And while I’m griping about usability, how to greatly improve the Kindle:

1. With paper books, I (and every other reader I know) will occasionally glance ahead to see how many pages are left in a chapter, to see if it’s worth pushing through for a last few pages before putting the book down mid-chapter. A ‘lines remaining to the end of the chapter’ count, under the current location data, would accomplish the same thing, and would be trivial to implement. (Or, at least, it should be; as the Kindle knows the chapter head locations for use in the table of contents, Amazon must already be encoding this information somehow.)

2. Several Kindle books I’ve read have footnotes. But skip ahead to a footnote, and when you return to the body proper, the Kindle has registered the footnote page as the ‘further read location’. Every time I turn on a Kindle or Kindle app (on iPhone, iPad, or laptop), it then tries to synch to the book to that footnote page, and never again remembers my place in the body text. Surely, Amazon could add the option to set the ‘furthest read location’ to the current one, to easily solve this problem.