Larry O’Brian made an interesting post on reading with the Amazon Kindle. In it he states that he misses the thrill of turning pages…
I turn pages, click click click, and the story progresses, but the only token of my progress is a bar at the bottom (the same length for all material, no matter the word count) that occasionally deigns to darken another pip. Like the animated plane on the in-flight display, this is almost worse than no indicator at all (”We still aren’t past Nebraska?” Wait for it… wait for it … tick it moves a single pixel…).
I can see how that would get annoying very quickly. I’m probably one of the worst people for wanting to know how much further, how many more pages and an uninformative progress bar certainly wouldn’t help my condition in that respect. I continue to be amazed by just how many design problems there are with the Kindle, not serious problems that should discourage anyone from buying the machine, but little annoyances that summed together don’t make for a pleasant experience.
I love my Sony Reader. It doesn’t have a naff progress bar but shows me at the bottom of each page that I’m reading page x or y total. If I change the zoom level on the document I’m reading, the total page count changes as well (zoom out, the page count goes down, zoom in and it goes up). From what I’ve seen from other reports of the Kindle’s physical build quality I think I got the better deal with the Sony and it’s svelt metal case and leather cover too. I do kinda regret not having access to Amazon’s catalogue of books on the device, the there’s plenty to read on my Sony and I’ve not had a problem finding a book I really want so far.
Wouldn’t it be great though if all the book manufacturers could get together to hash out some Geneva convention of electronic reading; no one manufacturer shall take books prisoner and force you to buy a specific device to read them. All book readers must work with the same formats etc. MMmmm.
