I got a Kindle Scribe for Christmas. Yeah, now I hav an e-reader I can actually read papers on! Cool.
Of course, this just means I've been sucked into Amazon's ecosystem. You can only use a few formats on it, but that includes PDF. Except...
- Annotation support on most PDFs is limited.
- To get full annotation support you have to submit the file through "Send to Kindle"1 where I suppose it is pre-processed in some way and them made available for downloading to your machine.
Fine. I'll pretend I don't think they're spying on my content, and I'll even try to believe that they are spying responsibly. But honestly they already know a lot about me.
But that doesn't mean that there aren't any surprises here. You see, the machine has a web browser. It's not very good, but it's there. That browser won't save PDFs directly to the machine, which is a little weird, but the big oddity is that it also has no facility to route them through Send to Kindle. To somehow manage to make matters worse, the "Send to Kindle" page has a link for a "Send to Kindle" browser extension!
Seems like a no-brainer to me. Perhaps I should send them a note, but they make that weird, too.2
1 More "Send to Kindle" breakage: it will convert ebook files to a Kindle friendly format for you, but will silently drop on the floor any files already in Kindle preferred format (that perhaps, you downloaded from a DRM-free source like Standard EBooks).
2 The device supports a "Contact Us" feature, which lets you send missives into the void, but they specifically disavow any intention to hold a conversation as a result (or even just telling you what they are doing about it). There doesn't seem to be a customer facing issue tracker where you can see that your suggestion is already in progress or follow deliberations on how to handle an issue. I'm spoiled by the culture of the open-source world.
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