Amazon, Please Don’t Require Me to Use a Touchscreen on the Kindle 4

Part of the appeal of the Kindle for me is that it doesn’t have a touchscreen. First a little history, then I will tell you why I don’t want a touchscreen on the future Kindle readers.

Kindle 3I have had my Kindle for a little over 2 months. I have completely fallen in love with it. But, I already knew I would even though I had never touched a Kindle before buying mine. I used my wife’s Sony ebook Reader for the first time in January and began to see how much I would like using an ebook reader of some kind. From January to May I was saving my pennies to be able to buy a Kindle.

There are other good ebook readers on the market. But there were a couple of features that made the Kindle most appealing to me. That is not to say that the Kindle is the best option in every situation. I found a chart that Michael Hyatt created where he highlighted the features of different ebook readers. You may want to take a look at it when thinking about purchasing an ebook reader. Note that it was compiled in October 2010. There may be some major changes by the time you read the chart.

Some of the appealing features of the Kindle to me were that I could purchase books through Amazon and the sheer number of books available. Because I am already an Amazon customer and I have purchased ebooks to read on the Kindle app of my iPhone, I was very interested in staying in the same ecosystem. An added benefit was that I could read on my phone and then pick up reading on the Kindle where I left off, or vice versa.

Kindle has more books available than any other marketplace. I don’t think this is a huge issue if you are buying current best-sellers. Those are probably available on all the platforms. But as someone who reads older books, or more technical obscure titles, then I have a better chance of finding the book at Amazon.

But the biggest reasons I like the Kindle as opposed to some of the other readers is that the Kindle does not have a touchscreen. I don’t want a touchscreen on my ebook reader. I want to be able to touch the screen like the page of a book. I can underline with my finger while reading. I can also hold my finger on the screen while showing a passage to someone else. When looking through the chart of various ebook readers, I purposely choose one that did not have a touchscreen.

I don’t mind if the Kindle 4 has a touchscreen that can be toggled on and off, but I don’t want to be forced to use one. An ebook device will be smaller overall with a touchscreen than without (if the screen size is the same). Look at the Nook Touch to see how much smaller it is than the Kindle because it doesn’t need the keyboard.

I want to touch my ebook screen like a real page without flipping pages or making things pop up while reading.

Please Amazon, don’t make me use a touchscreen on the Kindle 4!