Comment by AndrewUnmuted | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndrewUnmuted | Hacker News Reader

    I had been planning to launch a big, public campaign about Kindle typography to try and get Amazon to change her ways.  But I came to the conclusion: why bother?

This is precisely the feeling I had right before I resigned from my position at Amazon. Though I worked at a subsidiary, not Amazon proper, the culture at Amazon everywhere can be absurdly stubborn. In the presence of a bad team, the "leadership principles" can be used for evil, and not for good. Which is why I was consistently told that bugs in software were OK if a majority of customers didn't care to call up and complain about it to our poor, overworked customer service teams.

Amazon thinks that it already has "the customer," in its most broad abstraction, already in its grasp, and doesn't ever need to fight to keep any of them there. That is why, when I departed my Amazon subsidiary in December of 2014, they were only just starting to hire a UX team. These principles can be made so dogmatic to the point of destructive company culture that outwardly resists change, be it to marketing designs or entire technology infrastructures that entire teams comprising hundreds of people rely upon to get work done.

This is why it is very hard to keep talented people in positions of management at Amazon.

I agree with this post, but not with regards to the Kindle, but more Amazon as an entity.

Also, perfect timing to read this article, after just purchasing a Kindle Paperwhite and having it for a few weeks now.

As a casual reader, I find the Kindle Paperwhite as the perfect medium for my reading needs. I can hold it in one hand, I can read it any time of the day with adjustable brightness, and the e-ink is very clear and the font is fine. With respect to the article, I don't think the typical person cares much for typography, as long as it can be read and understood. The justification notion, I would argue that the typical user may not notice it as much as the hardcore reader. This is where I disagree with the parent post here, as in Amazon may understand "the customer" in this particular case, or at least the majority. Everyone who I've come across absolutely loves, and heavily uses, their Kindle(s). Some people even collect them! All reviews love them and it's a great experience.

The point of the article: Now, I'm all for making the Kindle the best reading device ever by adding all these cool features (justification, typography, different modes for different things like iBooks, etc.), but instead of targeting the Kindle as being deficient for most users, the article is targeting Amazon more so for it's lack of pushing the product to all it can be and I think this can be extracted toward larger companies doing what they can to push the envelope with their product. This is where I agree with the parent post, Amazon seems to be lacking in this area. The blogpost written and the parent post both point to deficiencies in how Amazon looks to their customers and pushes their products to the best they can be.

Yeah, I've never once wanted more options/features/modes for my Kindle. I honestly think any additional complication would make it worse.

Being able to keep your notes and highlights when updating a book is a feature AND makes it simpler at the same time. Choosing a warmer colour for the Paperwhite wouldn't make it more complicated either. And I wish my (first-gen) Paperwhite wouldn't complain about syncing details every.single.time. I move a book across collections (many of them samples-it's how I keep track of books that were recommended to me).

> The justification notion, I would argue that the typical user may not notice it as much as the hardcore reader.

The fact of the matter is it impacts all readers, whether they recognize it or not, and there is a reason the printing industry generally doesn't do it.

At what point would you acknowledge that maybe the large number of people who think they prefer full justification... actually prefer full justification?

I wasn't denying people's preferences. I was pointing out that it has an impact even if people don't notice the justification.

What impact is that?

A bit of google will find

https://kaiweber.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/ragged-right-or-ju...

containing numerous links to academic papers showing lower test scores with right justification. I don't know if the author cherry picked only the articles favoring the authors opinion.

(edited to add, also try googling for the topic and "Dyslexia" where the conclusions seem fairly non-controversial and realize dyslexia is a spectrum disorder)

This is aside from the fairly obvious aesthetic argument that looking at ugly things (like right justified text) inherently lowers your quality of life.

On the side of left justification, it looks better, there seems to be at least some scientific data it reads better, and the argument why its easier and better to read makes sense. On the side of right justification we have crickets.

Perhaps there's a patent on displaying left justified text on an ebook, and merely by ruining the product by right justification, the patent can be avoided.

> This is aside from the fairly obvious aesthetic argument that looking at ugly things (like right justified text) inherently lowers your quality of life.

If ugly line endings even make your list of "things in my life that could be going better," you're living a pretty charmed life. :)

Ah but stuffing my house with original paintings by the dutch masters would be somewhat expensive, compared to what boils down to a fairly obvious very small software bug fix. That's the truly interesting part, the ratio of effort to improve vs results of improvement.

