Dear Amazon:
I hate reading on the Kindle Fire, and that has bothered me enough to lead to this plea. As someone who is regularly asked to recommend e-readers, it distressed me that I felt such animosity towards the Fire without an obvious reason for it.
There are, of course, the obvious issues. The unbonded glass on the screen causes an abundance of glare, and the lack of an ePub reader is just annoying. And yet those aren’t the real problem. I can look beyond the glare, and Calibre makes it easy enough to convert materials into a Kindle-friendly format. Even more, I really like how WhisperSync keeps my materials linked between devices. So why do I hate reading on the Fire so much?
In short, because it doesn’t feel like a book. The reader app wants to feel like a book, but at least in the horizontal format, it isn’t a book. By extending the text across the entire screen, the book starts to feel like a web page. In fact the first time I saw the reader app on the Fire, it was in the middle of a book. Lacking any clues as to what to do, my finger tried to scroll the page the get to the next page. I am not the only one. At least a third of the people I hand my Fire initially try to scroll to the next page of a book with a vertical movement. A vertical scroll seems natural because there are no clues to direct a user to do otherwise.
The Kindle app on the iPad, and indeed iBooks itself, makes use of two columns of text to more obviously denote that the screen should be swiped horizontally to turn the page. That is the obvious, intuitive response; one would never scroll in a column environment. This confusion is especially profound in the horizontal layout. I find that when I read on the Fire in a vertical format I intuitively swipe to turn the page. The layout matches what feels natural for a traditional page that we turn horizontally. Held horizontally, the Fire doesn’t feel like a book. And that is okay, but only if awkward remnants of book navigation aren’t forced upon the reader.
The Nook Tablet offers two-column reading in the horizontal orientation, but that just doesn’t work. The height is too small and the columns thus are too short to allow comfortable reading. With that option off the table, I ask of you, please consider allowing a vertical swipe to proceed to the next page. Let me stay engaged in the magic of the stories without having to delegate even an instant of thought to how I turn the page.
Thanks,
A Confused Reader