Kindle 2 Thoughts

I like this device. I’d like to get rid of my four shelves of books and rely on this thing. Unfortunately, we’re not quite there yet, since many of the books aren’t available as Kindle editions. The replacement cost would be high, though if I paid for my Kindle books as I needed them, it might not be too bad. Many of my books I probably won’t use again.

Some areas for improvement in order of declining importance:

availability and quality of Kindle books:
Lots of books still not available. Some Kindle books have quality issues. Some lack a table of contents with links, and left and right on the 5-way controller, which is supposed to move by chapter or section, doesn’t always work. I see books with bits like “procrast- ination”, which suggest some sort of problem in the conversion to Kindle process. Downloading a sample of the book first or reading reviews can help avoid these bad books, but it might not be a big deal since the bad books are usually the dollar books.

navigation:
Should be able to execute commands in the menu with one or two keystrokes. Droppping the menu and navigating to the desired action with the 5 way can easily be 5 or more keystrokes (counting the 5 way as a key). Also, sometimes a sentence or paragraph is broken by the page break, and it is desirable to quickly see the whole. I would like to be able to reposition the page by one location with a single stroke. Best I can do now is use the goto location in the menu. There is some weirdness I don’t understand about the goto location, because sometimes the location provided doesn’t become the beginning of the page. Are not all locations positionable at the top of the page? Also, if you page backward, sometimes it takes more page forwards to return to the original position, which is disorienting.

screen refresh:
Too slow, affects navigation, both when paging and moving the cursor. Is this a limitation of the screen technology or the speed of the processor?

symbols
Using the symbol palette that pops up when you hit the SYM key stinks. First of all, there aren’t enough symbols. When making a note on a mathematical text, I would like to have Greek letters. Also, when using the 5 way, I find it too easy to push in instead of push left, which results in the wrong symbol selected. Not sure what the solution is. Have every symbol in the table numbered, so it can be selected with one or two keystrokes? Or add symbols to the number keys like a regular keyboard (plenty of space above the keyboard)?

internationalization:
There are some foreign language texts, and accented Latin displays correctly, but no foreign language dictionaries. Ideally, I would like to set two dictionaries simultaneously when reading a foreign text, to have for example a Spanish dictionary and a Spanish-to-English dictionary.

pdf:
Sent a PDF to amazon to have it converted and downloaded. It was a challenging document, 3M of images scans of a 1937 master’s thesis. Amazon chopped it up into pages. One page would be the best guess of the text in the image, and the next would be the image. Document size on the kindle didn’t increase much, and the process took about 5-10 minutes and cost $0.75. Although the text was ugly and had lots of errors and was not completely necessary because the image quality was readable, I see the value of including it for search. Unfortunately, I didn’t change the file name when I attached it in the email, and ended up with 344541425.pdf as the document name on my home screen. Could not find out how to change it. Not even hooking up my laptop via USB and editing the file name.

web, mp3:
The browser could be improved. The external speakers make crackle noise. I haven’t tried plugging in headphones.

other:
One can image other improvements: color screen, backlit screen. These may add more cost than value. I hanker for a stylus like the old palm pilot, for taking notes, or even doing the exercises in a technical work, so I don’t have to have an extra notebook and pen. Seems like there is room for increasing the screen size without increasing the overall size of the device: about an inch is wasted horizontally.