Kindle Likes And Dislikes
Posted on May 16, 2008 - Filed Under General
After spending a week with my Kindle I’m very pleased with the device but feel there are large areas for improvement.
It shines as a compact device that will carry all of my books, and it cuts down on the number of books I need to carry around with me for my job.
The clarity of the text in bright light situations is excellent, including direct sunlight. The ability to change the text size on the fly is great.
The negatives?
No back light or light of any kind is really a bummer. I like to read in bed at night and the Kindle sucks in low light situations. I know that battery life would suffer with a light included on the Kindle, but an LED setup would be ideal and would not use much battery. As it stands, I need to buy a clip-on light to read at night and I shouldn’t need to do that with a $400 device.
Another issue is the way the books are stored and listed. Currently the books are stored in one directory and you can sort them by book title or author, and sort by books or periodicals. The books are listed on screen this way and you have to scroll through pages just to get to the book you want. You can type the first letter of the book or author to narrow it down but you are still forced to scroll through many pages if you store a large number of books on the Kindle like I do. This sucks.
I would love to have the ability to store my books in different directories on the Kindle. I would love to be able to store my work related books in one folder, and set the Kindle to open that folder when I turn it on. This would cut down on the clutter and improve user interface.
Another change I would love to see is the use of “tags” for my books the way they are used on web sites like del.icio.us and other social bookmarking sites. The ability to tag my books this way would be great. I could search by tag or keyword and have the Kindle bring up groups related to my tags, or browse by tags and tag clouds in order to find topics and subjects. This would be possible with an OS update for the Kindle and I am surprised that Amazon never included this type of feature.
The kindle is lacking when it comes to magazine and newspaper subscriptions. There just are not enough available at this time.
The number of books available is growing but there is a lot of cheap filler material available on the Amazon site and the number of books they list as available is misleading. There are pages and pages of 25 cent books written by losers like me, and a majority of them are cheap sexual fantasy stories that aren’t even good enough to make the pages of Penthouse. Seriously, I want more REAL books available.
I know that sounds like a lot, and that I hate the device but I really love the Kindle and what it brings to the table. The price is steep, and this is not something for the casual reader. If you read as much as I do then this is the perfect way to carry everything with you on a compact and easy to read device.
Comments
Leave a Reply
