Kindle Review – Kindle Fire Review, Kindle 4 Review

There’s a good post on the Nook forum where users are talking about what features they’d like to see in the next version of the Nook.

Amazon should steal some of those ideas – they’re good and a few are marvellous.

What’s Sauce for the Goose

Here are the ideas that were interesting -

1. Ability to add notes and highlights to a PDF.  
2. Ability to delete items forever via the Kindle (and not the Manage My Kindle portion of the Amazon.com website).  
3. Flip to random page option – especially for books that have already been read and reference books.
4. A suggestions feature so users can enter a suggestion straight from the Kindle – right when they come across a need or problem.
5. A way to complain about badly formatted books. This comes up very often on the official Kindle forum too. Would also be nice to be able to suggest a correction and see suggested corrections (by all readers) in the book.
6. Cover Browsing for Personal Documents (Nook has this for bought books). It would be nice to get cover browsing like Kindle for iPad has on the Kindle. Amazon’s cover images on their site are just 10 kb each so bandwidth shouldn’t be an issue. 
7. The ability to mark books as read. It would be nice to have this in addition to the Folders feature (since Books can be in multiple folders). 
8. A way to make the mp3 player loop one or more songs. A better mp3 player period.
9. Word of the Day feature.
10. Option to turn off the header and the page bar. This is a good point as they do take up space (supposedly 8% of the screen).

It’s also satisfying to see Nook users asking for features the Kindle already has or will be getting soon -

1. Folders. Arriving for the Kindle in the 2.5 upgrade.  
2. Even larger font sizes. Kindle will get two larger font sizes in 2.5.
3. Support for Doc format documents. Kindle supports this via the conversion service. 
4. Zoom function for PDFs. Zoom function for images. Kindle 2.5 update has this. 
5. Sorting of books by Author.
6. Being able to search books – type in title or author and find corresponding book. Not sure but this is pretty basic and Nook ought to have this.
7. Text to Speech. Amazon needs to get more Publishers to allow this.

The Kindle still has a lot to do regarding PDF support. However, it’s added a lot of what users were asking for.

There are also some Nook features that would go well with the Kindle -

1. Custom screensavers.
2. Multiple Fonts.
3. Pages and something Nook doesn’t have – The ability to go to a particular page.
4. A variant of the LendMe feature. If Publishers are allowing it on Nook they should allow it on Kindle too.
5. A better browser.

Is Sauce for the Gander

It’s surprising (even thought it shouldn’t be) to see so many commonalities in what Kindle and Nook owners want.

In fact, until the 2.5 upgrade was announced they had significant overlap – better PDF support, Folders, larger font sizes, Pages and navigation via page numbers, more powerful search, better music player, and the ability to report and correct book typos.

Even now the list is remarkably similar. In the end the Kindle and Nook are eReaders and owners of both are people who love to read. There’s a natural affinity and there’s got to be a way to tap into that. For example, it was great to see protests against the Agency Model – imagine if Kindle and Nook and Sony owners all worked together to boycott Agency Model Publishers.

Basically the current generation of eReader owners (Kindle, Sony, Nook) are the pioneers – they (we) are helping create a much brighter future for books and publishing.  

It’s quite nice to have a Kindle vs Nook contest going on and each racing to catch up with the other. The competition shouldn’t distract us from the fact that fundamentally we’re on the same team – books and reading.

Filed under: Barnes Noble Nook Tagged: | ideal ereader, kindle software improvements