[weatherman]

One of the main reasons I bought my first kindle was because I loved having access to the NYT "paper edition" in an easy-to-read, ad-free format. I read much more news than I read books. But this newsstand app on the Fire is ruining the news for me.

My chief complaint is that there are no previous editions archived on the device - on any other kindle, several days worth of the paper are left on the device and are accessible. But on the fire, its today's news or nothing, so I cant go back and refer to an article I read, or catch something I didn't get around to reading the previous day. And on any other kindle I could send editions from weeks ago to it using the web interface, but thats no longer possible with the Fire. Big problem for me.

Second, the interface is horrible. Article list scrolls up and down, but navigation in the article is side to side - it just doesn't feel right. The nav bars appear every time you open an.article, taking up 1/4 of the screen, but then they disappear after 3-4 seconds and the text shifts to full screen. It is so jarring that it basically isn't worth starting to read an article until the nav bars go away, which means its about 5-6 seconds to wait between tapping the article you want to read and actually starting to read it. Also a problem is the way the "back" button behaves, taking you back to the article you were reading last, not the article list, even if that was where you were last. And the menu button, which one might think to press to get options, leads directly back to the article list. Hardly intuitive. Page turn animations are laggy, especially when swiping. That shouldn't happen on a Kindle.

I also find annoying that the font choice is universal to the device. I generally like to read my news in black-on-white mode, Times New Roman, I like to read my books in white-on-black mode, verdana. But I have to switch it manually every time when I switch from news to book, or vice versa. This should be app specific, not universal.

There are also a lot of features missing.- no social features (share via db or twitter), no clipping, etc. That makes it even more frustrating that the Times subscription on the Kindle is still a completely different subscription from the cost of paper delivery or digital access via web. They expect me to.pay $20/month for this? I guess I could just read it in the browser, but that defeats the purpose of having a "reader" device in the first place. What makes the Kindle appealing is that its not just a browser, but optimized for reading - at least that's what the brand "Kindle" means to me.

Overall the newsstand is not just disappointing, its a disaster. And it's a far cry from what it's like reading on the iPad. This may be what kills the device for me if some changes aren't made, and quick.