NASA's First ebook

I just downloaded this book to my Kindle. It's pretty hefty at 16,057 locations (a typical book is around 4-7K locations, with about 10-15 locations per page) and I look forward to reading it.

I just happened to be between books at the moment, so this couldn't have come at a better time!

Here's some initial comments from an initial glance at the Kindle2 version. (Mileage may vary for versions on the Kindle DX and other ebook readers.)

The first thing I noticed, however, is that the book shows up in my Home screen as "X15_Final" (which must have been their working file name) instead of the actual title of the book. I hope that as the good folks at NASA continue to generate their library in ebook format, they'll refine the process to show the book title in the Home screen instead of the file name.

I went to the cover of the book, and it looks as beautiful as it can on the 16-shade grayscale 600x800 screen of the Kindle2.

After the Table of Contents (location 47), I ran across a set of photos and tables. The photos were pretty good, but the text of the figures and in the tables were pretty much illegible. (This may not be the case for the Kindle DX.)

The data tables at location 48 were totally unreadable. This is one of my main complaints about the Kindle version of books. In general, data tables input as graphics are unreadable. I can't even tell what I'm looking at with these tables.

I tried to turn the page past these unreadable tables, but for some reason, there were blank pages every other page turn.

I then decided to go to the Forward (~loc 127) and start flipping backwards to see what I was missing. It turns out there were a lot of photos between locs 57-127, but none of them were captioned. It took forever to flip, page by page, backward until I ran into those unreadable tables at loc 70.

I then went back to Chapter 1 and started flipping forward from there. I tried out the first hyperlinked footnote, and it worked perfectly (That's not always a given for ebooks, because there's a wide variation in their production quality depending on the editor.)

After flipping some pages, I got to loc 381 and there was a figure, with a text caption, as I would have expected to see (and as I have seen in other Kindle books). I recognized the picture from the set that preceded Chapter 1, so maybe all the pictures and figures and tables have been duplicated both prior to Chapter 1 as well as in their appropriate locations in the text. I'm not sure why this would be this way, and I may be wrong in this assessment, but that's the way it looks at first glance to me.

Anyway, without spending any more time reviewing the production qualities of this book, I'd close with the following points:

1. Congratulations, NASA, for publishing your excellent books in ebook format... this is great!

2. I would caution readers not to try to flip through past the Table of Contents through the tables and figures between the Foreward and Chapter 1. It was really slow, and there were a bunch of blank pages to get through. Use the Table of Contents to get to the Forward and move forward from there.

3. Future publications could benefit from having navigational hyperlinks to the beginnings of each chapter with a right-click of the 5-way mouse. That's a neat feature of some ebooks I've read.

4. Future publications could also benefit from having the actual title as the filename so it shows up properly in my Home screen.

I've written enough for now, especially considering I've only had this book on my Kindle for about 45 minutes now, and I've spend 40 minutes typing up this initial review.

Thanks NASA, and happy reading!

P.S. I have also subscribed to NASAWatch for my Kindle, and it's great! I'd highly recommend it!