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The latest version of "look inside" has become super stingy. The default is to show you the first twenty pages or so, then you have to use "Surprise Me", which

The latest version of "look inside" has become super stingy. The default is to show you the first twenty pages or so, then you have to use "Surprise Me", which feeds me one page at a time at some random location, most of the time in the first twenty pages I've already seen. In technical books, that's not enough to get a feel for the actual content. It used to be better, you could read several pages for each "Surprise Me". It's really off-putting. In a bookstore, I can stand there ten minutes and make sure the book is worthwhile. Technical books are expensive. Amazon treats me like a deadbeat, even though I buy lots of books from them.

MrVandemar 4y ago
> The default is to show you the first twenty pages or so, For anything other than a novel, that's usually the least representative sample. That'll give you the copyright, table of contents (admittedly useful) and the Preface and the Introduction and a page with a couple of quotations on it. Not really great to judge the quality of writing / code samples or whatever you're interested in. I always used to use zlib for "flicking through" a book the way you would in a bookshop to see if it was worth buying it.
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  I really, really want to look at table of contents. That should always be available.
Mezzie 4y ago
> It's really off-putting. In a bookstore, I can stand there ten minutes and make sure the book is worthwhile. Technical books are expensive. We have a local chain that sells well curated used books and it's brilliant. Picked up my copy of Godel, Escher, Bach because I saw it on the shelf and flipped through and was like 'Yes, please!'
tzs 4y ago
> The latest version of "look inside" has become super stingy. The default is to show you the first twenty pages or so, then you have to use "Surprise Me" [...] Note that this is only for print editions. For Kindle editions it does not have "Surprise Me". For those "Look Inside" seems to just show you the same sample that you get if you ask it to send a sample to your Kindle. I've found this is often completely useless for music books and math books as the sample doesn't get far enough in to actually have any music or math notation, and it is terrible handling of such notation that often makes an otherwise good Kindle book unreadable. I once bought a Kindle edition of "Proofs from the Book" and it had been produced apparently using OCR which didn't know how to handle anything other than normal letters, digits, and common symbols. Things like integral signs, summation signs, and set relationship symbols showed up as whitespace. Another math book I bought had many of the equations as graphics. Reading on the Kindle app on a computer or tablet was fine. The images were scaled to a reasonable size and were quite readable. On an eInk Kindle however they were not scaled. They were tiny and required more magnification than my best magnifying glass had for me to read them comfortably. I had to tap them to get a menu that would let me show the image full screen. This made reading the book incredibly tedious both from the slowness of the Kindle and only being able to see one equation at a time this way.

MrVandemar 4y ago

> The default is to show you the first twenty pages or so, For anything other than a novel, that's usually the least representative sample. That'll give you the copyright, table of contents (admittedly useful) and the Preface and the Introduction and a page with a couple of quotations on it. Not really great to judge the quality of writing / code samples or whatever you're interested in. I always used to use zlib for "flicking through" a book the way you would in a bookshop to see if it was worth buying it.

KptMarchewa 4y ago
I really, really want to look at table of contents. That should always be available.

Mezzie 4y ago

> It's really off-putting. In a bookstore, I can stand there ten minutes and make sure the book is worthwhile. Technical books are expensive. We have a local chain that sells well curated used books and it's brilliant. Picked up my copy of Godel, Escher, Bach because I saw it on the shelf and flipped through and was like 'Yes, please!'

tzs 4y ago

> The latest version of "look inside" has become super stingy. The default is to show you the first twenty pages or so, then you have to use "Surprise Me" [...] Note that this is only for print editions. For Kindle editions it does not have "Surprise Me". For those "Look Inside" seems to just show you the same sample that you get if you ask it to send a sample to your Kindle. I've found this is often completely useless for music books and math books as the sample doesn't get far enough in to actually have any music or math notation, and it is terrible handling of such notation that often makes an otherwise good Kindle book unreadable. I once bought a Kindle edition of "Proofs from the Book" and it had been produced apparently using OCR which didn't know how to handle anything other than normal letters, digits, and common symbols. Things like integral signs, summation signs, and set relationship symbols showed up as whitespace. Another math book I bought had many of the equations as graphics. Reading on the Kindle app on a computer or tablet was fine. The images were scaled to a reasonable size and were quite readable. On an eInk Kindle however they were not scaled. They were tiny and required more magnification than my best magnifying glass had for me to read them comfortably. I had to tap them to get a menu that would let me show the image full screen. This made reading the book incredibly tedious both from the slowness of the Kindle and only being able to see one equation at a time this way.