E-books More Than Just Digital Facsimiles

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Purple Lady

I like my solution better . Download and strip the drm so I can read in an app that works much better.

That is no excuse for Amazon making an app that loses your place if you follow a link and taking a giant step backward from what e-ink kindles have had since 2007.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Purple Lady

Is this an eink device or the ios app?

Eink. Just done some tests on the iOS app, and it only maintains a "back history" within a book. The jump history within each book is preserved, so you see all the points you've jumped to (as dots on the slider you use to scroll through the book) when you reopen that book.

[Purple Lady]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Eink. Just done some tests on the iOS app, and it only maintains a "back history" within a book. The jump history within each book is preserved, so you see all the points you've jumped to (as dots on the slider you use to scroll through the book) when you reopen that book.

The Android app has the dots on the slider, but for the cookbook I was looking at that's useless because in a cookbook I will jump all over.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Eink. Just done some tests on the iOS app, and it only maintains a "back history" within a book. The jump history within each book is preserved, so you see all the points you've jumped to (as dots on the slider you use to scroll through the book) when you reopen that book.

iOS app has a Back icon as well as dots. It will be disabled most of the time, but if you make a series of jumps it enables and lets you go back to any of the pages you jump to, until you arrive back at where you started (and then it is disabled once more). So this is nice if you just want to jump around randomly and return to where you were. A page turn will disable the Back icon, and establish a new 'anchor' position.

There are a max of two dots shown at any time, so if you jump more than a couple of times in a row, the original location will lose its dot and Back is the only way back.

A bit tricky, but useful once you get the hang of it.

On android (and Fire) the system Back takes you back to the library. All you have to work with are the dots, and again you only have two available, so the oldest location drops off of the jump history if you jump to a new location.

A good idea to set a bookmark if you are worried about losing your place(s) by jumping around. I would say bookmarks work better on Kindle, Fire, and Android apps than on iOS app , since they are easier to navigate to (the list pops up if you tap in upper right corner).

[bgalbrecht]

Originally Posted by Purple Lady

If you are using the Kindle app on an Android tablet the link to another area of the book is useless. There is no way to get back to where you were when you clicked the link. When I use Moon+ and click on the same link I get an arrow to return back to where I was. The Kindle app used to be able to go back when you hit the back button but that was removed a long time ago. It was also very annoying if you had clicked a bunch of links. If you tried to use the back button to exit, you needed to hit back the number of times you used links before you could exit. This also lost your place in the book. I guess Amazon wasn't smart enough to figure out how to fix this and just got rid of it completely.

I almost never read any Kindle books, and never on an Android, so I don't know why Amazon doesn't support that. On my Nook, it displays a back button that goes away after any sort of navigation, but it's simple to add a bookmark before jumping to the other section if you expect to need to read more than one page. Of course, if you're not used to using the reader's bookmark function, I can see why you might feel that the ebook reader is much worse than the print edition.

I have read books where each footnote has an explicit link back to the original location. While that's not feasible when the text links to a later section of the book to link back to the original link, in the other example he used of test questions and answers, it's quite sensible to link every question to its answer and vice versa.

[Purple Lady]

Originally Posted by Purple Lady

It can be easily fixed. Moon+ figured out how to do it - just display an arrow on the screen that takes you back when you tap it. FBReader lets you use the back button, and if you visited more than one link it displays a list that includes an option to exit. Mantano displays a return button after you tap in the center of the screen. Amazon just needs to want to do it and they obviously don't think it's necessary.

I just discovered that Moon+ also displays a list of links that you visited if you change the back button to "none" in Control settings. I had it set to "Close Moon+ Reader". This list is not saved if you exit the book though like FBReader does.