09-14-2011, 10:18 AM | #1 |
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10 Things Amazon should correct in the Kindle
Ran across this blog post...
http://guidohenkel.com/2011/09/10-th...in-the-kindle/ Thought it was interesting. I haven't ran across too many of these (or maybe I just don't pay that much attention to them when I do). |
09-14-2011, 11:40 AM | #2 | |
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excellent post
Quote:
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09-14-2011, 12:14 PM | #3 |
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If Amazon went with ePub, some of those issues would go away.
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09-14-2011, 12:17 PM | #4 |
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They left out PDF reflowing, which is by far the biggest correction Amazon needs to make.
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09-14-2011, 12:25 PM | #5 |
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Most of them are moans from a designer's point of view that they can't force a particular layout on readers. One of the things I like is that everything looks the way I want it to look. Lots of paper books are spoiled by designers going wild or not really knowing how to design books properly.
The non-justification of some lines, I always assumed that was deliberate so that you didn't get too much space between words when there is a very long word at the line break. Hyphenation would probably fix it, but I'd rather have it like that than read lots of lines of text with hyphenated words at the end. |
09-14-2011, 01:19 PM | #6 |
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Not a bad list. I would point out that the first item on his list has absolutely nothing to do with the Kindle, though.
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09-14-2011, 01:45 PM | #7 |
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#6 is one thing I am glad it does not have. I do not nor will ever like Hyphenation. It drives me batty. I find in most Reader software it never works correctly and in some books every line is hyphenated. If added it's needs to be optional.
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09-14-2011, 02:09 PM | #8 |
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Yes, I've had to tweak a lot of converted epubs because of the em spacing handling bug in kindle.
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09-14-2011, 03:18 PM | #9 |
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Not really. The Kindle is an ebook reader. PDF is not an ebook format. Trying to use PDF for a purpose it was neither designed nor intended for is always going to be an exercise in frustration, and that's not Amazon's fault.
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09-14-2011, 03:23 PM | #10 |
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I disagree. PDFs are more readable on my phone than they are on my Kindle, which is sad. Amazon chose to directly support PDFs. There's no point in doing it if you're going to do it badly. Based on what I've seen on my phone, most plain text PDFs would be perfectly readable on the Kindle with reflow.
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09-14-2011, 03:29 PM | #11 |
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#5 certainly isn't a bug; it's done deliberately to improve readability.
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09-14-2011, 03:33 PM | #12 | |
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Quote:
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09-14-2011, 03:51 PM | #13 |
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Oh, yes, I agree with that. PDF isn't an ebook format at all. But as long as we're stuck with it I wish the Kindle supported it better.
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09-15-2011, 08:56 PM | #14 | |
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Quote:
And I feel the author of the "10 things" lives still too much in the world of paper publishing, not e-book publishing. From my point of view, obligatory margins in an e-book would just be a big nuissance. Similarly, em spacing and full justification need to function differently in an e-book than in a p-book. With printing resolutions exceeding 300 dpi, kerning and variable font width, p-book spacing and justification can be absolutely perfect. On a screen 600 or 800 pixels wide it is not reasonable to expect perfect justification (not to mention processing power required for rendering such perfect pages). I could perhaps agree with two of his points: floating objects and transparency. The former would require developing the Mobipocket format beyond the HTML-based logic, but would be welcome. Obviously, in HTML you can have floating objects, but they tend to misbehave if the viewer's screen resolution differs much from the designer's one. Just imagine what happens when the floating image, 700 pixels wide, needs to be surrounded by text on a 800-pixel screen |
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