Thoughts on Kindle
04 Mar 2011 TechnologyI have been using a Kindle for a few months, and I am just starting to enjoy it.
What I like:
- Integrated dictionnary, having a word definition just by selecting it is GREAT!
- Being able to read “offline” articles from the internet, thanks to the great Instapaper service (select articles that you want to read with a bookmarlet, then generate a mobi file to put in your Kindle).
- Kindle is not just an e-reader, it is a platform. Last version of the software and its “social” features (such as following “friends” favorite quotes or reading activities) looks like a good start.
What could be improved:
- Playing with “Named entities”: (both of them are possible regarding current state of the art of named entities recognition)
- Same principle than dictionnary, open an encyclopedia (or Wikipedia) when it is not a word from a dictionnary (e.g. display context informations for places name, people…)
- Contextual navigation in the text itself (e.g. display informations about characters. By the way, “Extracting social networks from literary fiction” is a very interesting paper!)
- Exporting annotations: it would be great to be able to export clippings (highlights and notes) to a web service (or at least in a easier way than doing some not very beautiful things…)
- Layout and typography: sometimes it gets horrible.
- PDF reader! reading research papers in two columns is nearly impossible (someone tried to create a converter to ebook, but it doesn’t work very well). It asks the question of the separation of content and format, also addressed in a very interesting article, “Taking scientific publishing to the next level”.
- How to define universally the position in a text? (Amazon is introducing a “real number page” in its Kindle but I’m not sure of its value as you can change font, size and screen orientation…). I’m interested by that question for a long time but I couldn’t find any relevant literature on that topic…
Very interesting post by O’Reilly Radar too: “the future of the book”.