Amazon Restores Some Heft To Helvetica For Kindle E-Ink Readers (teleread.com)

David Rothman writes: Props to Amazon. The Helvetica font will be restored to a more readable weight than the anorexic one in the latest update for E Ink Kindles. Let's hope that an all-bold switch—or, better, a font weight adjuster of the kind that Kobo now offers—will also happen. I've queried Amazon about that possibility. Meanwhile thanks to Slashdot community members who spoke up against the anorexic Helvetica!

Comments

Re:all life matters initiative reunveiled

[Rei]

Word salad dances singingly dogs into the breeze?

It's a wider issue

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

A wider issue is the general trend for devices with behaviour that is remotely changed after you buy them thanks to software updates. What is the situation if you bought an e-reader you were happy with and could use comfortably, but then after this kind of update it no longer works for you because, for example, your eyesight isn't good enough to read the new font? It's obvious why hardware and software vendors might want this kind of capability, but how do we protect the buyers who are using the products to make sure they're still getting what they paid for when they decided to buy?

Re:It's a wider issue

[Dutch Gun]

Devices updating is both a good thing and a bad thing from a customer perspective. You can get new features, bugfixes, and security updates, of course. But what happens if functional changes are made and you aren't happy with it? That's sort of a tough one. Almost any functional change you make is going to make a small percentage of people unhappy, because people don't like change, or it may genuinely be a worse experience for them for whatever reason.

Does that mean a company shouldn't try to genuinely improve their product? People might also complain about the opposite - that a device has been "abandoned" if nothing ever happens with it. We see the exact opposite problem with many Android phones today - especially the lower-end models. The manufacturers have a sell-it-and-forget-it mentality, and that simply isn't acceptable nowadays from a security standpoint.

I think one good example of changes negatively affecting customer experience is all the Xbox 360 UI updates. At some point in time during the console's lifecycle, MS decided they wanted to push a bunch of advertisements out to their paying customers, and so radically changed the console's UI. Moreover, the new UI felt like it was a lot less information dense, with a good deal of space reserved exclusively for advertising. That was a change made solely for the benefit of Microsoft's bottom line at the expense of their customers.

Re:It's a wider issue

[tlambert]

By not upgrading unless it adds something you need?

But... but... 1.1.3 is soooooooooooooo much better than 1.1.2!!!!!

It has a +0.0.1!!!!!!!

Re:It's a wider issue

[c0d3g33k]

By not upgrading unless it adds something you need?

That can often times be difficult, since the description of upgrades are often dumbed down to the point of uselessness in the name of user friendliness or deliberately obfuscated to hide what they contain (looking at you, Microsoft). Figuring out if it contains something you need isn't as simple as your flippant comment suggests. Not to mention the fact that updates on devices like the kindle are delivered in a single monolithic update file, so there is no opportunity to selectively reject changes such as the one OP describes while accepting needed security updates.

Re:It's a wider issue

[c0d3g33k]

And, please, what securiity updates for a freking e-reader? It's a device for reading documents, nothing more, nothing less. Do you apply security updates to a paper book?
Yeah, yeah, I know, you can browse the web, read mail, install apps and so on. But why should you do it? You bought it for reading books, right, else you'd have bought a tablet.

Think it through. How do those books get on the device in the first place? It's a networked device with purchasing ability, tied to your Amazon account and payment information. That's enough reason to warrant security updates, even if the device is used for nothing else but buying and reading books.

Re:You are not the Owner

[PhineusJWhoopee]

Wait a minute..you set the font, size, and weight to your needs for your physical books??? ed

Great - now they need to enable a night mode!

[PhineusJWhoopee]

I love my Paperwhite (small form factor, light weight, long charge) - but I really wish you could invert the text and have white text on black, for reading at night.

Re:Great - now they need to enable a night mode!

[locofungus]

Two problems with this.

1. You don't seem to be able to change the colour of the paper all the way to the border - not sure if this is a limitation of the paper, limitation of the kindle or limitation of my efforts to get inverted text.

2. (and why I gave up on 1) when the page refreshes, it goes to all white before it changes back to black. If you could *COMPLETELY* turn off the back light and use reflected light then this would probably be OK but it causes a very unpleasant flash when reading with a dark adapted eye.

One day I'll get around to attacking my voyage with a soldering iron and rooting it so I can turn off the backlight but I don't know when.

Not upgrading may not be a (realistic) option

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Unfortunately, there is a trend for updates to be completely automatic and involuntary, both with certain devices and even now with Windows 10 on the desktop. All it takes is some sort of online component it depends on and you have a crank to turn the update wheel, even if the update actually has nothing to do with that online element. Again, it's clear why the developers would prefer only having to support their latest code base, but unfortunately it leaves users with no control over their own devices, including in cases where from their point of view the update makes something worse than it was before.

There are also all kinds of mechanisms that effectively compel updates even if they aren't directly made mandatory and automatic. For example, on iOS devices, you can only get apps from the App Store, and Apple can impose constraints on those apps if they want to be listed. This can drive app developers towards only supporting the latest version of iOS, and again that can be a problem for people who previously had an older version of the app installed on an older version of iOS that worked well on an older device where perhaps the new version does not. These cases are particularly nasty, because all the developers involved can point fingers at each other and say it's someone else causing the problem, yet to the user the reality is the same: their device and software used to work, and now they don't.

Re:You are not the Owner

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Although this is a fair point, I also can't remember the last time I picked up a book I've read several times before off my shelf, and found it was suddenly now set in 6pt Comic Sans.

Re:Why is this a story?

[KGIII]

If you search around the 'net, you can find a documentary called "Helvetica." It might not seem like it but it's actually a pretty good documentary. Because that's pretty much all I want, I was scrounging the 'net for documentaries and found that. I wasn't expecting a whole lot when I watched it but it actually turned out to be pretty good. I was actually pleasantly surprised.