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Another Nit for Amazon.com: Search Results Artificially Limited
I don't know why I've taken to this trend of nibbling away at Amazon.com and their amazing Kindle apps and hardware lately. But here's my second one in less than a week.
I discovered by accident the other day that if you search in a Kindle book on a Kindle app (in my case, running on an OS X box and an iOS device), the search results are limited to the first 100 hits. On the Kindle device, on the other hand, all available results are returned.
Why?
I'm not a heavy-duty programmer but I think I understand programming the Mac and iOS apps well enough to be pretty sure that memory constraints wouldn't be an issue. Not only are both machines pretty robust in terms of memory, but managing virtual memory on an app isn't all that difficult. So even the amount of available RAM shouldn't limit the result set.
Is this just a silly ploy to get me to buy a Kindle? I already have one, folks! Just let me find all the results I need on whatever app I'm using a Kindle publication on.
Why would I need more than 100 results, you ask? If I'm doing research and I'm looking for references to a particular word or phrase that appear in, e.g., a specific section or chapter of a book, and that section appears after the first 100 results the app returns, I have no way to get at the additional results as far as I can tell. No excuse for this and it is in my way.
Apple-Amazon Dust-Up Is All About Money and Control
Apple and Amazon.com are playing chicken over the question of whether those of us who use the Kindle app from Amazon on Apple desktop, laptop and hand-held devices will continue to be able to buy new items easily. The real battle -- as usual -- is over money and control. The question of which of the behemoths will blink first is up for grabs.
The problem: Apple has warned app developers like Amazon.com that they have to remove users' ability to buy items directly within an app by taking them to a Web site to effect the purchase. This is because Apple can't figure out how to get its 30% of that revenue stream. Amazon.com's Kindle apps all have links to the Web-based Kindle store at Amazon.
Where thing stand: Apple says that as of June 30 when it begins to enforce the new licensing terms, apps like Kindle will have to comply or be yanked from the Apple AppStore. Amazon is mum on whether they intend to comply or fight back.
Who Wins? Who Loses? Simply put, you lose if you're a Kindle user and Apple carries out its threat. You will either not be able to read Kindle books on your Apple device or you'll be able to read them but have to go outside the app to buy new titles. User convenience suffers. Apple's historic claim to being concerned first and foremost about the user experience on their products will finally give way to the long-known ugly truth that Apple will ride roughshod over your user expectations in pursuit of more money.
Prediction: Apple has to crumple on this one. Amazon.com is too important a content provider for Apple to lose them -- and with it, potentially, millions of users who will see Apple as the greedy capitalist here and switch platforms or at least grouse publicly about their anger. Furthermore, Apple's on shaky anti-trust ground here with their own book selling service (iBooks) that, by all accounts, is a real bust. My bet is that cooler heads will prevail and Apple will modify the licensing terms to allow it to save some face, perhaps by allowing the off-site purchases with some sort of way of tracking them to get a 10% commission for the sales. That's what Google did with the Android phone and its new One Pass technology.
