Kindle, Buy or Not
UX Issues in any ebook reader
I liked kindle because it is less harmful for eyes, less distraction in comparison of mobile, portable, give me the feeling of a paper, and many books can be stored so it save space and money both. But it doesn’t fit right to all criteria from user experience perspective. Let’s explore what I miss.
Problem 1: Like a paper not a book
No doubt, digital media help us to reduce the space and money to store things in real world but it can’t give the same feeling. For the people like me who can remember things visually, Kindle is not a good option. A physical book strength your tactical and visual memories. A book with a bending cover, finger stains on the pages, folded corners, paper texture, binding, thickness and many other factors make a book unique and thus your reading experience too.
I still remember when I was in high school and I used to open a page in a math book almost with 90-98% accuracy to check a particular problem. Search for test doesn’t work that accurately and returns many result.
Though this is always gonna be a missing feature in any ebook reader, but there are a few UX, I feel can be improved.
Show a page slider in the bottom. Not a line slider but it shows the rectangular pages. As you can notice in the conceptual diagram below, it use gray color to the pages which are already read, white pages which are left to read, currently open page and last page with numbers. In addition of that, the particular page color in the slider will become darker when user scrolls through the slider to show the finger on particular page.
There are multiple things can be shown in the slider like highlighting the page for starting a chapter, separating the index, or answers page etc. However, in my opinion, so many things can be a burden to the reader so they should be selected wisely.
Problem 2: Time left to complete a chapter
I was reading a bed time story book with my daughter. Kindle was showing that the current chapter can be finished in 2 mins. But we took almost 20 mins to finish it. Kindle doesn’t track your reading speed. It’s more static formula to show the left time based on number of pages or words divided by standard reading speed instead of user’s reading speed. I believe this feature can be easily tweaked at software level.
I scrolled through 5 pages but Kindle shows only 1 min left to complete the chapter. Since I was reading with my daughter who is just 6 years old and practicing reading a language, her reading speed is way low.
Problem 3: Quick navigation
Kindle is good when you have to read a story book where you move in only one direction. You hardly go backward or forward. You need not to flip the pages quite often.
I was reading a puzzle book with my daughter and we really faced a hard time to navigate to the page containing the answers and then jump back to the page with questions. This was the beginning when I commenced to explore more UX issues in a ebook reader.
This issue can’t be handled at device level but they could have been provided the provision in mobi book format to handle this scenario very well. That could have motivated the authors or publishers to solve the problem.
The problem could have been solved in two ways. Either with pop up to see the hints/answers or with the links on question and answer both to navigate to the correct position. The first option is more intuitive as user need not to leave the page.
epub format supports the link so it might be possible with books in mobi format as well. But I’m not sure as I couldn’t find any book with this feature yet.
Quick navigation can also be achieved till some extend with pages slider as I described above.
Problem 4: Separate profiles
Kindle is not that cheap that you can afford to buy one for each family member. And when it comes to share the same device, it is always good that each can manage their own collection of books. Currently, we can group the books but it doesn’t fulfill the need completely. Whenever you open the kindle , it shows you the last book your daughter reading. Now, you need to go Home and switch to the book you were reading.
I believe, switching to a profile in starting can be a better option and easily achievable at software level. However, I‘ll prefer 2–3 hardware buttons to open the kindle in a particular profile directly.
Problem 5: Wallpaper
Kobo shows you the book cover of book that you were reading last. But kindle shows you the wallpaper. Kindle might have opted for showing the wallpaper to protect the privacy so the other people don’t judge you with the open book on your kindle. However, I would like to leave it to ther user’s choice. There are 3 configuration that I can think of to improve the UX;
- Displaying the last page of the book to motivate the reader.
- Displaying the cover of the book
- Displaying the cover pages of books as a collection like a physical library.
Problem 6: Different books
As I said earlier, Kindle is good for story books where the focus is on the text and it’s meaning. There are many books especially for children which contains a lot of images like an encyclopedia. In some books, like Timelines of everything, both left and right side pages should be visible together.
Kindle or other small portable ebook readers are not good for such books not only because of page size but the image quality and various color combinations. Kindle fire might be a better idea that I have not experienced yet but it is so costly for my pocket and size is still a constraint.
Problem 7: Browsing experience
Whenever I like an article, I store it to pocket. So I can easily access it and comfortably read it later. So I tried to access Getpocket on kindle but it is not kindle friendly. The login page shows nothing other than the bottom bar links.
I tried various other sites on Kindle’s experimental browser but due to the low refresh rate, it is nightmare to type a web address, scroll through the pages and understanding the text written in different colors or overlapping the images.
I also tried Calibre content server to read books directly on kindle. But it also failed. Other hacks like browsersync also failed.
Disclaimer
I have not experienced any other ebook reader than Kindle yet. They might be handling some of the UX issues I discussed above. I have discussed them in general to bring my opinion up.