Kindles get better

Librarians and teachers will be especially happy to see the news from amazon.com that Kindle ebooks will soon have pages. It's very frustrating for librarians to deal with content that is difficult to search and difficult to synchronize with print versions of the same content. Talking to a group--a class or reading group--in which people are using different versions of a text can be irritating if you cannot refer people to a specific sentence or paragraph. These new Kindle page numbers will be the same as the page numbers in the print versions, so life will become easier for group leaders as well as for family and friends who like to talk about books. The introductory version of the new software is available through the N.Y. Times article on the subject. The downside is that early adopters of the Kindle, those who do not have the latest models, cannot get the software. Only people with the Kindle 3 in its various versions can download the software. If they don't want to bother doing it themselves, it will soon be sent to them wirelessly. The rest of us will have to decide whether to buy a new Kindle for $139 or to continue suffering the no-pagination problem. Not an easy choice!