I just had a conversation about this last friday with a coworker. We both basically came to the conclusion that the only e-books that work are prose-oriented, not learning-oriented.
With your average novel, you only read from beginning to end, and you only read words. With a textbook, you not only read words, but you read diagrams and figures. You also skip around...you follow footnotes, references, and you also might follow a curricula that was not defined by the author. You will often refer to two or three different hotspots while studying a single chapter...for example, while working on practice problems, you will flip back and forth between the practice problems, the chapter intro, the context for that problem, and possibly a chapter recap.
This user-adoption gap is not one of the underlying medium, but rather of the user interface. Flipping pages one at a time is not sufficient.
There are tons of text features that suck or are absent in ebooks. Even footnotes aren't great, let alone things like facing-page translation—or anything else that relies on two pages being visible side by side at once, which is quite a bit if you're reading much outside of mass-market fiction. Plus, yeah, diagrams, figures, et c.
Poetry often blows in ebook form. A good paper book of poetry has a lot of care put in to precise placement of the text, and it can add a lot to the experience. Ebooks can't do that. Really, any book that benefits from fixed page boundaries has similar problems.
Even one of ebooks' big advantages, full-text search, is worse than using an index unless either 1) you need to search for something that's not in the index, or 2) you're on a device with a full, real keyboard, so not a tablet or eink device.
Ebooks are also very expensive and there's no used market—I'd effectively have to pay ~3x what I did to assemble my physical book collection to replace it with ebooks, provided there were an ebook version for all my dead-trees (not the case). It'd be even worse if most of my books were common paperbacks (the thing ebooks are best at replacing) since you can pick those up for next to nothing if you keep an eye out. 10x the cost to take such a collection digital, I'd imagine.
That seems abundantly obvious to me. I've been a fairly avid fan of Kindles for about 4 years, but I've never even considered reading a textbook, programming book, or reference book in that format. All I have ever read on my Kindles are novels, comedy, popular science, and biographies, all of which are very prose-oriented and linear. One pop econ book I read recently had a lot of endnotes, which was admittedly a bit annoying, but I don't think it would be significantly less annoying than a physical book with a lot of endnotes. Luckily the endnotes were not very crucial to the text.
I have purchased several physical books from Amazon and chuckled seeing them offered for Kindle. The most recent examples were a large and dense musical theory book that's very reference-oriented and has a lot of diagrams, and a book of Bay Area hiking spots that is obviously very map-oriented and meant to be thumbed through. I can't imagine using either on an e-reader.
I wish I knew more details about what sorts of material they were having these young people read, but I suspect it was largely not prose-oriented.
> We both basically came to the conclusion that the only e-books that work are prose-oriented, not learning-oriented.
Completely agreed. E-books are great for linear text, but the moment you have any kind of cross-referencing it falls apart (even footnotes are troublesome; why can't footnotes be display inline?) Most importantly, they lack discovery; it's a lot harder to flip to a random page.
That said, I have started reading a programming Apple iBooks textbook [1] and I find the format great because it's interactive and because [edit: in principle...] you can copy and paste code snippets directly. In this sense, I think it's actually a lot better than its paper counterpart–but perhaps coding books are a niche (and, I'm sure, some would argue that having to re-type code yourself is a worthwhile exercise in its own right).
I agree, if by "eBook" we mean only the specific formats (ePub, PDF, mobi). But I'd argue that you can have all if you make a website instead, and read it on a browser. You can then have multiple tabs, bookmarks, large pages with fast scrolling, etc.
And an epub is just a collection of HTML files anyway, so it shouldn't be difficult to make a website instead. I think what's missing is a "website archive format" supported by all major browsers, so the user can have an offline copy of the "book".
> I just had a conversation about this last friday with a coworker. We both basically came to the conclusion that the only e-books that work are prose-oriented, not learning-oriented.
To me, this is precisely backwards.
I would LOVE to have all my technical library in e-book form where I could easily reference it on a tablet instead of the 4 bookshelves and 42 boxes that it sits in.
I never need my entertainment book on a tablet.
In addition, e-readers are still too slow for me. I can flip a page faster than anything renders. This is STUPID given the vast amounts of processing power we have but continues to hold true.
