I have a big investment in Kindle books and I want to be able to read the technical ones on my PC. WHen I was running Windows 7, this was very effective, although the desktop Kindle app is fully incapable of sorting by recent …
But then I installed Windows 8. And while all of my other applications are running just fine on Windows 8 in Windows 7 mode, the Kindle application is busted completely. I uninstalled it today and went to the Kindle site to pick up the latest desktop version. The Metro version is already on my PC but is extremely limited and seems slow. It cannot search inside the book, either, which makes it a total joke.
So anyway …. I have tried and tried (for months) and today I tested it empirically:
A very few (20% maybe) books download, open, and allow me to read.
About another 20% simply fail to open.
For example Kanban, which I read on my laptop just fine. The laptop version (which should be the same version as on the desktop) even allows search 
But the rest of the books behave even worse. An example is Effective Java, which I just downloaded today (I’m into some heavy coding and I wanted a searchable reference book.) It loads and then shows a spinning cursor for a long time and finally nothing happens. Crap.
The desktop version:
The laptop version:
Isn’t that special … same version. Works perfectly on Windows 7 and works like siht on Windows 8.
Amazon … software professionals generally get this right on a widely deployed platform. Don’t fall into the stupidity trap by assuming we will all use the Metro version, because it is limited in features and the Metro interface has a staggering inability to coexist with Windows 7 applications …
Hopefully Microsoft will wake up and fix their Metro integration to act more like parallels or fusion for those of us who want basically Windows (PC) behavior and not Metro (pad) behavior … but in the meantime just make the darned thing work properly …
Update: I got the brilliant idea to run the old desktop Kindle in compatibility mode for Windows 7. Should work a charm, no?
No. After going through the wizards twice and getting nowhere, I let it report the problem to Microsoft and search for a solution, and this is what it came back with.
How underwhelming.
