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@Cinisajoy: What is the the percentage of Kindle users that would want/like/appreciate/wouldn't mind having on/off option to have "book-cover-as-screensaver" (and/or "choose my own set of pictures of dogs/cats/children/anime characters/...)? That is something that people have been asking for 10 f-ing years now... and I bet that gaining that particular functionality covers at least 90% jailbreaks.
I agree that Amazon can't be expected to invest time and money for 0.001% Kindle users that want to run VNC, Dropbox, server for XYZ/... on their Kindle, or 1% that want to use external remote (or voice commands) to turn pages (but on the other hand Lab126 should not actively do their best to stop people for doing those exotic use-cases; I really can't imagine that a guy trying to do stuff like that will contact Kindle Support and complain if/when he soft-bricks his Kindle... he well get a serial port connection and fix it).
I don't consider as asking to much when people express a desire to have extra level of customization of their reading experience and are not satisfied with Amazon's "optimal defaults" (see font sizes [even now when there are 14 option, new additions begin somewhere around option 7... and I for example am affected by lack of middle-step in options 1 to 4], see margins]... or when people rightfully state that Kindle offers insufficient functionality regarding managing and categorizing his/hers book collection on device .
Yes there is Calibre and almost everyone has a computer.. yes Amazon website categorizes its catalog so you could go there and check things like genre. There is currently FONT_RAMP thing (that effect only 1 of the 3 total formats Amazon uses), there are metadata plugboards for trying to make Kindles shortcomings more tolerable. But all of those are clutches, and bad UX. People should't have to cram all that info into Title field.
What's stopping Kindle from pre-generating couple types of collection (like genre, author, series) while offering on/off switch for each of those? The needed info already exists on server (Kindle Store uses it) ... Kindle already uses bunch of additional files in ".sdr" directory... it would be simple for servers to pre-generate book categories/collections metadata, to avoid extra battery usage of doing all that on device itself. And document the format used for that metadata so if a "power user" knows how and wants to correct/edit a genre (i "no I don't agree this books is "urban fantasy", it's obviously "paranormal romance" [yuck] ) that user can do just that.
On/off switches aren't that much extra work for programmers and having a choice and fine-grained controls makes every user happy. And "defensive programming" against things like malformed data is a must even without leaving a window of opportunity for users to access and play with existing data. Servers can produce mistakes...
In summary: having (semi)functional workarounds that result in "now I can live with it" isn't the same a being satisfied with your device. Amazon should strive for the 100% basic functionality (like correctly rendering em units) done right before spending programmers time on stupid things like Word runner.
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