The price is a bargain. I did not have any issues with indexing or finding the Table of Contents (another review covered this). This is the first Kindle book with multiple stories that I purchased. I never gave it any thought before, but personally I like to know the length of a story before I start reading. On single books in Kindle you can see your percentage read, your location and the location number for the end of book location. With this particular compilation of books I have no idea how long a story is or where I am in that story. I do not know if other book compilations have the same issue or not, but for me this is a negative.
Easy to navigate, easy to read, amazingly complete content for the price
First I want to address some of the negative comments made by other reviews - comments that don't prove to be true in my experience.
1. Table of Contents - This edition, as advertised, does come with a fully functional interactive Table of Contents. The only problem - an extremely minor one that isn't uncommon with Kindle books - is that "Table of Contents" is grayed out on the Kindle's "Go To" menu. As I've discovered before, that doesn't mean there isn't an interactive Table of Contents. In this case, all you have to do to find it is Go to _Cover_, press "Next Page" just once and the Table of Contents appears - on the second screen in the book. Once I found it, I bookmarked it for future use. Cursoring through the Table of Contents using the 5-way control produced the small "pointing finger" icon and once the finger is pointing at the desired article, pressing down on the 5-way immediately takes me right to the very article. The T of C is lengthy, but it's text searchable.
2. The Font - No way is the font Courier, which is a monospace font. In fact, it's the very same proportionally spaced font used for the vast majority of books I've read on Kindle to date (over 200). It's the font that the Oxford American Dictionary native to the Kindle 2 uses. I find that font to be perfectly pleasant to read and I can't imagine why anyone would object to it.
3. Extra White Space Between Paragraphs - Yes, there seems to be one extra line of white space between paragraphs. It's nothing I haven't seen before reading books on the Kindle. At worst, it means that, in the course of reading a book, I might have to press the "Next Page" button more times than if there were only one line of white space between paragraphs. So far, my button-pushing finger doesn't seem to be damaged on account of it. In fact, I simply think it's a typesetting consideration. Some books indent paragraphs, some don't. When indented, some books indent the first line more than others. Some books skip a single line between paragraphs, some skip two lines. So what? It doesn't interfere with reading in the least bit.
4. Searching the Text - At first, when I tried to search for a given text string, I received that error message saying that the book was not yet indexed and to try later. I've run into that before with a book on Kindle when I've opened it for the first time. But, after reading a while, after turning the pages a number of times, that problem cleared up with this book - as it has with other books in the past. I think that, with some books, the Kindle isn't immediately synchronized to the searchable text, but at some point, synchronization occurs and, once it does, there are no further problems. So, read for a bit, and you'll find everything is copacetic when it comes to searching the text.
5. Omissions of Certain TwainWorks - Perhaps some things are missing. Me, I haven't noticed any. What I have noticed is that this book offers just about everything Samuel Clemens wrote as Mark Twain, all his novels, short stories, essays, magazine articles and personal correspondence. If anything is missing, I don't think it's very much and for $2.99, it's an amazing bargain, considering that it is fully functional and not hard to read.
My one complaint is that there are typographical errors of the sort that occur when a print edition is optically scanned to electronic format. The percentage of those errors is small and, again, for $2.99, I'm willing to overlook those errors. It's generally not too hard to figure out what the correct word should be - "the" instead of "he," for example, or "shoe" instead of "shot." That's the sort of random spelling error I've noticed in this publication. Considering that there are thousands of pages of Mark Twain in this volume for all of $2.99, however, I'm inclined not to complain about the occasional typographical error.
In sum, the book's an incredible bargain, and it's very functional with its interactive Table of Contents, very readable with a perfectly decent font, serviceably formatted as to paragraphs, fully searchable as to text, very complete as to content, and amazingly well priced at $2.99.
based on 11 reviews
