Kindle Problems

If e-book readers are to ever catch on then they must be able to display all kinds of documents and information, from novels to picture albums to technical documents. This presents a challenge for publishers right now because whist e-book readers are catching on, they don’t posses the technology to display anything other than just words and simple black and white images. A lot of publishers are wanting to put their technical documents on to e-ink devices, however technology in the e-ink industry is limiting how those documents can be displayed.

Once such publisher is Dave Thomas from Pragmatic Programmer which publishes technical programming books, as you can imagine, programming books will be full of diagrams, tables, code lists and images — they are really tricky to reproduce for e-book viewing.

This is what Dave had to say

About once a week, we get a request from a reader to have our books available in a format that can be read on an eBook reader (typically, nowadays, the Amazon Kindle).

In fact, we’ve had a prototype form of that capability for a while now, but we’ve always held back. Frankly, we didn’t think the devices worked well with our kind of content. Basically, the .mobi format used by the Kindle is optimized for books that contain just galleys of text with the occasional heading. Throw in tables, monospaced code listings, sidebars and the like, and things start to get messy. The .epub format (used, for example, by Adobe Digital Editions) is slightly more capable, but it also has issues.

You can see exactly what Dave is talking about because he has uploaded his tests, you can see the results here;

Dave goes on to say getting to this stage required a lot of hacks, for instance the code listings have been converted to images so that they render better, however they don’t scale when the user changes the font size — i’m sure many more hacks were used to get to this stage, Dave finises with a good question:

So… what do you think. Is this workable? Should we make these available, even though they’re not very good, or should we wait for a later generation of eBook that’s closer to the capabilities we need? Comments are open… :)

What do you think, should publishers wait or press on knowing this is the best possible outcome given the current technology?

Source: O’Reilly, PragDave

Does Amazon have a problem with the Kindle replacement battery? There seems to be a mixed bag when it comes to the Kindle battery, while some people get awesome battery life it seems like others get a raw deal with the battery.

As you can see, the Kindle battery is out of stock which tells my that there is a real problem with the battery and it isn’t just effecting a handful of people. It scores a pitiful 2.5/5 in the customer satisfaction review which also backs up the theory that the Kindle battery is somewhat volatile when it comes to consistent performance.

The reviews paint a worrying picture:

J. E. Link writes:

My Kindle battery failed within 3 months. It is yet another poor quality Lithium Polymer battery manufactured in Communist China. I had hoped that Amazon would have done better with it’s Kindle product. This is not encouraging.

Michael T. Earle

While I love my Kindle, the original battery that came with it only lasted a mere three months (and not real heavy usage) and is now dead and won’t recharge. And now I see Amazon is sold out of replacements!

James Mueller “Gadget Head”

My battery is dead after only 3 months as well. Based on the comments I have read others are having the same issue. Is Amazon looking into this? Are they going to make good on the replacement batteries for customers who have this problem? It’s a shame, the device is great. I hope they don’t let this issue overshadow the device’s good points. Take a lesson from Apple when the iPod had battery issues when it first came out. FIX IT!

When the iPod came out it was plagued with battery issues, it Apple took a long time to fix them and it definitely hurt iPod’s image - its time Amazon learned from Apple’s misfortune. Lets hope its not as as bad as it looks, how is your Kindle battery, have you had to have it replaced?