(edit to add, its like living in an area plagued by vandalism)

+1 for that study summary, that's very interesting.

As for aesthetics, the reason for right justification in the first place is that when done correctly it looks nicer. Unfortunately it's hard to do correctly.

I sincerely doubt that there's a patent on left justified text, since that's the most obvious way to display text. I hope you were just kidding.

> As for aesthetics, the reason for right justification in the first place is that when done correctly it looks nicer.

The overall structure of the text looks nicer, but not the individual sentences.

Interesting. There certainly seems to be a bit of cherry-picking in the author's quotes. From the abstract of the first article

"Thirty-two poor readers were then tested with the same material arranged in longer lines averaging 12 words, and no disadvantage of justification was found."

So the only time that there was any evidence of poor comprehension in that study was with very short lines - 7 words per line - and with poor readers.

The third one was published in 1991, and again seems to be based on narrow lines - 4 column newspaper. And if the examples on page 29 are anything to go by, it's potentially also based on fixed space type - and I'm not going to argue with anyone about justified text with a fixed space type looking poor.

> This is aside from the fairly obvious aesthetic argument that looking at ugly things (like right justified text) inherently lowers your quality of life

But if you don't notice it, then you presumably don't think it's ugly.

Are there a "large number of people who think they prefer full justification"? Citation required. I think most people don't think about it.

I'm confused by this -- looking through my physical books now, I'm hard-pressed to find any that aren't fully justified.

And none of them even have a dark mode! So no sense in worrying about that....

The issue isn't justification--it's justification without hyphenation. Books with justified text almost always break lines using hyphens. The Kindle doesn't do this, and that's what creates the "rivers" of white space.

Sorry, I guess I shouldn't make generalizations about the entire printing industry. There's a segment of the market where they don't do it. For other markets, not so much.

Just to chime in from the opposite angle, I, too, have a Paperwhite. I've had it for quite a while now, and it's receded to being a "once a month" thing. There's some reason that the act of reading on it just isn't as comfortable as reading a physical page. I'm not a "casual reader" when it comes to physical books at all, and I was hoping that the Kindle would help me avoid having to buy more shelf-space, but if the product is preventing "casual readership" from turning into "hardcore readership", wherever you draw those lines, it's hard to see a business reason for doing so.

I'll happily blame the justification, but there are other layout problems which also distract: image handling and inconsistent paging don't help in the slightest.

Exactly, Amazon understands and targets the majority, and they wind up very satisfied. This article lost me at "you’ll find hundreds and hundreds of people asking, begging for Amazon to change this." Ooh, hundreds! Amazon has manufactured at least 10 million kindles by now.

The point is that the product would be better for those millions of people too, they just don't realize it enough to ask. The same way people didn't realize they wanted an iPhone until Apple invented it - people were quite happy with their Blackberries.

I think Steve Jobs would say that by making a product beautiful enough to satisfy enthusiasts, you'll satisfy millions of consumers as well. They probably can't put their finger on exactly what makes it better, it just feels good.

The person who truly cares about typography, or even uploading and using their own fonts, will not buy the Kindle in the first place.

Kobo has already had those features for years now.

As it happens, I didn't buy my Kobo Aura H2O for that reason. I bought it for the microSD card slot, the frontlight, the ability to move documents to and from the device on my own terms, and the ability to read EPUBs without a pass through Calibre first. The water resistance is a nice plus.

I'm all for making the Kobo the best reading device ever, but so far, after the first 40 books, I haven't been able to come up with anything I might want to change about the hardware.

The Kobo in-device bookstore and computer sync software, on the other hand, could use some more work. Fortunately for me, I don't ever have to use either of those things to enjoy the full use of my hardware device.

Even if Amazon has 70% of the market share, they can't afford to ignore features that their remaining competitors have.

I'm curious: were you at Lab126?

I was not at Lab126. :)

The leadership principles mentioned in this post: http://www.amazon.com/Values-Careers-Homepage/b?node=2393650...

Disagree but commit. Idiots.

"Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly."

It's essentially saying fight for what you believe is right, but if the group decides an alternative approach don't sabotage the project from the inside because your ideas were not chosen just so you can say "A ha! Told you!"

I don't buy into most of the Amazon dogma (I currently work at Amazon). But I don't think the lesson behind this leadership principle is idiotic.

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