Quote:
Originally Posted by curstpriest
I could see a wide view being viable with cover art / metadata with ratings/author/publisher/isbn/tags/description - most ebooks have these fields. Also advanced search features would be useful. But again, using such a layout would take its toll on battery life, quite quickly.. Instead of crawling along at a 50-100mhz, it would blaze at the full 500 or so as it struggles to index/organize all of that crap. It would also require more page turns to display fewer books =X
I do agree that more options = better, and they should spend some goddamn time on the GUI/software. It's kind of sad that hackers have released more features than the dev team...
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Developers are limited by what their bosses will let them develop. Bezos said in interviews before collections came into being that he was worried that adding folders would confuse some less tech savy users and he wanted to keep the Kindle accessible to everyone. In essence, he was saying that he was willing to annoy the folks who wanted folders so that the folks who might screw up using folders and stop buying books would be happy.
I imagine that it is this same thinking that is hindering allowing customizable anything on a Kindle. Bezos and comp are looking at data that says most Kindle users are older then 40 with a decent percentage being over 60. He is concerned that people who have less exposure to smart phones and the like are going to accidently change the settings on their Kindles and not be able to fix it. They will get frustrated, stop using their Kindles, and stop buying books.
So customizable options scare Amazon. Which is why I would love to see a seperate menu item for customizing your Kindle and the first item being an option for resetting all features to the factory model. Then let people choose what font style, margin style, line spacing, screen savers and the like they want. If someone doesn't want to worry about any of that, they don't have to open the customizable option.