Tags: Amazon, Kindle, usability
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I broke down and bought a Kindle ebook today. The book was “Why Plans Fail: Cognitive Bias and Decision-Making.” This book was highly recommended by Adam Yuret, and looks like a great supplement to my presentation Moneyball and the Science of Building Great Testing Teams.”
But the book is only available in the Kindle format. I understand why people do that. If you are publishing a short story, or a short book, and are self-publishing, you are likely to choose one format for simplicity purposes, and the Kindle format makes sense for many.
I don’t own a Kindle. For a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that the Kindle format was proprietary until relatively recently, I am invested in ePub books on the Barnes and Noble Nook.
So I downloaded and installed the Kindle app for Windows 7, and purchased the book.
And the app sucks. I know it’s a free application, and Amazon would very much prefer to have me actually purchase a Kindle, but the app doesn’t at all make me inclined to do so. Pretty much the opposite, in fact.
My big beef is scrolling. Basically, you can’t. There is no scroll bar. You can arrow down, or you can use the wheel on the mouse if you have one. Either way, it scrolls a complete page. I prefer scrolling more or less continuously, a few lines at a time, so that I don’t have to stop and scroll a page, and I can refer a few lines above without scrolling back. The Kindle app is anti-scroll. You go to the next page, and if you want to look at the line above, you scroll back. But you lose the line you were reading. That’s simply stupid.
I realize that I’ve invested a grand total of $3.99, and that with that level of commitment I don’t have a lot of right to complain. But this is a real usability problem, and that’s the kiss of death for online reading.
The book is basically unreadable the way that I prefer to read, and it’s entirely the fault of the app. Amazon, either do better, or admit that you don’t want me to buy your books without also buying a Kindle.
Source:
http://pvarhol.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/the-kindle-app-is-terrible/