Things I don’t understand about the Kindle
I read with my wife’s Amazon Kindle for the first time tonight, and I have to be honest, I didn’t like it very much. These are the things I don’t understand about it:
- Why did Amazon choose a slab serif font as its universal typeface? While Caecilia is a lovely typeface, slab serifs are about as pleasant for long-session reading as sans serifs, that is, not very.
- Why didn’t they style the subheads or, quite confusingly, the pullquotes?
- Why didn’t they use “keep” settings so that there aren’t widow or orphan lines?
- Was there no other way to represent progress through a book other than that meter at the bottom of the screen?
These are aesthetic concerns, yes, but they have a lot to do with how I read, process, and remember stories and information. I have no confidence in my ability to remember something I’ve read on a Kindle, because there are no design cues to help me collate what I read. Turning letters into narrative or knowledge needs a storyteller or a teacher, functions good design have traditionally served…that is, functions books have traditionally served.
