EBooks and EBook Reader Apps

EBooks and EBook Reader Apps

I have not read paper books in years now. I started ebooks with a second generation Kindle, reading The Hunger Games trilogy. Then I tried it on my phone and never used the Kindle again. I always have my phone with me. It is small and light. And it has very sharp text. At the time, Amazon's Android Kindle app was very good.

I almost never know the title of the book that I am reading. I never see the cover and the title never appears on the pages that I am reading.

And one more issue, in general, why does it take so long to open the app and get started reading? Even if the book has been downloaded to the phone the app appears to be contacting the cloud. Fear of cheating is more important than giving me a good experience, I guess.

Through the years, the Kindle app has gotten worse and worse as they added useless features and bugs.

The current version fails to start up on the page that I last displayed. I have to be sure to bookmark my page before exiting.

Touching the upper right corner of the screen sometimes produces a bookmark, sometimes does nothing, and sometimes displays the next page. Very annoying.

Touching a word marks the word and brings up the first line of the definition of the word. Huh? It used to display the whole definition.

These aren't transient bugs. I reported them months ago. I believe that Amazon doesn't consider them to be bugs.

I tried Nook. When I stopped reading at the start of a new chapter, when I returned, the page would be blank. To get it back I had to do something like change the font size and then change it back. I couldn't detect any attempt to fix the problem.

Next I tried Google Play Books. I haven't found any bugs, but there are two annoying features. First, there is some gesture that is easy to invoke, although I don't know exactly how, that dramatically increases the font size. I can't find any way to turn it off. And there is no setting to leave the Android status and action lines (at the top and bottom) visible. So I have to back out of reading mode to see the time or hit the home button.

I tried Kobo too. As I recall, it had an option to always display the Android status line, but the option didn't work. I stuck with Google.

I wonder what plans the self driving automobile developers have to avoid bugs like these and to not introduce new bugs in software updates.