June 28th, 2010 chris

I bought the first Kindle. Well, not the first one, but the first version. Then I bought the second version. Then the DX. I also downloaded the Kindle apps onto various devices, including an iPad. Finally I downloaded the Kindle app for the Mac. I had some suggestions for improving the apps, and Amazon kindly offered me an email address to communicate these. I decided I’d post them here as well:
Chapter Titles at Top or Bottom of Page
It would be great to have chapter titles visible when reading a Kindle book, maybe at the top or bottom of the page. With the lack of page numbers, it’s even harder to get a feel where you are in the book, even with a percentage and the location numbers shown.
Personally, I’d also rather have page numbers that change with type and screen size than no page numbers at all. The magnitude of the locations is just too great to fathom.
Two Page Display
I’d like the option to have two pages on the screen at the same time. Usually this would be the naturally occurring consecutive pages, but sometimes having the table of contents as the first page would be useful as well.
Option to Remove Side Margins
The book app has two gray bars on each side of the book content that seem to only serve as a place for the arrows to show up when the cursor is placed over them. Since you can just use the arrow keys to navigate between pages, I’d like the option to not have these margins.
When the app window is resized, the margins remain the same size, although the content window shrinks, thus showing less content. This seems backwards from a utility standpoint, and since screen real estate is scarce, it would be optimal to have the minimum amount of screen real estate used and still be able to read the book.
I’m using the app to read technical books on screen as I do related software development on a laptop. Right now there’s not a lot of room left on the screen for what I’m working on while referring back to the book.
Random Access / Quick scan
This feedback applies to the iPad app as well as the Mac app.
One of the advantages of a physical book is the ease of random access, the ability to scan quickly, as well as a physical sense of how far through the book you currently are. This is particularly useful when the book is technical or reference in nature. Often you know you’ve read something before, but you’re not sure exactly where it is, so you can flip rapidly through the book to find what you’re looking for.
One way to implement this for the Kindle apps might be to have (optional) margins that look similar to how the hidden pages of a book look, with vertical lines representing past and future pages. This probably works best with a two-page display, but could probably be made to work for one as well.
- the thickness of the margin of lines would indicate how far into the book you are
- sliding your cursor (or finger for a touch device) horizontally across the margin would show a very large thumbnail of pages represented by that position (scanning). Clicking, double-clicking or tapping could jump to that page, depending on what interaction scheme was used.
- bookmarks could be visually shown as tabs with different colors and labels on them
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »