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The progress bar is not available on my new Kindle Touch. Very frustrating. I never know how long I have to read in a chapter. If I could see that the next chapter is short I can choose to read it before I go to sleep. I am flying blind without it.
The methods used to display reading progress are flawed in my opinion. Locations are unintuitive and unhelpful except in very specific circumstances (though there is a need for a way to locate specific places across editions). The entire industry should agree on a way to identify a place in a book regardless of book format.
Page numbers is anachronistic and backwards looking. It's forcing a new technology to inherit the drawbacks of an old one. I can't imagine it is particularly useful since it only works on a specific edition of a paper book anyway, and it's not intuitive to follow page numbers when a screen of text is a fraction of a page.
% doesn't work well in my experience, especially in non-fiction. I recently read a really long non-fiction book that ended at about the 70% mark due to all the endnotes and index taking up 30%. I would like to have a better idea of where I am in a book. Can't they work out a way to disregard the end matter when calculating % read? It can't be difficult, but I don't know enough about the ebook file formats to know if a section can be tagged in such a way so that it is ignored in the % calculation. Or could they simply have a marker at the end of the main book and have that recognised as the 100% point?
I think Amazon can do better than this. A screen number would be perfect for me. It's closest to a paper book (i.e. a screen is a page), it's the most intuitive (anyone can understand it immediately, which is not the case for locations), and intuitively '130 of 300' makes more sense than a %.
I don't reference ebooks at all, but wouldn't it make more sense to have an option for referencing where you could bring up a list of information, such as location and paper book page numbers for ALL known print editions of the book rather than tying an ebook to a single print edition? FWIW when I was at university and we had conflicting editions of books it was never a problem to find a passage by something along the lines of 'Chapter 8, near the end of the chapter, paragraph starting with "Bob picked up the sausage and..." '. I don't see why Amazon places more emphasis on this type of information than it does on giving the reader a more intuitive experience. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I would guess that the vast majority of Kindle users just read the books without the need to reference sections of compare position with a paper book.
Surely it makes sense for the default (or most visible) progress indicator to be the one most useful and intuitive the the reader. And surely with the technology and data available they can do a better job of giving that extra information to those who need it.
It seems to me that Amazon (and probably other ereader makers) are introducing limitations and inconveniences that don't need to exist given the power and data at their disposal.
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