Some Problems With the Kindle 2 Specific to Nonfiction
Posted on March 4, 2009 at 11:49 pm by kyliu
Tags: amazon, ebooks, hardware, kindle, kindle2
Filed Under geek | 4 Comments |
In my review of the Kindle 2, I noted some of the problems with Kindle books: formatting errors and the inability to flip quickly through the book being the chief ones. Now that I’ve read another book on the Kindle, Moneyball, this post will focus more specifically on the problems with nonfiction titles on the Kindle.
1. Footnotes
The Kindle deals with footnotes in an extremely inefficient way. Footnote references are treated as links. You can manipulate the five-way controller (slowly) to point to the link, and then push the controller to access the footnote text, which is shown as a stand-alone page. This means that it’s not possible to quickly glance back and forth between the footnote text and the body text, and impossible to compare multiple footnotes.
If the book is full of notes, as nonfiction books tend to be, this makes reading extremely unpleasant.
Even worse, sometimes there are footnotes that you cannot even access. In Moneyball, for example, one of the footnotes is inside of a table, and there’s simply no way to navigate the five-way controller to point to it.
2. Flipping back and forth
I can’t summarize this problem better than Wilson Rothman of Gizmodo:
Somewhere into my fourth or fifth book, I stopped reading Kindle 1, and the same basic issue hampered my enjoyment of literature in Kindle 2: You can’t jump around. There’s no way to read what actually counts as literature on a Kindle, because that takes the ability to leaf around, matching passages from different parts of the book, identifying key characters’ surreptitious first appearances, etc. This is something the codex lets people do very well, and it’s something no single-surface digital screen comes close to getting right, even when making it up partly with search, notes and bookmarks.
Rothman was talking about fiction, but this is a problem exacerbated for nonfiction. The need for random access is even greater there as you frequently need to refer to maps, figures, charts, notes in the back, etc.
3. No index
The index for a Kindle book is nonfunctional. Given that there are no page numbers for Kindle editions, it makes some sense that no page references would be reproduced. But why not at least make the index entries into links that will perform a textual search? (Not that this would in fact even be a real solution. It’s not possible to use simple textual search to generate index entries for “statistics, analysis of.”) A list of non-active keywords is like a taunt to the reader concerning what he’s missing.
4. Formatting of lists
Lists in Kindle editions are apparently treated as HTML lists, which means that unless whoever prepared the Kindle edition is careful, you end up with this mess:
5. Equations
As unbelievable as this may be, equations in Kindle editions don’t get formatted correctly. The mathematical symbols are apparently not supported by the built-in fonts:
6. Side boxes
For texts which have side boxes containing digressions (such as The Areas of My Expertise), the formatting is so tied to the printed page that the Kindle edition simply butchers it, creating a mess of everything. This is a problem that probably can only be solved by carefully reformatting books for the Kindle, which is probably an expense most publishers are unwilling to pay. But for the Kindle to really be useful, this has to be done.
These are not, in fact, minor gripes. They seriously detract from the reading experience on the Kindle. Some of them, such as the “can’t jump around” problem, require technological advances not yet available. But others, such as the various formatting issues, should be fixed right away.
Unfortunately, I have not seen many reviewers write about these usability problems. Amazon needs to fix them if the device is to be useful, and I would urge everyone to hold off on purchasing until these problems are better addressed.
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4 Responses to “Some Problems With the Kindle 2 Specific to Nonfiction”
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I just bought a Kindle 2 after playing with a friend’s Kindle (1). I agree that the footnote problem is pretty major for non-fiction, as well as some fiction– Try reading Colbert’s _I am America (And So can you!)_ and you’ll miss out on some funny commentary. Also in that same book, I found the side/margin notes placed somewhat randomly within the text, though I was able to figure out what they were in relation to.
Lastly, both this book and another Kindle book I just read had typos that I can only assume are not in the print-published versions. This is a bit annoying.
Still, I do think it’s a great device and it has helped me keep a steady stream of books at my fingertips, since I’m a fairly ravenous reader. I also love the non-glare screen, electric paper, and font-size control.
Even if the battery eventually dies or I want to upgrade to the inevitable lighter, color model that has more memory and a better cursor control, I feel pretty confident that I will get my money’s worth out of this device.
Your observations about formatting are right on target. I read Outliers on the Kindle and charts were badly formatted. Worse yet, there were footnotes that were not marked in the text, but as a asterisked list at the end. You had to click on the footnote and have the Kindle switch back to the text to figure out the context.
With a fiction title I bought two days ago, one character is referenced 10 times as “#8217;”. I have emailed Amazon about this, but don’t know if this is some kind of hardware glitch on the Kindle 1, or bad preparation of the document by the publisher, but it is definitely annoying.
Not only that, but I’ve noticed sections of missing text in the first book I purchased from the kindle store. There are blank sections between paragraphs with only a sentence fragment letting you know something is missing (that and the lack of sense of those passages).
Although it is true that too many books suffer from these problems on the Kindle (as well as most other e-book formats), they all stem from two main causes:
(1) Inherent limitations of the device — this particularly applies to your first complaint. Unfortunately, I can see no way that e-books (on any platform) will find a solution to this for a very long time, if ever. The codex and its remote digital cousin are just too very different things.
(2) Careless conversions. Too many publishers, including some large ones, seem to rely on automated conversion software that tends to generate many errors. This is particularly true if a printer-ready PDF is fun through the software. Odd codes, such as the #8217; mentioned by Shirley probably stem from trying to convert an ePub format to the Kindle’s limited HTML format. The code #8217; would be recognized by most ePub-compatible readers as a curly right single quote, but Kindle requires that code to be rendered as the HTML code ’ to display properly. Again, that’s careless e-book design.
I’ve blogged several times about e-book design issues (we do a lot of e-book conversions to PDF, ePub and Kindle formats):
Kindle Errors and Typos
E-Book Design – Do Readers Care?
Thoughts on E-book Design