October 13, 2008...8:36 am

Another Fault with Amazon’s Kindle

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Don’t get me wrong. I still love my Kindle (well, I like it a lot, anyway). But, like most products, it does have its faults. One that has begun to bug me is that it is designed as a single-user device.

By single-user device, I mean that it doesn’t allow me to set up different folders for my stuff and my wife’s stuff. Or, for that matter, a folder just for news stuff that I usually keep on the Kindle for a day.

We share our one Kindle because of its high price (another failing that I’ve blogged about previously).

The Kindle does allow me to sort the items by “Most recent first.” That’s a good thing. However, if I read those new items first, they will no longer show up as new items at the top of the list when my wife wants to read. She has to scan down through multiple pages to find the new items to read.

That’s just annoying. And a waste of time.

Maybe if Amazon designed it so that the items on the SD card showed up in a separate folder, that would help. Actually, anything would help to make this great tool far more user-friendly for those of us who must share a Kindle.

Does anyone know if the Sony Reader handles this issue any better?

3 Comments

  • It’s not a perfect solution
    Since the Kindle
    will probably waste battery power
    reindexing when you do it
    But how about separate
    SD cards
    and keep very little
    on the Kindle itself?

    One of my account partners
    uses an old 64 Mb SD
    to hold just the Hillerman and Pratchett
    from our library
    She takes it out or switches it
    when neither of those authors
    fits her necessaries
    of the moment

  • Thought about that, but it’s a lot of bother. Have to pop off the back to insert or change the durn SD.

    Besides, the news items I gather during the day and transfer to the Kindle we both want to read, without having to search through multiple pages to find them.

    As it is, only the first one of us to read them can use the sort by most recent capability. After that, it’s down in the list somewhere…

    Amazon needs to fix this (I hope with a firmware update) or make the Kindle so cheap we’d consider buying a second one.

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