The Great Stagnation on Kindle

Yes, I agree with Kevin Drum;

The problem with this is that the Kindle sucks at rendering tables and charts. The screen cap on the right, for example, shows a chart from Tyler's book. As Kindle charts go, it's actually not too bad. But what's on the X-axis? It appears to start with 1455, and obviously the numbers go up. I get the idea. But the actual details are completely lost. Later in the book there's another table so badly rendered that I can't make it out at all.

In the case of "The Great Stagnation," this isn't too big a deal. I know what the chart above is getting at, and the table at the end is one I've seen before. But other nonfiction books don't fare so well. Gregory Clark's Farewell to Alms, for example, relies heavily on lots and lots of fairly complex charts and tables, and they're rendered so badly (unreadable graphs, table columns that don't line up, etc.) and placed so haphazardly that they made the book almost impossible to absorb properly. To this day, I'm not sure if my disagreements with his thesis are real, or mere artifacts of the fact that the e-version of the book was really hard to follow. In any case, that was the book that made me give up on the Kindle entirely for nonfiction. Until now.

Though the Kindle sucks in many ways, it is still a great way to get books for someone in a poor developing country.