People amuse me, gladden me, sadden me and perplex me. Sometimes all at once.
The latest controversy in Kindle-Land centers around this picture (which, yes, is the same one I posted a few days ago).
You’ll see that in screenshot on the right, the reader is depicted as selecting books by cover. When most of us (including me) saw this, we were delighted. Kindle Apps on colour devices (iPod, iPhone, iPad, PCs, Macs) have long had the cover-view selection and it’s actually a nice way to choose your book, despite what old wives tell you. So when the Kindle got here and I had been reading it for a few hours I suddenly remembered that screenshot and spent a few minutes trying to play around with the settings to configure my home page to look like that.
It currently looks like this–without the ad:
Alas, there is no way to see the pretty grayscale pictures. Unless you are shopping in the Kindle Store. See, they can work a Cover Photo Display into the software for the selling portion, but not for the “this is the stuff you’re reading” portion. That kind of bums me out a little bit, because there’s just something more satisfying about seeing your books symbolised by something that looks more like the type of books you grew up with. The biggest objection people have with ebooks is that they don’t own the book.
That’s why iBook is set up like this:
and part of why Nook Touch is set up like this: 
See how clearly one of those things is not like the other? And Amazon must realise that this is a shortcoming because none of their marketing material shows the actual homescreen unless you are taking the “tour”. The splash images either show cover art (from the store) a single cover (from within the book itself) or a full page of text. They KNOW their home screen looks like cold asscakes.
But I love in spite of appearances, and I’m sticking with my snazzy new Kindle Touch. Especially since I now have hundreds of dollars committed to Kindle ebooks.
There are, though, quite a few people sounding off in the Kindle Forum over at Amazon about how they bought the Touch for the Cover display and cannot read their books without it and are returning the machine forthwith. This, I admit, is a headscratcher for me. I like the pictures, yes, but it doesn’t kill me to look at list of titles instead. If I want to see cover display I can always resort to checking in on my iPhone.
Yes, Amazon screwed up on this one. That much is plainly (ha!) obvious. But is not having little pictures really a dealbreaker?
Then again, since that’s how Amazon is choosing to market the product, they must know deep down that for many people it is. Now why they can’t just MAKE the product they’re trying to sell…that’s another question.
Marketing Something That Doesn’t Exist In Three Easy Steps:
See Jeff Bezos flaunt the pretty pictures! They're taller than he is!
See the fancy new lighted cover shining a halo on the pretty pictures!
See the pretty pictures on the box in the store!
I can see it being a deal breaker for some people for the simple reason that the competition has it. You have alot invested in Kindle, but for someone who would be just as happy going with Nook as they would be going with Kindle, a little nicety like pictures could sway them. Plus, there’s always a certain resentment there when you feel like an advertiser “lied” to you.
I’ve spent the last few months working on my employer’s e-reader app for Android so I’ve got a little bit of related trivia rolling around in my head.
It really doesn’t make much sense for them not to have the covers here. If the kindle works anything like ours, the app is reading an opds atom feed of your library, and each entry should have instructions on how to get the cover image, probably via an opds callback entry document.
If their apps on other devices are showing your library with covers then I would think they have something like this set up already. I guess maybe the only issue would be if they need to show a *different* cover image on the b/w version (different format or something) but the library service doesn’t know how to return anything but the color image. Then maybe it was a choice between making the home page simple or the library service complicated, and a market deadline made the choice for them.
[...] –The picture thing was a classic shell game. The only place you could select books by cover art was when shopping in the Kindle Store. The rest of the time you’re left with the old text-only menu that looks like a table of contents. The same one everyone else gets.. [...]