Kindle thoughts

No, I haven't bought one (and never will) but I installed the Kindle program on Pris a while ago. I'd never done so on shiny, because for something that basically just displays HTML as a series of pages, it's surprising big and there isn't the space.

Things I have learnt:

• It works differently to most other paged displays on Android. They let you move to the next page by swiping up the display. This expects you to swipe right to left instead. Ok, it uses book pages rather than a display metaphor, but it would be easy to get vertical swipes to work too.



• There is a substantial amount of free content available on Amazon, some of it very good. If, as an author / publisher, you sign up to give them an exclusive on your ebook, you can offer it for free for several days every so often. Amazon don't make as much fuss about this as they should.



• It's a lot easier to find free content on Amazon than, say Kobo, which does make a fuss about it, but don't seem to let you sort lists of books by price.



• If you have a thousand books (see above) on your Kindle program, it is very, very slow, even with a fast CPU. This started happening when there were only a hundred or so. Something is very wrong with how they generate the list of books: either they are not caching the list or it's being generated on the fly extremely inefficiently.



• It is also extremely bad at organising them. You can order your books by title or author and nothing else. It desperately needs the ability to have folders, so you can separate books into categories - you can not even sort them into fiction and non-fiction.



• Folders, if passworded, would also get around the problem that there's no way to let your kids use your Kindle program if you have any 'adult' content on it. You can see and access (once the sodding list has been populated) every book on it.



• Searching is not as good as I was expecting. You can search for title/author while at the big list, but not within the books to see which one has the phrase you're looking for.



• Am I missing something with bookmarks? Setting them is easy (tap on the page, then tap on the bookmark icon), but how do you go back to them?



• There is an awful lot of bad (temporarily) free erotica on Amazon, most of it featuring taboos. It takes several good reviews before I'll even look at it. There's even inflation in terms of 'how rich can I make the hero', with dozens of billionaires - I've met at least four real ones, and they're boring! - and now trillionaires are appearing. 50 Shades.. has a lot to answer for.



• Lots of books are badly located in the Amazon categories. Fiction is often in non-fiction categories, and books on sexuality often aren't in the sexuality categories.



• A surprising number of people can't format a book properly either. Some of this is apparently Amazon's fault for inadequate previews.

Anything I am missing?