alternative, especially if you add a second smaller line that contains status and other metadata is to have each book have two click areas (the current 3-segment tall title, which remains the same – clicking opens the book, and a second 1-2 segment tall status line which brings up a context line — note, this space already exists, so it wouldn’t even affect the # of books that could be listed by much…)
- A related request would be for storage of a reading journal — this data is stored by the device (it autobookmarks and knows which books were last opened, how long, etc.) and, at least according to the Kindle TOS is being reported to Amazon.com. It seems like a big opportunity is being missed by not having a user-accessible journal (the Wii is a good example of what this might look like to the end user).
- Although I’m not a fan of DRM, I really like what you guys are doing with the media management of purchased books. This is very compelling, although I’m disappointed that it doesn’t extend to periodicals. There are some periodicals I’d be open to subscribing to (any hope of getting The Economist?), but that’s definitely a sticking point to me. I like to annotate and file articles of interest – the latter functionality doesn’t seem to exist at all, and the former works, although it’s too bad that there’s no way to better manage the annotations or get it off the device wirelessly.
- In terms of legibility, if there were different fonts or line-height adjustment, that’d be quite welcome. This is especially noticeable w/ the experimental web browser.
- I very much like the ability to make annotations, especially when reading technical papers, essays/articles (unfortunately, the conversion process is somewhat lackluster/tedious – when I tried sending an HTML file to the kindle.com address, it converted it as plain text (tags in the page galore), and since I’m on a Mac, I had to use a third party toolchain (Mobiperl). Err, in any case, my suggestion for annotations is fairly simple – when viewing/editing an annotation, it currently requires a second click to show it. I can (somewhat) understand a second click to edit, but wouldn’t it be better to just show the note (and menu) when one clicks on a line w/ a note?
- Along the lines of notetaking, I’ve taken to carrying around the Kindle when I’m out and about – there’s lots of times where it’d be useful to use it to type a quick note, but there isn’t any way to do that in a standalone manner. Lists are another potentially useful app, which leads me to ask…
- Is there any particular reason there isn’t an SDK available? Is there one planned? It seems like there’s a lot of potential for Kindle’s functionality to be extended, whether in terms of additional apps, or for things related its core capabilities. I can think of a half dozen things off the top of my head that would do a lot, I think, to help get a random person to plunk down $360 on the device. The e-book space is littered with devices that require enormous amounts of low-level effort just to get to a point where useful apps can be developed (these, of course are very different skillsets, so rarely has anything exciting to end-users ever happened). It seems like the Kindle is well positioned to be different in this regard. I know there are potential pitfalls (although, having been intimately involved in making similar design decisions [open APIs and web services], somewhat overblown since it’d be easy enough to control via dev keys or just by the fact that without easy/automatic distribution, the userbase is self-limiting), but I believe the rewards are manifold, and I hope you guys at least give it a try.
There’s one additional issue that I didn’t mail in that’s been getting on my nerves – when buying a book, it comes down the pipe quite quickly, and it’s a simple (almost one click) process that you go through once you get to the end of the sample, but it doesn’t replace the sample chapters, and in fact starts you off all over again. IMO, the ideal experience would be to have some additional pages unlocked so you can continue reading, then, when the full book has finished downloading, to port your annotations, remove the sample file, and open the full book at the location where you left off from the sample. True that kind of polish is typically missing from 1.0 products, but it’s usually the difference between the magical product you love and… well, everything else.