This pressure sensitive ‘button’ is so bad, such an obvious worst-of-both-worlds construction its existence makes me doubt everything about the product team at Amazon.

To replicate the experience of the Kindle Voyage ‘button’ find an immovable surface in your house: a marble kitchen countertop will do. Place your thumb upon the surface, then press down – deforming your thumb.

Not pleasant, is it?

imagine repeating that gesture thousands and thousands of times over dozens and dozens of books for every turn of the page.

This is no button, it’s a repetitive strain injury machine. And a committee of humans (presumably including Bezos) somewhere in Amazon saw it, approved it, and shipped it.

Such judgement cannot be trusted.

If you want to avoid the RSI-‘button’ the Voyage does also have a touch-screen option like the Paperwhite. But this too has been made worse.

The touch screen, previously recessed, is now on the same level with the bezel which makes accidental pages turns more frequent. This flatness doesn’t make reading books any better – given the way the rest of the device is set up it makes it worse.

At Kindle design headquarters there should be a whiteboard with ‘Does this feature make reading better?’ at the top. Instead Amazon is trying to make the Kindle into an iPad-like tablet rather than making a speciality device “passionately crafted for readers”. The result feels like it fell out of an alternative universe where Palm survived into the tablet age.

Switching Costs

A recent two-week trip to America was intended to be a kindle testing ground but since Amazon does everything outside the US weeks or months late, my Kindle Voyage didn’t make it in time so I decided to try something else:

I used Apple’s iBooks for my reading on the trip. IBooks may not be the industry leader, but their product shows evidence of caring about the reading experience:

There are multiple options for handling text justification.

You can tap both margins to advance the page. (Unlike Amazon who thinks readers always hold their books in the same hand. Have they ever seen people read books?)

There is an acceptable (though not great) dark mode.

Collections of books sync in an understandable manner.

You can make highlights in a book sample before you buy it.

Speaking of highlights: Amazon has no graceful option to update books. Updating a book, in Amazon’s world, is the digital equivalent of handing you a new book, then burning your old one. Hope you didn’t have any notes or highlights in there.

IBooks, meanwhile, can update books while keeping your notes and highlights intact. ::gasp::

You Can’t Convince Someone to Love You

Reading books is a large part of how I make a living. My decision to switch away from Amazon’s ebooks doesn’t come lightly.

I have a huge sunk cost in terms of my existing library of books in Amazon. The future costs will be large as well. I buy, and still plan to buy, my audiobooks from Audible – which often lets you get the Amazon version for a dollar extra. Now, many of the audiobooks I buy for work will have to be double purchased.

To be pushed over a switching-costs wall so high is serious business. This long-coming decision is helped by Amazon’s other blunders: Their Firephone is so terrible they literally can’t give it away and the existence of the Amazon Echo strains all reason.

(Seriously, I dare you to sit through the Echo Ad without skipping. While you watch that train wreck unfold before your eyes, keep in mind that somewhere at Amazon is a team of humans, led by Bezos, who approved it.)

These bizarre products, combined with making the kindle line worse two generations in a row, and a neglected software system for half a decade makes Amazon feel unstable. Mentally.

I had been planning to launch a big, public campaign about Kindle typography to try and get Amazon to change her ways. But I came to the conclusion: why bother?

A restaurant won’t get better no matter how much you care if the owners don’t.