The only time paper books become easier to use than paper books for me is when the book makes extensive use of really fine print in tables or has extremely long lines of monospace text such as badly written source code.
The resolution of an iPad Mini 3 or iPad Air is sufficient to render all the technical books I use quite adequately.
eInk devices do not have the resolution and screen size required for comfortable technical reading. With "Retina" displays on a decent form factor, magic happens.
I use the iBooks reader almost exclusively since it has very good note-taking and place marking tools.
The only thing iBooks can't handle is position sensitive layout, such as some "art" books which rely on specific typography and layout for conceptual flow. PDF can handle some of this, but if the format is not exactly the same as the iPad screen we're back into "I can tell I'm reading a PDF on an iPad" territory rather than "I'm reading a book".
The Kindle is optimised for flowed text. Of course it is painful for technical books.
Came here to say about the same thing. For regular reading I don't care the medium but will pick ebook most of the time so that I have it everywhere I go and can read a chapter or two in the waiting room on my phone and pick up on my tablet later that night. For text books I have yet to see a good digital interface to them, mainly due to not being able to quickly jump between sections/pages. Maybe an interface where I can "cut" out parts of pages and organize them all on a digital corkboard is closer to what I imagine as "the best" way but still I'd pick book over ebook. The one other thing I will say is that I did get ebooks instead of textbooks a number of times in college because it was cheaper and I was told ahead of time that we either never or rarely use the book (but had to prove we got it or lose points in the class).
With a couple of books I reference often, I've bought the physical version after already having the e-book one. It really makes such a difference.
On the other hand, the convenience of looking for a book online, being able to choose one or a couple, and having it in your e-reader after a few minutes is also something not to discard.
I have to ask: how much of this do you think is because of the digital format, vs how much of it is because the digital format doesn't support certain physical book methods we use?
The two that come to mind are post-it notes and flipping through the book. If, perhaps, I could press and hold my finger one end of a tablet to flip through it, maybe it would make them more suitable. Also, perhaps if bookmarks I made in the book were always visible at the top of the reader, it would also make it more suitable.
It might even be useful to make the application present a 3d view of a real book based upon the orientation of the device. That way I could angle it to find roughly how deep within the book a bookmark is.
One could and should argue that reading and learning from webpages is an e-book. All the stuff you mentioned about skipping around, footnotes, following references, are all things that were solved with HTML. It's just that the current state of 'ebooks' have regressed and using their own formats.
So if they learn and read from websites then they are learning from ebooks. I think they would prefer to have the internet than to have paper books.
How about on a tablet? I admit, I don't really like reading a screen (I do love me some e-ink for novels, though). I've found for things that require flipping back and forth (think DFW foot-notes) that an iPad Mini has an intuitive enough interface that I don't find it cumbersome. I think the real challenge is making the ebooks not just text, but interactive. That is, ebooks should add value to the text, not just reproduce it in a different format.
I agree -- the need to flip back and forth ruins ebook readers for technical material. There's a similar problem for writing notes on the page. They allow it, but clumsily.
But it seems like a solvable problem: there should be some brilliant user interface that makes it easy, it's just that no one has found it yet. And I'm not sure it's even possible on the classic Kindle (the epaper one), where each view update is clunky.
I guess I'm an outlier because I can't stand to read my academic stuff on paper. Just the ability to search for a specific word makes it so much easier than trying to figure out if something is in an index, if it might be in the index but using a different term, or any of a bunch of other reasons why indexes are not enough.
I don't know about you guys but my Kindle paper white shows footnotes in a pop-up dialog box. No page fumbling. I thought DFW's books were great on Kindle.
But yes, learning-oriented Ebooks I always read on my laptop. Nothing can compete with the power of cmnd/ctrl+F and multiple windows IMO.
I feel the complete opposite for all of the college textbooks I've used (although all of my textbooks are filled with problems rather than readings).
Using a laptop or e-reader to read textbooks is awesome for a couple of reasons. First off, having multiple textbooks doesn't weigh anything, and I can carry them around at all times. Secondly, when doing assignments and the like, I can bookmark the answer section in the back, and flip back and forth between questions and answers arguably faster than I could with a paper book. Finally, the best part of electronic books is the ability to search through it. Every definition in the book is a Ctrl+F away.
