I am a huge fan of e-books, and have generally been pleased with Amazon’s e-book reader, Kindle, and its e-book supply system. I’ve bought close to 40 Kindle e-books. So, at a savings of several dollars per book, I’ve pretty much gotten my money’s worth out of my first-generation Kindle.
I have some disappointments with the Kindle, though. For example, one book I bought this weekend references several figures, but the figures do not appear to be included anywhere in the book. I would love to see the figures, and now I’ll probably have to buy the hardcopy of the book to do so. (The book is William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, and many of the figures are pictorial descriptions of various models for the creation of the universe, a subject that is a passion of mine.)
Another example of a disappointment is with the book The Brothers Karamazov. On some pages, half of the page is missing, plus the book’s table of contents is horridly formatted.
And, speaking of tables, Kindle does not handle them well at all, displaying each column separately. Long columns can take up several pages, making it impractical to view a table row. This is one of the areas where the ePub format shines over the Kindle format.
And, I am not alone in my disappointment. For instance, Engadget recently reported that Princeton called the Kindle DX a “poor excuse of an academic tool” — ouch!
I have a lot of respect for Jeff Bezos, particularly for his passion for taking care of customers. So, I’ve got to assume at this point that he is rather divorced from the Kindle, except perhaps in the broadest strategic ways. I hope this changes soon, and that he gets involved in improving the product quality, both in terms of the e-books and the devices.
Otherwise, Kindle will lose out to Tablet Devices. Imagine, for example, having the Stanza app installed on an iPad and being able to easily read ePub-formatted e-books on a great-looking screen. Kindle may very well lose out to such devices anyway, but it will be a near certainty if the current inattention to quality and customer needs is not adequately addressed.