Voyage to Nowhere: The Amazon Kindle Story

I own a voyage, but can't come up with the answer to one simple question. In what way are those stupid little touch strips actually BETTER than real buttons? Since there's no actual physical feedback you can't tell how hard you have to press. They've tried to fix this by letting you set sensitivity levels, but that doesn't work great. Then I thought it would be a good idea to add a pager motor to fake physical feedback by vibrating when you would've made a press.

None of this works as well as the buttons on Kindle keyboard , but I bet it cost a hell of lot more money.

> that you can skip several generations and pick out the revisions that you like most.

The problem is that you really can't. Despite owning the absolute top-of-the-line device the software feels half-baked. Shortly after launch it would often crash itself and require physical restarts. The on screen keyboard is absolutely atrocious, Which they appear to tried to fix with text suggestions. The suggestions are slow and wildly inconsistent which makes it impossible to quickly use them. Even if it suggests the right word you never know where on the suggestion bar to actually going to pop-up.

As the author mentions the text layout system hasn't been updated in years despite obvious problems. I waited years for a new version with physical buttons but ended up settling for the somewhat acceptable touch strips. He complains about the lighting system, which is apparently still a problem for a lot of for a lot of voyage users (luckily I'm not one).

Also Amazon doesn't seem to do anything to control or improve the quality of e-books. They're often laughably bad.

His main thesis is dead on. The project doesn't feel like anyone who actually likes books is working on it. It doesn't feel like a passion, it feels like a terrible afterthought that people rotate in and out of making random changes to try and look like they did some management.

I use the Kindle app for Android because that is where the indie authors seem to be. I use the app in spite of itself. The Kindle app on Android has over the past few years been such a buggy piece of shit that I curse it's very existence. It alone has demonstrated that Amazon can't competently develop mobile apps worth a damn and made me laugh when I heard Amazon was making a phone.

Once a month Amazon seems to make a release that outright breaks a critical flow in the app. For the past couple weeks I've had to use the website to skim through books because every time the app tries to open the store view for a book the app instead opens Chrome with "about:blank" as the URL. /facepalm

I'll ignore the fact the tablet version gets a proper store interface (when it's not completely broken) but the cellphone version gets a regurgitated ancient web view that was last updated a half decade ago.

I can only conclude that Kindle isn't profitable for Amazon at all and they throw appropriate talent at it... that is none at all.

Does Apple give a rip about iBooks? Google doesn't seem to give a crap about getting indies on Google Play.

Have you used a Kindle? It's not small nitpicking, sometimes they layouts it makes are laughably bad and hard to read. Basic stuff that anyone who has read a book would notice at some point and it hasn't been fixed in YEARS.

Wait, what? Shitty typography makes a book substantially harder to read.

With good typography, the color of text blocks is even and flowing, and logical structure of headings, captions, block quotations, etc. is obvious and clear without calling attention to itself. With shitty typography, the eye is constantly pulled away from a regular flow by the uneven color within text blocks or by distracting elements on the page, certain words or phrases are illegible and require scrutiny (in some cases, switching focus back and forth between two places on the page or even between pages) and effort to figure out, and inconsistencies impose a small but continuous mental tax on the reader.

Does KOReader fix the Kindle typography? That is, get rid of the rivers of white running through the poorly justified pages?