ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

I’ve had the Kindle for a few weeks now, and some of its irritating features have come to light, so this post is going to be a whinge – sorry!

The most annoying is the lack of a proper charger.  For some bizarre reason Amazon ship the Australian version without a charger – you have to connect it to your computer with a USB cable.  I’ve tried charging it with my little netbook but it has such a small battery itself that only a trickle gets through to the Kindle .  I also tried using my iPod charger but although the leads fit it doesn’t seem to work.  Here at home I plug it into the computer over the weekend when it’s on all day, but it is going to be a real nuisance when I go overseas.  Where am I going to find a computer where I can leave the Kindle for 6-7 hours at a time?  Not in my hotel room, that’s for sure.  

It’s actually quite difficult to see how much battery power you have left.  There’s a little icon up at the top of the screen, but it’s not very clear and it doesn’t tell you how much time you have left like a laptop or netbook icon does; it’s more basic than that.  Like a phone battery icon, more of it is dark if it’s fully charged, but unlike a phone where you can venture into the innards and find the percentage of charge that’s left, you can’t do that with the Kindle.  It is extremely frustrating to have the battery go flat.  It has happened once; I would have been furious if I’d been reading a page-turner.   

Another annoying feature is the way some titles download themselves. The Home button takes you to the list of books you’ve got, but some of the ones I’ve imported from Gutenberg have given themselves odd titles, and you can’t rename them. ‘Le Mis’ has called itself ‘Look at the important information’ and Peter Pan has called itself the ‘eText of The Adventures of Peter Pan’ so it’s in with the Es, and not with B for Barrie or A for Adventures where you’d expect to be depending on whether you sort the titles by author or title.  Some titles have lost their authors which leaves them stranded if you sort your titles by author, and for some bizarre reason some of my Austens and Balzacs have been separated from the rest and I keep thinking I don’t have them and waste my time trying to download them again. It’s no good whingeing to Amazon about this because they’re free titles from somewhere else and it’s not their problem.

If Amazon is hoping that Australian customers are going to buy heaps of eBooks they’re going to have to fix their horrible website which is very tiresome for Aussies.  In the bookshops I frequent, it’s easy to find literary fiction as distinct from the dross, but that’s not how it works at Amazon, and there is no capacity to browse through Australian literary fiction.  If you know what you’re looking for, the search facility works well.  But browsing is absolutely hopeless.

First of all, you can browse through their ‘Recommendations for You’.  This is based on your purchases, and since (like most Australians I assume) I have bought very few books from them (3) and they were only obscure things I couldn’t find here, Amazon didn’t have much to work with.  Recommendations thought I was a war history buff (John Steinbeck’s Once There was a War) who likes Tomie de Paola religious children’s books (Legend of St Patrick)  and coffee table books about Tuscany (Shirley Hazzard’s travel writings.)  I waded through about a dozen pages of their recommendations trying to train it to reflect my reading tastes and now it knows I like the classics but of course I’ve got almost all of them so it ransacked the Amazon store to find obscure titles by Dickens and countless different editions of Austen for me to trudge through. 

Eventually it gave up on the British classics and started on American ones.  After a while I found something vaguely interesting only to find that it’s not available for Australian Kindle customers. And while you can refine Recommendations to eliminate titles you’re not interested in, you can’t refine it to eliminate titles not available for your country.   If you do find something that’s available for Kindle in Australia, and you add it to a wishlist, it will then suggest other titles, but they’re not necessarily going to be available for Kindle in Australia.  Clearly their Recommendations database isn’t talking to their Aussie customers database. I sent off a cross email about this, and they appreciate me telling them about it.  Pah!

To avoid the letdown that comes from spending ages browsing in a database full of books you can’t buy, you’re supposed to use the Kindle country specific site.  You can sort this alphabetically, by price, by publication date or by its bestseller status, but not by genre and not by country of publication either.  The Kindle categories on the LHS menu offers just 20 titles they’ve called Literary Fiction, of which some are classics anyway and apart from one Julian Barnes and a VS Naipaul the rest are presumably American authors I’ve never heard of . It doesn’t include Nam Le’s The Boat (which is available).  There’s nothing available by Kate Grenville, Tim Winton or (unsurprisingly) Gerald Murnane and after that I stopped looking.  Why bother? Cumulatively I’ve wasted about 90 minutes trying to find something interesting, but it’s hopeless.  Most annoying of all is that you can’t bookmark a page to come back to, nor can you input the page you want to go to in your browsing history.  There are some enthusiastic customers who tag titles for Amazon’s Listmania, e.g. Free for Kindle, but their ideas about what constitutes literary fiction and mine just don’t match so it hasn’t helped either.  I even had a go at making a list myself. to collect titles as I find them, but you won’t find it if you search the Listmania search box, so that was a waste of time too.  I’ve wasted an awful lot  of good reading time browsing the Amazon site and found nothing of interest at all.

My conclusion: for Aussie buyers, the Kindle is a dead loss if you like contemporary literary fiction and Australian literary fiction in particular.  If you do know the name of a book you want it turns out not to be available in Kindle or not available for Australian Kindle.   My advice is: don’t buy a Kindle at all unless like me you like the copyright free classics, and don’t pay $2 for them from Amazon, get them for nothing from Gutenberg.