So maybe reading books electronically isn't as great when you're doing a lot of actual reading, but in my experience using more math/science textbooks, electronic wins out every time.
I agree textbooks on a laptop are really great - no heavy books, and Ctrl+F works really well. I can't imagine they work very well on e-readers though - it seems like flipping through pages would be slow, and ctrl+f would be pretty difficult without a real keyboard.
You need to have multiple copies open at the same time if you want to refer to different parts at the same time.
Ctrl+f is great, but you end up losing the part of the book you were at before you started searching. So basically I needed to have 4 copies open at a time. 3 for different parts of the book I needed to refer to and one for searching. This made the actual size of the text way too small on a laptop screen.
Some of the problems could probably be solved with bookmarking software, but then you have to remember where each bookmark is instead of glancing at it.
So true about math/science books. I think they work for a lot of fiction reading too, you just have to set adaptive brightness or change to a darker background to avoid strain.
I think the biggest problem is we are getting e-books that are just digital representations of physical books. I'm learning music theory right now and it would be great if the book I'm following was an app with animated examples to re-enforce the concepts.
I'm also imagining the time I first saw the animated unit circle gif (years after trig class):
If that was in my "e-textbook", I think some concepts would be easier to explain. I think we are sitting at just the cusp of what "e-books" in school should be. They shouldn't just be for words, but for conceptual learning in a school setting.
You seem to be describing web pages. In ~20 years they've had little success in replacing textbooks.
Since they're so obviously superior for that purpose, I can only assume it's because there's not enough money in it for one reason or another.
Seems like some sort of free multimedia web textbooks resource would be a great way to spend public money helping some of those unemployed/underemployed professional scholars and scientists that are often covered on HN. Shouldn't even cost much, as government education expenditures go.
I agree with this. And as an author and teacher, I really want to use iBooks Author for that reason, but it's incredibly limited in both what it allows and who can use the books. There's an opportunity for an authoring tool for these kinds of books where media can be easily managed, and interactivity can be easily integrated.
ePub has some potential, but again, the e-readers handle it poorly in my experience.
What options and tools are out there to solve this problem? I've looked at SCORM, I've hacked some web page stuff together, but those all seem to require you to sit in front of an actual computer, not in a self-contained book format. Some friends of mine have done amazing things with iBooks Author, but the reach is very narrow from what I can tell.
Which book are you reading, out of curiosity? I recently bought Harmonic Experience, the physical book, and thought it was funny that it is even offered in the Kindle format.
(By the way, it's not at all an introductory or comprehensive music theory book. It's about the history of harmony, temperament systems, and psychoacoustics.)
"In the United States, e-books are less expensive. Students will say, “I’d like to have the print version, but the electronic version is so much less expensive.” But if you buy a book used, the publisher and the author are not getting any money but they are getting another reader and they’re not cutting another tree. And the cost is less. And if it goes to a third generation the cost is really less."
That's a nice sentiment but there were a bunch of books in college that purposely changed portions from year to year to kill to resale market. Some profs were cool and researched what sections/questions would be so that you could use one of the 3 editions available but others didn't care.
I was happy to get all some of my books in digital form in grad school. Preparing for finals was so much easier.
'they say they get distracted, pulled away to other things.'
This is probably the biggest draw away from e-readers for me and the reason I gave up on them.
For prose, Amazon's Kindle achieved the right form factor, battery life, display combo many iterations ago for me; but I seemingly can't handle having so much information available with a button press. It's just too little effort.
It's one of those oddities of being human, I feel. It seems perfectly possible in theory to learn about a complex field fairly rapidly by simply using Wikipedia and Google, but in practice the discipline required to not wander off-topic I find impossible to manage.
The sort of semi-procrastination that occurs when you're still being productive (because you're still learning), but you realise that you've gone from studying waveforms to ventricular fibrillation.
The thing that's so strange about it to me is that books themselves are alien concepts, there's nothing inherent about them - humans chugged along for millenia without them. Yet somehow, clicking off of an e-book for 'just a few seconds' to look something up seems to function differently to, say, closing one book and opening another.
I've also seemingly paradoxically found that scarcity seems to have a dramatic effect on this.
