Why the Kindle Is Losing Me

I really loved my Kindle when I first got it. I love writing books, and I'm for anything that helps people consume and purchase more of them-- I don't care if I make a fraction of the royalties off electronic sales. I was especially struck by how much I wished I'd had a Kindle in college. As a literature major I read about five books a week, not to mention all the textbook reading for other courses. There were so many great touches in the UI that elevated the experience from just putting a book on a screen. There's the Kindle store and its friction-free, one-click purchases from anywhere, say, a cafe the night before the exam when you still haven't bought the book. There's the freedom from lugging around a heavy backpack of books. And there are so many features that are designed specifically for collegiate reading like the ability to easily highlight, annotate, store those annotations in a specific file, and be able to easily search around within the book and find certain quotes or passages. I thought, this isn't a beautiful piece of hardware, but it is clearly designed by someone who knows high-volume readers. So how the hell is it possible that the Kindle doesn't have a feature as obvious as page numbers?