Stars and Astral Cars

But page-turning is a bit of a setback. It’s good that you can use the touchscreen to turn pages, but why not include dedicated page-turning buttons as well? The e-ink Kindles are designed to do one thing really well: display long-form text. Page-turning is at the heart of the Kindle reading experience. An active Kindle reader is going to go to the next page hundreds — in some cases, I’m sure, even thousands — of times every week. There should not just be buttons for page-turning, but great buttons. Buttons exquisitely designed and engineered to be perfectly placed and delightfully clickable. The problem with using the touchscreen to turn pages is that you have to move your thumb, from the bezel to the display and then back to the bezel after tapping, each time. With page-turning buttons on the bezel, like on the old pre-touchscreen Kindles, you never had to move your thumbs while reading. Not having to move your thumbs is one way a dedicated e-reader could hold an advantage over tablets like the iPad and Kindle Fire — a missed opportunity here. It’s a little thing, but as always, it’s the details that matter.

Been saying this since they introduced the touchscreen Kindles. It’s why I chose the non-touch version last generation when the touchscreen was only $20 more. 

Yes, the touchscreen experience is light years better than the stupid keyboard or 5-way button for highlighting, typing, getting definitions, and navigating. But all those things are secondary to the entire purpose of the device. I still don’t want to move my hand onto the display while reading to move to the next page. 

I’d rather have physical buttons than a backlit screen. If I broke or lost my last gen regular Kindle, I’d still opt for the $70 Kindle.