Amazon Kindle for PC – Frustrations.

Post Published on December 2, 2010.
Last Updated on November 29, 2017 by davemackey.

I don’t have an Amazon Kindle – but I do regularly download books for the Kindle – onto my computer and my Android phone. Recently a friend recommended to me the book Reimagining Church: Pursuing the Dream of Organic Christianity by Frank Viola. I decided to purchase a copy – and get the Amazon Kindle version for a few reasons:

1. I wanted to begin reading right now, and I can download a Kindle book in seconds.
2. The price is right – while not as cheap as a library or a used book, it still beats buying it new from almost any retailer.
3. I generally take fairly extensive notes on the books I read and didn’t want to do the note taking by hand – I knew the Kindle included highlighting/notes capabilities.

I must admit, I’ve been a bit frustrated in my endeavors thus far to read this book using the Kindle for PC software. Why? (From most important to least important to me)

1. The highlighting doesn’t always work. Sometimes when I highlight text it only gives me the option to “search”. I’ve tried doing this several different ways, but for the time being I’ve resorted to noting the location in the text of items I want to quote in a separate document when Kindle refuses to allow me to highlight.
2. Then there is the issue that you can’t copy and paste from Kindle into another application. What the crap?!? Come on now! I understand you are trying to protect the publisher’s rights, but this is ridiculous. Even if I make it a highlight first, I still can’t copy the highlight. Amazon could limit the amount of text we could highlight – thus preventing outright pirating while still allowing ready use of the text.
3. There are no page numbers!

Gahhh! I’m not sure what Amazon is thinking on this front – but Google Editions is looking really attractive right now…I’m sure they’ll have more reasonable methods for copying text?!?