Thoughts on Kindle & Ebooks

I finally got an Amazon Kindle 2, and I'm loving it, but of course there are a few things that are not quite there yet. Some are vastly more superficial than others. Here's a copy of my letter to the feedback team. For the record, this is one of my favorite toys ever. I guess I'm just hard to please.

• Form factor is slippery on the back, and doesn't always feel secure in my hands, particularly if they're greasy or sweaty for any reason. Some grooves or bumps would go a long way there.
• I never realized how much abuse paperbacks can take until I got the Kindle. I frequently feel like it wouldn't survive in some scenarios that a book would, e.g. falling off a treadmill, or thrown into the back seat of a car.
• The Next Page button on the right side of my kindle is loose, and has been since the first day I got it.
• I'd like the ability to fold the kindle in half and put it in my pocket.
• Many books (including professional ones) have typesetting or translation errors (especially with hyphens and page or chapter headers). I'll forgive that for $0.99 books, but not for $9.99 ones
• The navigation is decent, but several tasks would benefit from direct keyboard shortcuts, without sending me through the (slow) tracking widget interface.
• Dictionary support is really nice, except for two things. First, if it can't find a word, it should tell me immediately, instead of leaving me waiting and reporting nothing for the word at the cursor.
• The dictionary lookup should be smart enough to infer the part of speech of a word from its usage (in many circumstances) and show me the definition for that part of speech first. Frequently, the most common definition for a word is the definition I already know.
• The contrast ratio isn't quite as black & white as I wanted; I think the Sony reader has it beat on that point.
• Unicode support is way behind, especially with Asian languages and mathematical fonts. I've got course notes and digital books that don't work (but should).
• Reflow in PDF documents is a must. Currently, PDFs can't be resized intelligently on the device, and that's a drag for two-column journal articles and things.
• Sample books are great, but once I've read my sample all the way through and bought the book itself, I have to sift through it to find my place. There's no synchronization with the end of the sample content in the newly purchased book. Am I doing that wrong?
• The "sync to furthest page read" only works if I've been reading on more than one device, apparently. It's no help when I want to get back to where I was after jumping backward.
• There should be a reverse search feature as well as a forward search.
• Navigation is frequently painful, as the device doesn't take advantage of its keyboard for navigation. The web browser could associate hyperlinks with letters and numbers so I don't have to move the little widget around. Menu entries should also have hotkeys; I hate waiting for the screen refresh when navigating this way.
• The busy/progress indicator could be implemented as an LED off-screen so that the screen doesn't have to continuously be updated during a download or other slow activity.
• The size and position of the buttons isn't especially intuitive, or convenient for someone with big hands. It'd be nice to have a next page button available on the back and top of the unit.

• If I buy a physical book from amazon and it doesn't yet have a kindle edition, send me the kindle version free (or at a steep discount) when it comes out
• There's no reason I should have to buy whole books at once for $10; I'd like the option to pay a chapter at a time
• A Netflix/XM pricing model: $x/month for y books "checked out" at a time. In many cases, I'd prefer to pay while I'm reading a book only, especially if I can't lend it to friends or sell it when I'm done with it anyway. In many ways a rental model makes more sense to me.
• A pay-per-page model option would be nice. That way I'd never pay for a page I hadn't read.
• The ability to sell, trade, or donate purchased Kindle books to other users
• An option to trade in hard copies for a digital edition. Amazon could then resell the hard copies used.
• I should get a discount on future editions of an ebook I've purchased in exchange for some of the rights I would've had with a physical book. (That is, if the kindle edition is mine forever, I would like a relationship with the author & publisher that keeps my book up to date)
• I should be able to return a partially-read book for a prorated discount if I lose interest or am not satisfied
• Prices for physical & ebooks should be broken down more transparently. Exactly how much of a physical book comes from (a) ownership in the physical sense, (b) materials, binding, shipping (i.e. the "dead tree tax"), and (c) the content itself. The price of a Kindle edition should just be (c) plus the cost of downloading it. There's a real opportunity to win over consumers alienated by Apple's DRM scheme.
• Subscriptions to individual authors would be interesting. Consumers could help pay advances for popular, independent authors by pre-paying for the next book (or next chapter). Eventually a model like this could take publishers out of the picture entirely.
• The pricing for blogs is exorbitant. I shouldn't have to pay for RSS distribution of free content. At the very least, give me the option of paying for the bandwidth instead.
• From any page in any book, I should be able to access relevant comments and notes from other amazon readers online, social network style. Not that I'd want to; very often.
• Audiobook tracks should be discounted for purchasers of the kindle edition. Basically there should be clear-cut and well defined ownership/readership rights to all the content.
• I want an API

Finally, I found at least one sho' nuff bug:

• In the book Glory Road, I tried to look up the word "wards" in several places, and each time the dictionary brought up the entry for "ocean".

Latest Addiction

So ever since I found out about jyte on Wednesday or so, I've been intrigued by the simplicity of the system for keeping up with who said what and who agreed with them. There's also a "cred" feature, whereby users can enhance the credibility of other users (currently manifested in the radius of a purple dot).

There are several reasons this system appeals to me:

1.) I can post ideas that are too short for a blog:


2.) I can get stupid and/or brilliant ideas off my mind and let other people worry about the implementation:


3.) I can quickly gauge the state of public opinion, albeit in a small, skewed sample:


4.) It's a great demonstration of the potential of OpenID for social networks, prediction markets, and all that. You can make claims about other users (for good or ill):


So basically, I've staked my claim on some of the dumbest things said on the web in the last few days. More than anyone else in fact; the only users with nearly as many claims as me are the ones who launched the site in the first place.

Stupid Canadian Banks

I guess you take certain risks in any gambling endeavor. Nowadays the problem tends to be that somebody twists the arm of your online payment processor, preventing you from taking your winnings and walking away.

What's lame is, even if I believe the legislation trying to curtail online gaming is intended to protect us, it's actually gonna cost me more to play now. Whereas online I can play entire tournaments for $5, now the minimum legal buy-in is usually $50 or more. Likewise, the smallest cash games are $2-$5 limit, which requires a bankroll out of my range to play profitably. Even with optimal strategy, you're gonna go broke without enough set aside to handle the swings, and I don't know how to build one without micro-stakes games, especially playing no limit.

I've got the skills to be a winning player, but they're buried under the miasma of confused strategies that've stuck from the dozen or so books I've read on the subject. It's the same problem I have with programming: I spend all my time trying to learn the latest trend or language, and never get around to writing any actual code. That, and the fact that every time I have a need for a program, sombeody has already written it.

I guess the world has enough poker players, programmers, and especially bloggers. I'll figure out something useful to do with myself one of these days.

I Stand Self-corrected

I think I jinxed Blogger by bragging about google so much in the last post or two. Turns out it's been having a rough week, but I'm optimistic. I'll take the blame for jinxing them this time. Hopefully the effect will be limited.

They're in the process of making all their services communicate with each other, which, to most people, will elicit a loud yawn. It uses zend or something, which is like xxxml. That is, really, really, really, extensible markup language.

I get really excited about these interoperating initiatives because the code I'm paid to work with, sadly, is the total opposite. Think decades of urgent deadlines and no budget for documentation; a handful of developers and virtually no separate end users, and you can tell why I get jealous.

Thriller, even scarier.

(If you don't see a youtube embedded video thingy, click here. I'm not sure the Facebook-imported version is up to the challenge yet.)

It starts off slow, but the chorus is priceless (~10 min. in). I haven't laughed that hard at legos since the Brick Testament.