Spaced Out ::

Kindle updated the firmware for its keyboard (and other) ebook readers to version 3.4. Amazon have always been good with long support and incremental improvements to stability (a rare thing in the “I can top that” IT industry). Whilst this latest firmware was trucked out with barely a mention it is worth noting that there are some significant changes:

improved font for reading
parental controls (Apple please note)
support for latest Kindle ebook format
support for picture/comic books
sync of audio books

These are are hugely worthwhile, however, for me, the biggest update isn’t mentioned at all:

better PDF reading

OK, its still not perfect, but now we get the option to exactly pick the part of the page to zoom to rather than the slightly botched “left-page” and “right-page” views. What would be even better would be support for user-defined zoom levels - this would allow sizing of the PDF page for the landscape screen. I can live and hope, but credit to Amazon for genuinely improving the user experience.