Another item for my Kindle wishlist

I enjoy reading scientific and other non-fiction books. Those tend to come with bibliographies or otherwise make references to other books or authors within the text. I would love to have the ability to quickly look up the mentioned book and/or author in the Kindle store. It is pretty cumbersome to have to enter a search query, navigate the results list, etc. Ideally this would be as easily accessible as the two-click Dictionary lookup that the Kindle already provides.

Thinking of this makes me wish there was an API available for developers to experiment and research with the textual information and build interesting applications on top of. This is especially true as Kindle content is accessible on the IPhone and in the future hopefully on other devices.

Kindle feature request: Seamless transition from sample to book

At the end of a book sample, you’ll see something like the following:

End of this sample Kindle book.
Enjoyed the sample?

Buy Now
or
See details for this book in the Kindle Store

If I have read the sample, reached this page and enjoyed it enough to purchase the book, I typically find myself going through the following steps in some order:

1. Purchase book, either using Buy Now or the book’s detail page.
2. Navigate back to the Home Screen.
3. Now I really have no use for the sample anymore. I go ahead and delete it using the Kindle’s Content Manager.
4. I open the acquired book and find myself using the table of contents, repeatedly pressing Next Page or some other means of navigation to find the spot where I left off in the sample. Depending on the size of the sample and the book’s organization, this process can take some time (and clicking).

Here is what I would prefer:

I come to the end of a book sample and decide to purchase the book, using Buy Now. The book gets downloaded and once it has arrived, it is automatically opened at the position, where I left off in the sample. The book sample is automatically removed from the device. My reading experience is only briefly interrupted by the purchase/download, but is otherwise seamless.

That would seem like a pretty user friendly process to me. I wonder if that is possible with the Kindle 2.

Two things learned from Kindle usage

Using my kindle over the last half a year or so I have learned two things.

Samples are great for saving money.

Downloading samples is a great way to save money. I always enjoy browsing for interesting books and I usually also find lots of books that I would like to read. Particularly, when I am trying to learn about a new subject area, I may end up reading a number of relevant books quick succession.

I have found it is useful to develop the habit of always getting book samples and only actually purchasing the full version of a book, once I have the time available to actually begin reading the book right after the purchase.

I’d rather rent!

I used think I believed that books are primarily about the information and not so much about their storage medium (paper, disk, …). Since using the Kindle though, I feel I am significantly more convinced of it. In fact, I find I do not care all that much about owning a book really. With few exceptions, I do not re-read books. Of course, particularly with textbooks, it is not unusual to consult individual sections, but the principle remains: I do not much care about owning it.

I care about the access. You could say I care about the ownership, when I am trying to read it.

This seems much more obvious with the electronic format that is much less tangible than an actual paper-based book. Once the collection of electronic texts grows, individual titles get lost in the noise. The books I read a few months ago have become all but invisible to me. I am not sure I would mind much, if they simply disappeared from the device. Except of course: I paid for my own copy, so I should like to keep it!

The truth however is that the more I use my Kindle the more I would actually like to just rent electronic copies of the books for the duration of my reading them. It seems increasingly silly to own copies.

I never frequented libraries very much, always preferred to own books and build my own little library for pleasure reading and academic research. I guess this experience has changed my mind.

Saving more space with the Kindle

I really enjoy reading books on Amazon’s Kindle. I read a lot and nowadays I tend to favor Kindle books to regular ones.

Here’s a service that I would love for Amazon to offer though:

I would love to be able to return all those paperback and/or hardcover books that I purchased (often from Amazon.com) in the past to them. For each book they could then

1. give me an electronic version, and
2. offer the book for sale on the used market

This could turn out to be a potential win-win deal.