Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

First I want to address some of the negative comments made by other reviewers - 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. I note that on my Kindle 3, I have a choice of three fonts if I don't like the native one. 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 one less 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 or perhaps due to optical scanning of a print edition. I've seen the extra space before. So what? What's an extra line of white space between paragraphs? 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 Twain Works - Yes, "Letters from the Earth" is missing from this "complete" omnibus edition. The fact is, Twain's one surviving daughter, Clara Clemens, who controlled her father's literary estate until her death in 1962, withheld publication for fear people might be offended by the work. She changed her mind in 1960 and agreed to allow its publication only after her death. So "Letters from the Earth" was first published in 1962 and will remain under copyright until 2032 at the earliest, so it could not be included in this very inexpensive omnibus edition. Royalties would have to be paid to include it and that's just not possible for something that sells for $2.99 per copy. 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 very small and, again, for $2.99, I'm willing to overlook those errors. It's generally not too hard to figure out from context 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 -- they're relative few and pretty far between. In sum, the book's an incredible bargain, and it's very functional with its interactive Table of Contents (once you find it on the second screen), very readable with a perfectly decent proportionally spaced font, serviceably formatted as to paragraphs, fully searchable as to text, pretty much complete as to content, and amazingly well priced at $2.99.