How the hell do you use Locations?

[lunixer]

Originally Posted by Piper_

Yes. I've noticed the same thing about the marker lagging. I don't know why it does it, though.

The grey is the unread portion.
The pace could be jumping on heavily formatted sections of a book. I've seen a table display hundreds of locations on a single page.

So that means that the gray to the left is the read portion? I kind of guessed that, but what is the arrow? And I never read anything that is heavily formatted. I only read novels. I tried some of my engineering textbooks on the kindle- but they were just awful, so I returned them. I have been unable to figure out what's up with the pace. But I ignore that stuff anyway so ...

[Piper_]

Originally Posted by TheKindleWorm

Just to clarify, Piper, because I probably didn't express my post as well as I should have I'll admit I meant to say that it seemed such a minor thing to me personally but I wasn't suggesting that people were being "silly" or "over-reacting" (no where did I use these terms) and I wasn't trying to belittle anyone. I did say I was surprised by the reaction there has been to locations.

The main point I was trying to make was that I didn't think that people would return a Kindle (as has been suggested) just because the location feature bugs them.

And actually I hope Amazon do give the option of pages too because you'd think it would be easy to implement and it will clearly please a lot of people. So fingers crossed that it's all resolved.

Gotcha, TKW, and Thanks!

Now we just gotta get everyone else ...on the same page. <groan>

[Piper_]

Originally Posted by lunixer

So that means that the gray to the left is the read portion? I kind of guessed that, but what is the arrow? And I never read anything that is heavily formatted. I only read novels. I tried some of my engineering textbooks on the kindle- but they were just awful, so I returned them. I have been unable to figure out what's up with the pace. But I ignore that stuff anyway so ...

Yes, the left part reflects the read portion.

The arrow marks the place where you started to read in the current session.

The little blocks are places you put bookmarks and notes, kind of like the little chapter lines that run across the bar (on a book with properly-formatted chapter markers), but you cant jump to them like you can jump to chapters (with the 5-way right/left arrows).

[lunixer]

Originally Posted by Piper_

Yes, the left part reflects the read portion.

The arrow marks the place where you started to read in the current session.

The little blocks are places you put bookmarks and notes, kind of like the little chapter lines that run across the bar (on a book with properly-formatted chapter markers), but you cant jump to them like you can jump to chapters.

Wow. That cleared that up. I've been puzzling over that since I got the thing.

[Piper_]

You're welcome!

[mdovell]

Originally Posted by Dwayne_Matheson

I really don't see the problem. Read the book, who cares what page number you are on? Does it really make a difference? If you need a reference point for where you are, even though the Kindle remembers that for you, see what percent you have completed.

Read people, stop staring at where you are in the book and start enjoying the story!

Well eventually this kinda HAS to be addressed not so much for fiction but for non fiction...

Kindle textbooks. If resizing the text creates different page lengths (and I'm sure it does)

There's no way that any teachers would instruct someone to search or manually go to a chapter..page numbers get people more to where you are supposed to be.

[Balerion]

Sorry if someone has already said this, but I have only come across the little dots a couple of times (probably 3 out of 100 books I've read on my kindle), and they've always been on proper ebooks have have been formatted by a third party publisher, so I assumed that there are properly indexed Chapter markers...

...but given the size of the dots compared the bar, whether they represent chapters &/or indexed notes and highlights, I think they are a bit stupid as the dots can represent, what, about 10-100 pages depending on the size of the book?! A bit silly I think, because there is no way to accurately locate them using the bar as a guide... I prefer just a plain black line on the bar (the first time I saw the dots, I thought my Kindle was being "glitchy" LMAO).

[coolbreeze]

Originally Posted by sirmaru

This is the second thread I've seen here on locations. A lot of folks object to them.

Their solution is easy: return the Amazon Kindle WiFi within 30 days for a no questions asked refund. Why complain, just send it back.

Personally, I find locations far more accurate than pages in a pBook. They get you to the EXACT WORD you've last read. Pages numbers cannot do that.

Don't be ridiculous. It's not an issue worth a "OMG RETURNING NOW" reaction, rather it's an annoyance for former book readers. Think about it. The Kindle is intended to lure paper fans to this new-fangled e-ink thingy. Well, guess what? The first thing that perplexes us is the strange "locations" function of the Kindle.

At the minimum, Amazon should add page numbers WITHOUT removing locations. That way, everyone is happy. You change the font, the page number changes, but the location remains in-tact for hardcore college referencing requirements. Everyone is happy.

[Dwayne_Matheson]

Originally Posted by mdovell

Well eventually this kinda HAS to be addressed not so much for fiction but for non fiction...

Kindle textbooks. If resizing the text creates different page lengths (and I'm sure it does)

There's no way that any teachers would instruct someone to search or manually go to a chapter..page numbers get people more to where you are supposed to be.

This is true, but referencing the Internet is possible without direct page references so I imagine referencing an ebook will be fine too.

[sirmaru]

If one places a paper bookmark in a pBook, one has TWO PAGES bookmarked, the left and right of the paper marker. If one folds the corner of a page in a pBook, one again has two pages marked, the front and back pages. One still does NOT know what paragraph he ended and where to begin.

Using Amazon locations. one marks the EXACT WORD of where one left off reading an eBook.

