Obvious features I wish the kindle would have
I love the kindle. I have had five kindle devices, not including iOS devices. I am a book hoarder: at current count, I have 595 books in my kindle library.
I am also a Goodreads user. I was actually glad that Amazon acquired it, so for a long time I looked forward to seeing what they could do together in a marriage:
I waited a long time.
It was only pretty recent they allowed us to add books to our Goodreads shelves from our kindles, and I was really happy to see that now we can browse kindle highlights from Goodreads.
Still there are obvious features they should have implemented in the kindle library but didn’t. I’ve been complaining for a while now:
2014:
2017:
…I am also not the only person who has feedback:
I decided to write up my wishlist — at the very least I would have done my best as a user advocate, right? Here is the list:
Better library management
First of all, managing your library on Amazon is really sad: it exists as a tiny link under your account page. Good luck trying to find it:
When you find it, it leads to another sad page: a page the infinite-loads your books sorted by acquired date.
With 500+ books in my library, it is virtually impossible to find my next book to read. Most people don’t read books in the order they are bought. We definitely don’t read books in alphabetical order whether by the title or the author. If we want a specific book, there is always “search”. Most of the sorting options are useless. And good luck if you’re trying to manage a family library with hundreds of books — you just have to infinite load it until it ends.
Why is finding the next book important?
There is an infinite number of books we can read in a lifetime. Reading a book is a heavy investment of cognitive capacity, time and opportunity cost. With so much data at Amazon’s fingers, I can’t think of reasons why they are not making better use of it.
The more books we can make better decisions on, the more books we can complete satisfactorily, the more books we can buy, the more books we recommend people to buy. Society becomes smarter, Amazon sells more books. Win-win.
Give us the option to filter our books
Right now, there’s no way to filter or hide books. If I’m looking for a book to read, I have to scroll through books I’ve already read:
(I am using the iOS app to demonstrate ideas because it is easier to take/modify screenshots but these work for the kindle devices too or even the website above)
I’m mostly interested in new books, but let me find old gems easily.
Sorting by ratings should be a no-brainer:
Instead of sorting by recency, title, or author — which has no practical use— why not let us sort by Amazon/Goodreads ratings, or even better, friends’ ratings?
Magical recommendations
Why don’t they use all the data they have on us, both on Amazon and Goodreads, to recommend the next books we should be reading?
Better information display on an individual book
There is a ton more data they could include on this screen:
Before book is completed:
- snippets of popular highlights, just to give a quick glance into this book
- popular reviews of this book
After book is completed:
- more reading metrics
- similar books
- lists this book belongs to
Potential Criticisms
Privacy or control concerns
This can always be a setting people can turn on and off. If we can choose what newsletters or notifications to subscribe to, why can’t we decide the categories of books we want to read?
Not everyone has 500+ books
The library becomes unmanageable once you hit maybe 10+. People like me have 500+ books or more because we buy a ton of books. Shouldn’t some design features be afforded to us? :P
Not everyone likes “popular books”
If one is that discerning, they would probably have discerning friends on Goodreads, or they can simply turn the social features off and tightly manage their curation.
Shouldn’t ratings be factored in pre-purchase?
That only works until you have a ton of highly rated books in the same range and you need some sorting order to them, whether by granularity or a social filter.
Books are only a small % of Amazon’s revenue
I saw a slide somewhere that says books actually form a very small percentage of Amazon’s revenue, and perhaps this is the only reason I can understand why they didn’t seem want to put in much more thought, but this argument doesn’t hold when you consider what Amazon is doing with books still, like physical book stores.
I am not really a fan of unsolicited redesigns — I understand there are constraints and considerations in designing a product — but I hope this is not taken in a “oh look how much more beautiful this can get” way versus a “omg can I beg you to consider these features please” way. I would love to hear what other kindle lovers think!
