Maybe I’m just too optimistic… I bought a Kindle Oasis. I’m heading over to the British Isles to (hopefully) do a lot of hiking, The Cape Wrath Trail is on the list….( we all want bicycles for Christmas.) So I’ve got a two foot stack of guide books, 5 paper maps that weigh more than a pound (and they cover less than 10% of the routes I’m planning.) I did pay for a year’s access to the UK’s Ordnance Survey online access ($36 US)Â (Excellent mapping, inadequate 19th Century design… but usable. If you weren’t sure I guess I can be a crank.)Â The Cicerone Cape Wrath Book came from Amazon UK. It weighs 8 ounces (just over 7 oz with the vinyl cover removed.) The Skye Trail guide weighs 5.5 ounces…. can you see where this is going? (btw the scale on all the maps seems to be about 1 km/2 cm but nowhere does it say this. I’m a bit slow but when you see a grid on OS maps it’s 1 km. I was adding DIY Scales when I noticed the grid.. so maybe I’m missing something about the Kindle.)
So I found there’s a Kindle version of these guides. Terrific. Using the Kindle Reader on my MacBook Pro and on my 5 year old iPad, it looks great! I can zoom in on the maps that are a strain on my old eyes.
However, on the Top of the Line brand new Kindle Oasis…. the maps are worthless gray blurs. The pdfs I made: some open, some won’t, of those that open, they do zoom in better than the images in the Kindle books, but then they jump around in strange ways and some of the pages won’t load. The maps could be usable, but not if some pages don’t load.
If I’m totally wrong about the Kindle being completely worthless as an alternative map–let me know. Please. I think however it’s okay for text. But even here every gesture you make, every time you try to navigate back to your library–it’s a sales opportunity!
It’s also terrible for big, jumping around guidebooks like the Lonely Planet. I know, I tried going without the heavy printed version for Japan. The Kindle versions of these guidebooks are just as bad on the MacBook and iPad. Total headache navigating to the pages you need today. Going to Kyoto? Do a search and every single reference to Kyoto anywhere in the book shows up. Which ones are the chapter on Kyoto? There’s a small chance you might actually find some of the Found Pages in that particular chapter. Know all that stuff you never ever read? Things to do with kids, high priced hotels, over priced restaurants…? No way around it, you just have to slog through to get to where you want to go. You end up spending most of your time scrolling through this noise (to you) and you still miss the pages you’re looking for. Try searching? You’ll find Jimmy Hoffa sooner.
I’d take the iPad, but it’s just too heavy (and cracked). The new ones aren’t much lighter…. I think people brighter than me just got the larger sized smart phones and use these instead of pads or Kindles.
One thing I have been doing is shooting photos of the pages in guidebooks I can’t possibly carry, I did screen captures from the OS survey maps. (there’s a way to print them out, but I haven’t figured that out yet. So to start mostly I’m screen capturing big local day hikes because these are more area and less linear.) I can view these on my iPhone or MacBook. I’m not violating copyright unless I pass around copies, and it helps my old eyes reading details on the maps.
Kindle? It seemed to have so much promise. It just never got any better. It really hasn’t. I have one that’s a few years old, this one is new? I don’t see any difference.
Thanks for reading. Let me know what you’ve done for maps.
