In an effort to stick by my previously-stated philosophy of limiting my dud purchases, I read the sample material for Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation. This book is a bit of an instant classic, so it was easy to pull the trigger on it.
Silly me though. I thought that when I buy a Kindle book after reading the sample the full version will automatically open up to where the sample ended. Is that asking too much? Apparently so, because when the full book hit my Kindle it opened at the start, as if I'd never read the sample. I had to go back into the sample to see where I left off and find that spot in the full version.
Is this a horrible flaw? No, but it's one of those "nice little touches" you find with pretty much every product from Apple; it just shows how much attention was paid to the details.
Amazon could fix this down the road but it's too bad they didn't consider it before the initial Kindle roll out.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Upgrading a Sample
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4 comments:
I don't have a Kindle yet, which is part of the reason I read your blog.
When you get a preview, and then buy the book, do they come as two separate files?
If that's the case, then you might want to discard the preview, and keep the book (for rereading) as only one file?
The only other useful alternative would be to add the rest of the book to the preview.
Maybe I'm just confused.
Hi Jo. The full book and the sample of that book appear as two separate entries on your Kindle. You're right that you can (and I do) delete the sample when the actual book arrives, but that's not my beef. I think Amazon should know where I left off in the sample and start me on that page in the full book.
The other problem I just discovered is that if you do any highlighting or notes in the sample file, it won't carry over to the purchased copy. It's another little issue they should have considered.
That would seem to be a fairly simple thing to fix.
The location numbering in the sample appears to match the location numbering in the actual book. At least for the ones I've bothered to compare.
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