eReader: Cloud Kindle Notes

[Content Note: Potential Privacy Invasion]

Amazon doesn't really advertise it well (or at least not so far as I can tell), so I only just found out about this about a month ago, but you can access all your Kindle notes online from a personalized kindle.amazon.com page. This is obviously pretty swanky, given that I do a lot of posts based on the things I read and highlight, and it's nice to be able to neatly copy-pasta from the cloud anywhere instead of having to boot up the Kindle desktop app, download the relevant book, and navigate to the highlight. Yay for cloud-based top-level views that let me drill down to my highlights in a reasonably timely fashion. I'm actually really pleased with this.

I'm also somewhat pleased with the ability to share your profile and follow other peoples', which is why I'm sharing the link to my own profile both here and permanently in the About Ana blog page. What I'm way less enthused by is that apparently it's an Amazon default to mark all purchased and even wishlist-ed books as "public" for people to view on your profile and it's up to you to go into the system and turn books off individually. That's a stupid default for lots of obvious privacy and marginalization reasons, and I really hope there's a way to change it somewhere in a setting I haven't found, because privacy should be the system default, not a constant opt-in chore for the customer.

So if you've purchased any books from Amazon -- eBook or otherwise -- I recommend checking the kindle.amazon.com link above to see (a) if they made a profile for you and (b) if it has anything public that you'd rather not be. And then you might want to contact Amazon Help (there's a Contact Us button on the lower right) and ask them to make privacy the default behavior of the system. (You don't have to sign in to send a phone call or email.)

Aside from that, though, it's a nice feature and I like it.