I've sent the following to Amazon:
Hello,
I'd like to discuss the needs a reader of technical literature may have. Further, I'll propose a variant of solution done from the reader's point of view.
First of all, what the process of working with technical books is? I work more than ninety-five percent of time that I spend working with techbooks with computers-related (programming, system administration) literature.
How does the working process go? The person uses computer-related books in two ways:
- reading (or reading and doing actions like control clicks, menu clicks and so on)
- search with small stripped reading.
The first way is obvious, there is only one problem: poor bookmarking functionality. For example, the user guide says that you need to open the 'View notes and marks' menu option and navigate from there.
Aha, the technical literary is the area where people do a lot of highlights. Why? To see Your Highlights everywhere, to see highlights on a desktop (Kindle for PC), to see highlights of your personal documents (I use also for reading the documentation of the products I'm working with) using third-party software.
Now, let's recall what we a second ago discussed: bookmarks. How is it possible to navigate to a bookmark having tens or hundreds highlighted places in the book you are reading?
The conclusion is simple, you need or to add a menu item 'Navigate bookmarks', or a window as it's done in other vendors' e-readers. The first way is preferable since there is less to do than in the second, UI is athe same and it's also the same 'View Notes and Marks' menu item but with filtering 'only bookmarks'.
The second problem is not so easy to resolve. Again, it is the Search. When you need to find something, it's very rare luck if one book suffices. Compared to Advanced Search in Adobe Acrobat Reader, your search in almost nothing. (Do you know their search? Open a document, press Ctrl+Shift+А and type a path. After that Advanced Search works over a FOLDER of documents (one document is also supported). Of course, working with more than ten or twenty documents may feel burdensome (desktop slows down, even Acrobat may fall down if too many resources have been consumed), but compare please with your offer.
The key of success is the ability to search in a book as well in several books. There'll be very good if you allow us to search in three books in parallel, and work with three books in parallel. Three is usually enough because or these three helpful, or one or two should be closed and other opened.
The typical style of work with technical books is to get code samples from three of four places and to read in one or two areas of one book. The dedicated bookmarks navigation would help here.
The second stage is search in two or three books in parallel, finding alternate solutions in books or code sample in the first and something like an explanation how it works in the other (some authors are best in code writing, whereas others write text well :)).
Please think about the propossal. As a technical person (I also read fiction, but there is no problem) I need to have improved navigation and search capabilities.
What do you the Kindle users think about the above proposal?
