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Nov 30

Amazon Promises Kindle Update for Better Content Organization

Posted in: e-books, kindle, Media Players, Today's Chili

The Amazon Kindle has many problems: inconsistent international support for both features and availability of titles, a rather too-dark gray screen, no touch and the inability to display any EPUB-format titles bought elsewhere.

Once you start reading, though, the Kindle manages to do what Amazon promises: It disappears in your hand. Apart from the odd bright light reflecting in the screen, you almost forget you’re not reading a paper book. But if you have more than a handful of titles, then good luck browsing them. Although there are separate sections for periodicals, books and the content you have added yourself, Amazon’s attempt at organizing seems to be just to leave everything there in one long list. Imagine trying to navigate a real bricks and mortar bookshop with all the titles arranged either alphabetically or by release date* and you’ll get an idea of the problem.

Now, through the popular social networking site Facebook, the Kindle team has promised to fix things:

We have heard from many of you that you would like to have a better way to organize your growing Kindle libraries. We are currently working on a solution that will allow you to organize your Kindle libraries. We will be releasing this functionality as an over-the-air software update as soon as it is ready, in the first half of next year.

That could, of course, be up to six months away. Amazon has tied its own hands by going for the computer-free model. PC and Mac owners can of course drag and drop content to and from the Kindle, but Amazon doesn’t require you to have a computer to own one (although you need web access to buy one). This means that all the functionality needs to be available on a clunky, slow-refreshing machine with a bad keyboard, instead of going the iTunes route and exploiting the strengths of both computer and mobile device. And this is starting to make the Barnes and Noble Nook, with it’s coverflow-style color LCD screen, look rather more attractive.

Kindle Facebook promise [Facebook]

*If you visited Foyles bookstore in London before the owner Christina Foyle’s death in 1999, you could have experienced this for real: The 30 miles of shelves were organized not by subject or even author but, inexplicably, by publisher.

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Kindle photo credit: Charlie Sorrel