Quote:
Originally Posted by jlinear
Seems to me you maintain your customer base by keeping your customers happy. And keeping your customers happy will encourage them to buy your products. And selling your products will keep your shareholders happy. I do agree that Amazon probably thinks this move will not upset many of their customers. And they are probably right. There seems not to be much outrage that Kindles have such limited formatting options (margin, line-height, etc). So why make the effort to change anything. Seems to me giving your customers more options may make more customers, sell more products and keep shareholders happy.
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I think 'satisfaction' is the only metric here. Happiness is more elusive, there's no formula to generate that. Amazon sends me frequent requests for feedback on this or that thing. That is at least a proxy for caring about whether I'm satisfied. Ordering is as convenient as it can be, and fulfillment is flawless, but finding the thing to order with the fire hose of duplicate offerings from multiple sellers with 'promotions' mixed in can be 'dissatisfying', and I'm often able to get the same thing elsewhere without so much noise.
As for providing more options being always better, it is not, It can be bewildering and frustrating and paralyzing to have more options and information to explore. The ideal is to have [I]good enough[/] choices to move on and accomplish the task at hand.
So limited formatting options is a good thing in my book. I want to read, not have to explore some vast landscape of micro adjustments that may or may not make reading more pleasant. I do not want to be a book designer, it just has to be good enough, pleasing enough. (I would like to be able to pin a theme or layout to individual books give them more 'personality' and lock in my preferred orientation for the content. But nobody does this.)
I pretty much hate KOReader because the default settings look ugly and the menus can be 2 or 3 levels deep, and
everything is adjustable. I am not all that picky about layout but having so many options gets in the way of discovering a good enough one.