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Originally Posted by gca3020
The problem with this approach is how expensive it would be to do. You would have to manually have a person go in and number these sections, then have a copy editor double-check.
The comparison to DVDs isn't really valid, since a DVD represents far more man-hours for a single product than a book does, and therefore will likely have little touches like this. Imagine if any time a publisher wanted to put a book from their back catalog in Kindle format, they had to have a person spend (at minimum) a day adding in section headers, or worse going through 5-10 old editions and plugging in page numbers manually?
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If publishers have done things intelligently then they will have files with the text of at least every book they published in the last few decades. It's quite conceivable it should be possible to not only use these to create the e-books but also to extract page break positions from these files. IF they've managed these files the way they should have. This might be a pretty big if.
And effort/cost? How much effort do you think goes into getting a book ready for printing? A printer has many requirements with regards to the files they get sent by the publishers. Then there's the effort/cost of producing the physical book and let's not forget the effort/cost that is taken up by the logistics of getting the books to the readers. Once an e-book is on Amazon's servers the entire logistics process is automated. No human intervention/effort required anymore and negligible cost. What is saved there surely can be used to properly prepare a book for its e-incarnation.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gca3020
Also keep in mind that having a lot of settings and options to change things is not something that Amazon wants to do. They want their devices to appeal to a broad demographic, not just gadget people (and lets face it, if you're on an internet message board, you're already more of a gadget person than the general populace). My fiancé's grandmother saw the Kindle last weekend and immediately (within 2 minutes) knew how to use it. She has never owned a computer or gone on the internet. This is a woman who needs directions to operate a digital photo frame. If Amazon wants to be a success in this business, it's her and people like her they need to grab. Not you and me.
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Of course e-readers must be user-friendly but that's mostly done by selecting adequate defaults to require little or no user interaction for straightforward reading and designing a properly thought out user interface for additional tweaking of the user's preferences if he desires to do so. It needn't be more difficult than using the menus on a DVD. The presence of these menus don't seem to have impeded the sales of DVD players. E-readers manufacturers should wish for the same level of market penetration as DVD players.
In the end I think it's mostly a matter of mentality. Whether you choose to sell something that takes the least effort/cost to produce and you can get away with selling to the public without them protesting too much or whether you are motivated to offer the best product you are able to create.
I'm afraid all too many people fall into the first category.