If one uses pages in Sony eBooks, one's page bookmark can cover from two to ten SCREENS of information. Its pure luck or memory for one to find out there where one left off reading.

For avid readers the Amazon Kindle location beats pages hands down.

After using locations on my Kindle WiFi I could never go back to using pages again. They are OBSOLETE.

If schools used Kindles as mandatory eReaders to save on the cost of paper textbooks, LOCATIONS would be an EXACT way of directing students where to read for their assignments. Chapters and pages would then become irrelevant.

[lunixer]

Originally Posted by sirmaru

If one places a paper bookmark in a pBook, one has TWO PAGES bookmarked, the left and right of the paper marker. If one folds the corner of a page in a pBook, one again has two pages marked, the front and back pages. One still does NOT know what paragraph he ended and where to begin.

Using Amazon locations. one marks the EXACT WORD of where one left off reading an eBook.

If one uses pages in Sony eBooks, one's page bookmark can cover from two to ten SCREENS of information. Its pure luck or memory for one to find out there where one left off reading.

For avid readers the Amazon Kindle location beats pages hands down.

After using locations on my Kindle WiFi I could never go back to using pages again. They are OBSOLETE.

If schools used Kindles as mandatory eReaders to save on the cost of paper textbooks, LOCATIONS would be an EXACT way of directing students where to read for their assignments. Chapters and pages would then become irrelevant.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. Schools do not use kindles. The many schools that tried have all given kindles an F. And yes, pages may be obsolete, but hey, everybody has used them for decades. Giving people a comfort zone is not a bad thing. And for me, a college student, it may actually make the kindle the return-on-investment that was advertised. (Though of course I will never be able to use the kindle for my engineering or computer science textbooks- too many poorly formatted graphics.) It's just an easy fix that Amazon has neglected to implement- kind of like the screensavers. I might also put epub format into this category.

[sirmaru]

Originally Posted by lunixer

Unfortunately, this is not the case. Schools do not use kindles. The many schools that tried have all given kindles an F.

See this headline:

"Clearwater High School gives 2000 Kindles to students"

Here is the link:

http://ilmk.wordpress.com/2010/09/17...s-to-students/


In the next 5 years THOUSANDS of schools and colleges will migrate to eReaders incluinding Kindle in my humble opinion. Its a great way to save on the soaring costs of textbooks.

[emalvick]

I am one that likes locations but based on the threads presented, I think something has to be done to at least give options.

However, there are a few flaws that are going to be there as a result of the publishing process regardless of how location is identified.

The biggest problem I see is all the extra content that is placed in a book before and after the main content. In print books, these were the pages that were often identified in Roman Numerals. The problem however is that even if locations were perfect (i.e. a word count or character count type system without the problems of markup), you'd still have flaws from edition to edition. In fact, in print books this is not much of a factor because of those Roman Numerals. Never-the-less, you have the page and font size that can affect print pages. You can have the afterwards that may affect things, and of course graphics and other elements can have an affect.

In the ebook world some (most) of these items have a similar affect and the locations are an improvement on the page numbering scheme of paperback just because they will be more consistent than you might find in paper copies. That improvement is tied to the fact that locations are in small increments, which subsequently leads to the complaint often seen with respect to the number of locations.

When you divide up a book into more pieces, it becomes easier to find where you are at in that book. Of course that is all relative and dependent on the reader, which is why something needs to be fixed.

I still think an ideal solution would be to offer the option to simply locations by essentially shifting a digit (i.e. location 123 is location 12.3). Further, one could set the Kindle to show that same location as 12 rather than 12.3 if they prefer. The result, your location becomes a page number. A simple setting that would require almost nothing to be changed but the view.

As much as I don't mind locations, I wouldn't find that format. I would also like an option to not show locations period or to toggle the info at the base of the document off and on.

However, the one flaw in the thinking of a lot of people here is if they think there will ever be a perfect solution. First and foremost, a perfect solution would require effort beyond Amazon. The publishers would have to ascertain that a book is uniform throughout its various editions, and I just don't think that will ever happen. Whatever numbering scheme is used would have to somehow exclude all preface and afterward items, and I am just not sure how practical that will be except as a long term goal that people and publishers strive towards.

[whitearrow]

The problem with implementing something like "pages" (meaning either screens, which change with each font change, or static pages, which represent x amount of text no matter how many screens they cover) is that someone is sure to wrongly believe that the page numbers correspond to a print edition, which they don't and won't. So it won't really solve any problems -- not in academia, not in book clubs or church study groups. It will just give the emotional comfort of something familiar, without really solving any of the problems of a separate ebook edition. I think it would make matters worse, not better -- bookmarks and syncing across devices would both become less accurate.

The only way to make old-fashioned page numbers useful on an ebook reader is to correspond them to pages in some print edition of the same book, which would require hard-coding in the text itself. No matter what screen you were on, a bracketed page number would be inserted at the hard copy page break. (This is what the legal community does with Lexis and Westlaw.) But considering how much publishers have failed at even basic formatting and proofreading, it's hard to imagine many of them would take this on, or if they did, do it well.

Locations are a big change from page numbers, but they are actually more accurate in the ebook context. Amazon did a good thing by not calling them page numbers, but instead adapting a new paradigm that's more useful for the ebook platform.