Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jun8 | Hacker News Reader

Just another reason to totally love my Kindle.

As an aside, I just traveled with my Kindle to Europe and was ecstatic by the ability to load up on (free, from Gutenberg) books, and easily switch between them on the long flight.

However, those who herald the end of books is here are very wrong. Except from the "many books on long trip" or "Netflix-like instant book delivery" (and a few other, like reading long web pages) use cases, I wouldn't event think about switching to Kindle full-time. Gripes are:

* All books appear almost the same, little or no typesetting

* The note taking interface is shockingly primitive, e.g. just to get a questions mark requires several clicks

* AFAIK, pagination depends on you display, so bookmarks may change place among Kindle readers on different devices.

Of course, all of these are easily addressable. The question is: can the device that does these and other cool stuff (e.g. color) be sold around ~ $150.

View on HN

> The note taking interface is shockingly primitive, e.g. just to get a questions mark requires several clicks

Do you normally make notes in your physical books?

> AFAIK, pagination depends on you display, so bookmarks may change place among Kindle readers on different devices.

The start of the page you bookmarked will still be the start of the page you jump to, whatever display layout you use. The pages might be different length.

Some people do annotate in the margins. Especially non-fiction books. At the very least I've been known to add a bookmark (i.e. shred of paper) to a particular spot with some notes written on it.

My criticisms of the Kindle are for its page transitions and poor interface. The Kindle is really like the Blackberry of of digital readers. The interface is beyond clunky compared to simple taps and swipes that much more closely emulate the act of reading a physical book.

My best hope is that Mirasol comes to the Nook Color sooner rather than later as I highly doubt the iPad will come with a non-backlit display for several generations.

The interface is beyond clunky compared to simple taps and swipes that much more closely emulate the act of reading a physical book.

I've often felt that the "need" to emulate something in the real world on new devices and new interfaces has held back significant innovation. Despite that "the desktop metaphor" is supposed to be familiar, people still can't manage their files effectively. And now new interfaces are rare/difficult to gain traction because people are used to the desktop metaphor despite that it becomes less and less a good metaphor.

Regardless of whether we should or shouldn't emulate the real, I still stand by my statement that swipes and taps are superior to the Kindle interface. Perhaps in your case despite rather than because that interaction is more like reading a physical book.

I fail to see the significant difference between a "tap" on a screen and what you actually need to do to turn a page on the kindle: "tap" a button.

The Kindle hardware is usable with one hand. I don't find reading books using the kindle app on my android phone to be as easy to do with one hand as with the hardware, mostly because since the kindle page turning buttons are physical and have decent resistance, I don't need to hold the device in an awkward way to avoid activating an action I don't want to.

The kindle is actually much better than a book because it's easier to operate with one hand than a physical paperback is.

Yes, I do take notes in books, but as they say, the margin is too small for some of my notes. I thought this would be one of the big pluses of Kindle for me, and it still is, but using the 1980s style interface really is a killer.

Bookmarks work as you say, which is counterintuitive is one is used to how bookmarks use in real books, i.e. generally one or two points are of interest on a page. On the Kindle, with different pagination, a sentence you like may not be on the bookmarked page anymore. There's no easy solution to this problem, I guess.

With bookmarks you need only type an alt-b -- it toggles.the bookmark.

  What you want here is to get back to a sentence.  I'd highlight it instead.

  At the beginning of a sentence, press the 5-way center down and

then continue to the right or down (or even across a page) and when you get to the end of the sentence or partial paragraph you want, press the 5-way button down again.

  That creates a highlight (underlined) and is faster for me than

doing it on my NookColor with my finger, which invariably gets the wrong letter or row.

  When you want to find your highlight (or note), press the Menu

button and go down to "View my Notes & Marks" and you'll get a list of the ones you made in the order they're in the book, with context and a link to the annotation.

  That's a pretty good solution.  You'll also find a personal

private,password-protected annotations webpage of all your notes for a book, on the Amazon servers. See how at bit.ly/webknotes1 as it's a really useful feature.

  If you don't want your annotations backed up to your area on their

servers, just go to the Kindle's Home screen and use the Menu button to get Settings and turn off Annotations Backup.

APOLOGIES. I have no idea how to edit on this. The first one I did w/normal word wrapping while writing didn't wrap when I was reading and most of it was off the screen. This final result is very odd. :-)

Not only does it take several keys, but the placement of the keyboard is just awkward (I have a DX). If I have to take any meaningfully note I have to place the DX on the table/lap/somesurface and I chicken peck my note out.

Not to convenient, but I still love my Kindle for pure reading.

I only started taking notes once I got a Kindle. The idea of defacing a physical book just bothers me, and most the books I read are from libraries, anyway. Now that I have my Kindle I've been taking notes all the time, but there are a lot of missing features. Not being able to link to other sections in a book is a killer.

Pagination doesn't actually exist because (except for pdf's) there are no pages, only locations (see bottom of screen). Bookmarks mark locations, not pages.

Exactly, which take quite a bit of getting used to (see my comment above), because it doesn't work that way for real books. In fact when people cite references with page numbers, they usually give the precise editions of the book, since different editions may have the sentence or point being referenced on different pages. So it's important for the "bookmark" to hold the information about the whole text that the user sees a that time, I think.

In case you didn't know, "Locations" are actually sentences, images, etc. I don't know how you can get much more specific than identifying the exact sentence that you'd like to bookmark and remember.

Which makes it impossible to do anything other than read certain books straight through. I wanted to skip around in Infinite Jest, but since the chapter names are meaningless and all the book guides have page number references, it's impossible to know the book's outline.

From these you said, I only miss the typesetting. If they add some new fonts, and differente typography. It would be more awesome! And one thing, I think all books for people more then 14 years old, are in black and white. Lol.

The main thing I'd like to see is a Kindle DX with Wifi support.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com