Problems

The issues as I see them.

Old metaphor

The Kindle’s simple UI is designed to closely mimic the function of a paper book. Text is presented and navigated one page at a time. Progression through an ebook goes left to right.

How an ebook on Kindle Paperwhite might appear today.

Simple function and familiar form are great methods to introduce a new concept to old users, but can also hold back useful advances in interface. Apple ditched skeumorphism in iOS, not just because felt-covered apps are embarrassing in this contemporary decade, but also because relying on metaphors based on old technology limits what can be done with user interface. (UI in Game Center and Apple’s Podcasts apps was badly cornered by reliance on old metaphors.)

Paper books read left to right, cover to cover, but everything else we use — with rare exception — scrolls top to bottom. Flip pages on the Web? No thank you, and I like my Twitter feed scrolling to infinity (or 2006).

A vertical scroll isn’t just “modern,” I wouldn’t advocate Kindle ditch page flipping for the sake of appearances. But a vertical scroll — combined with other UI improvements — could go a long way in solving Kindle’s bigger problems.

After a week with Kindle, I am continually challenged by position and context.

Position and context

Position and context are the biggest challenges for consuming long-form, digital text. Position is maintaining progress in the text, the ability to walk away from reading and come back text later to the same place. Context is knowing the relation of position in context of the rest of the text, how far through a book, how long before the next chapter, what was written two pages ago, who said what.

Kindle smartly solves position and context by removing them from the user’s mind. I read a book. I close the book and load a new one. I jump to another device. Kindle remembers for me where I left off. Kindle reduces context to page forward and page back, though Amazon usefully complicated the interface slightly to improve contextual positioning when the company introduced an estimated time to the next end of chapter. (That estimated time remaining annoyingly hurries me to read faster, though my wife — a heavy Kindle user — swears the impulse wears off.)

It’s smart, but incomplete. Position and context are still issues on Kindle.

I often need to flip back a page or two to re-read a detail that later becomes important in the book. And while a countdown to the end of a chapter is helpful, I don’t need a chapter end to stop reading, just the end of a thought or excerpt, a useful break in the text, and finding one requires flipping forward pages.

Either case results in lost position.

I’ve wanted to jump to the start of a book to pull a detail from the front matter (year published), but neglected the urge because maintaining position in an ebook feels a bit like riding a river on a life raft. As long as my progress is forward, I can hold onto my position in the raft, but wading backward or forward in the book gives me the anxiety that comes with temporarily abandoning the raft. I’m confident I can find my way back, but I better not swim far.

Kindle’s tendency to reflow text makes finding a lost position especially difficult — the page I left isn’t guaranteed to look the same when I find it again.

This plays into context, too. Did I flip backward four pages or five? Though Kindle displays content in pages, it actually knows content in terms of location values. The location value is useful for the device, but not very useful for a human. At first blush, location values seem a modern substitute for page numbers. In practice, the values don’t offer nearly the same context.

I’m currently at Loc 4734 in the book I’m reading. It’s not an especially long book, but that number is large enough to lose much meaning. I have no concept of how 4734 fits into the overall structure of the book; how many Locs are in this thing? Worse still, moving to the next page jumps to me Loc 4741, which isn’t a predictable count, and if I navigate backward or forward and Kindle reflows the text there’s a chance I’ll never be able to see “Loc 4734” again. As a reader, the location value tells me little and I won’t remember it.

And so while Kindle would have me not worry about position and context, in reality I often do. And the current interface doesn’t do much to help me.

Solutions

How I’d solve these problems.