Just posted this on
my blog. I haven't seen any reports like this here. Any comments?
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The two-three most recent firmware updates for Kindle Touch (5.1.0, 5.1.1, 5.1.2) have brought new features but also much havoc [I ignore the security hole for this post].
One of the new “features” is the “Enhanced Table of Contents.” What it means is that Amazon removed from the “Go to” menu the link to the (carefully crafted by us) Table of Contents in the book itself and replaced it with the entire contents of an internal toc.ncx file. For those who know, Amazon basically followed the epub toc custom but, unlike epub, listed all levels of toc by default. In practice, it means that you will see the list of all!!! chapters of, say, the Bible one by one, and if you happen to be reading in the middle of the Bible you will be lost – there is no way you can scroll up through the entire list. The cumbersome workaround around this mess is to press “Beginning”, then open the “Go to” menu again and select the OT toc or NT toc.
The other blunder is that you will not be able to search reliably any of the books that you had on the Kindle Touch prior to the update (their index file on your Kindle is messed up by the update). The only solution so far is to delete the book and reinstall (redownload it from Amazon) it again so that Kindle Touch can create a new index file for the book. This issue also means that DVJ-1 (based on search functionality) will work only after you delete/reinstall.
The only good news (we have to treat anything that is not broken by Amazon’s update as good news) is that DVJ-2 (based on Mobipocket's index feature) did not receive any harmful attention from Amazon. It still works… but for how long?
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For all the new eye candy, I am upset with Amazon's lack of attention to its unique feature set inherited from Mobipocket. It seems they are embarrassed by them (they got rid of all of them in Kindle Fire line and killing it slowly in e-ink Kindles). See my posts,
here,
here, and
here.