Kindle niggles

Just to be clear, I still stand by my earlier posts. But as with any relationship, at some point, the honeymoon is over…

This morning, I was reading on the Tube – Bill Bryson’s Short History. I reached a page that referred to an experiment, and the line reads “Schrödinger… blah blah… (see here)”; I rapidly clicked a few times on the 5-way controller to move the cursor up to that line – and lo and behold, the screen flickered, went blank, then showed an amazon background image (a silhouette reading under a tree) with a progress bar slowly filling across the bottom. Uh oh. The device seemed to have shut down. I “woke” it up, which showed the home page, and opened up the Bryson book from the list. Annoyingly, it did not take me to the place where it had rudely cut me off but to a much earlier page.

How, now, to go forward to the right page? There does not seem to be an easy way of jumping to either a given page (but then, there are no page numbers but rather location points, so that would not be much help) and while I can use the 5-way controller to click forward and jump chapters, I could not see how to go straight to a given chapter through a table of content. Oops. And I did not have the patience to go look in the help – I felt it should have been intuitive enough to do. So a black mark on the user experience.

Once I clicked forward to the right page, I more slowly placed the cursor on the underlined words and clicked: unfortunately this seemed to take me to a random page further on in the book, not a description of the above-mentioned experiment. This is akin to a broken link on a website, and again warrants a black mark – because there is no easy way of flicking to the index at the end to look up the right page and find the reference.

Similarly, navigating to/from numbered end-notes is not obvious: these do not open at the bottom of the page, clicking on the little number takes you to the location at the end of the book (as with a physical book). Then, clicking on ‘back’ does not take you back to the page you were reading but to the previous page in the notes. It took some trial and error – totally breaking up the flow of my reading – to get back to that page, initially I could not remember how I did it (to be fair, after fumbling a couple more times, I found it again: rather than clicking on the back page button, you have to click on the keyboard, on the button actually labelled “back”…) Again, not great.

Lesson from all this: if you are just reading forward, fine: but if you want to jump about in a book (for instance where there are lots of footnotes or references), then not so good, at least the first few times, until you get used to it.

Last, as I was reading, I thought my Mum might rather enjoy this book: but whereas with a paperback, I would have handed it over to her when I next saw her, with the Kindle, I will have to tell her to buy it, which rankles somewhat. Thus the lock-in implications are interesting: if everyone has a Kindle, should I not be able to lend my copy to someone, as I do with paperbacks, especially given the cost of a Kindle edition is close to that of a paperback one? And then we run into a conundrum similar to the one the music industry hit about a decade ago with the advent of mp3 players and digital downloads…but I guess that’s a whole can of worms I’m not going to open now!