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To state the obvious, Amazon cannot accommodate everyone’s preferences. As I see it, the changes were made for the following reasons:
- to improve UI consistency between Kindle and the Kindle apps for iOS, Android/Fire
- to unwind some weirdness with the previous UI (e.g. what is difference between Collection view and Collections sort?)
- to replace long menus with tiny text (so long they needed to scroll, making some things difficult to discover) with option panels showing logical relationships between options
- improve Library navigation so swiping was not always necessary (swiping too infrequently opened an item unintentionally): now you have scroll bar with draggable position indicator and page up/down buttons (you can still swipe if you like).
- for Special Offers Kindles, they have removed the annoying, space-consuming banner ads that used to show at the bottom of Library pages. The only place ads appear is on the Lock Screen.
- there are no longer the ubiquitous and distracting Kindle Store links in menus.
The main thing people here seem to complain about is that you can only 4 or 5 items in List view; somehow seeing 8 or 9 items is inherently ‘better’ because it shows more stuff. But I would wager that on can now navigate much more efficiently through Library items using the scroll bar and page buttons than before with swipes (and the occasional accidental opening of books). At least it feels that way to me.
I would however vote for a List view option that did away with the thumbnails and allowed a larger type size for the Title/author (without truncating too much) and allowing a couple more items per page.
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