Jakob Nielsen – Kindle Content Design:
As I discussed in my review of Kindle 2′s usability, the device is best for reading long linear material, such as novels and some non-fiction. Kindle’s best user interface feature is turning the page; the reading experience you design should require no other interactions.
Writing linear books simply requires a skill that all good authors already possess: the ability to keep readers immersed in the plot.
Kindle also works well for the long, narrative articles common in certain literary magazines and Sunday newspaper supplements. No surprise that The New Yorker is currently the best-selling magazine for the device.
Kindle works poorly for non-fiction books that have many illustrations or that require users to frequently refer back and forth between sections. Even if Kindle had a color screen, heavily illustrated books would still be better in print because moving around in Kindle is awkward. My own books fall into this category, so even though I’d like to sell more books, I can’t really recommend that you buy them for Kindle. My latest book is available in Kindle format, so you can download a free chapter and try for yourself (and then buy it in print
P.S. Reading Russ McBee’s review of the Kindle I discovered something I didn’t know about its “electronic paper” display:
1) The device only consumes power when it’s redrawing the page. Once the page is rendered, it takes no power to maintain the display. This eliminates the subliminal flicker of an LCD, and it significantly increases battery life (especially if the wireless feature is turned off).
That’s just incredibly cool.
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E-Ink is one of the neatest display technologies to come around in a long time. Imagine a bunch of ping pong balls floating in oil with one side painted white and the other side painted black. When charge is applied the balls flip over and stay that way until an opposite charge is applied. It’s a great example of nanotechnology in the (somewhat) mainstream.
There are bistable LCD technologies that also save power and hold their state. The only eReader that currently uses it is Fujitsu’s FLEPia and that’s just now being released. It’s also the only eReader that displays color. It also costs $1000.