Immersion, the sense of losing hours to a good book (or a good movie, or video game, etcetera) I seem to find more difficult as availability increases. There's a constant nagging feeling that I could be making better use of that time, that perhaps the next book on Gutenberg would be 'better' (whatever that means).
It's very difficult to really pin down why that is. If I were fantastically wealthy and could buy books by the truckload without even thinking about it, would I feel detached from them all in the same way?
We need a comparison of print, pdf and epub. PDF can retain print layout and typography, which makes a big difference in aesthetics. EPUB still needs work from device makers, to honor embedded fonts.
When the flexible eink screen from the 13" Sony Digital Paper goes mainstream with a bluetooth keyboard and Android clones, students can have access to a large yet lightweight device for reading PDF+epub, handwritten annotations and typed notes.
I travel a lot around the world, so I digitalized my entire library, University notes, everything...
I used a Fujitsu ScanSnap(amazing scanner with automatic feeder) to digitalized them using a Wood saw to cut the back of the books. I stored them in boxes in a locker room.
I love it because I control it. I could analyze my documents, I could index them, I could organize them as I want. I could mark them too on my tablet.
Much better than paper.
But most people can't do it(each of my kids going with a USD400 device to school sounds ridiculous to me). A tablet is expensive just for reading, and more expensive if you are going to add an active pen, like I use.
What is quite shocking is that the device I use the most for reading is a new 55 inches LG OLED screen, rotated 90 degrees. I use software that converts black over white "paper" to green on black.
Einks are slow, very bad resolution, monocrome(exchanging resolutions for tones using halftoning), and very small screen.
If only Qualcomm Mirasol or other technologies were cheaper it will be totally different. Not ready yet for the mass market.
> What is quite shocking is that the device I use the most for reading is a new 55 inches LG OLED screen, rotated 90 degrees.
Is that because you prefer to focus at a longer distance?
> I love it because I control it. I could analyze my documents, I could index them, I could organize them as I want. I could mark them too on my tablet.
Do you store them as PDFs? What software do you use for indexing/ocr?
>found a near-universal preference for print, especially for serious reading
Is this really any surprise for "serious reading"? Reading a textbook, especially one with lots of graphs, charts, figures, etc., is miserable on an e-reader. I suppose I always assumed that pleasure reading was the most popular use case for an e-reader. Maybe I'm way off.
EDIT: while muddling through this in my brain, I realized that I've been mentally defining e-readers as E-Ink readers.
This finding is not surprising and is a result of shortsightedness by technology companies, IMHO. They placed more importance in video games, multimedia than the simple readability of texts. First, they moved away from antiglare, matte screens. They favor flashy, shiny highly reflect displays, which show shiny videos and images very well, can are subpar compared to matte screens when reading in different lighting conditions. Second, they put less money in developing technologies similar to the Kindle readers, which prioritize reading.
I am sick and tired of reading reviews of devices based on their ability to watch videos and play games. I want to get things done. I want screens that do not reflect. I want screens on which I can read comfortably in different lighting situations. Give me those.
Well, yes, if you force people to use today's college ebooks. I made the mistake of buying ebooks a year ago. The ones I got forced me to use proprietary crap-ware that hardly worked, let alone worked the way I wanted. Eventually, I downloaded illegal PDF copies of the print versions of the books (that I legitimately paid for!) Using simple PDFs and an iPad was a dream come true. I can't imagine anything better for large, technical textbooks. Unfortunately, the legit offerings from text book companies don't even come close.
Honestly, I'm inclined to look sideways at this article. The college text book industry is just too entrenched and future-phobic for me not to believe that special interests funded these findings.
"They run out of battery, they hurt your eyes, they don’t work in the bath."
None of that is practically true.
The Kindle can run out of battery but lets face it it lasts weeks so you just need to remember to charge it occasionally. It is unlikely to die on you like a mobile phone.
I am not sure what they mean by hurt your eyes, but the ability to change the font size and still have convenient paging is brilliant. With a paper book you have to don your 2x non-prescription glasses I guess.
And they do work with the operator in the bath, and the eReader just above the surface. Just keep the window open so it isn't too steamy, and have a table ready for when you want to put the reader down (stop reading once your toes start to wrinkle!).
Oddly enough, my mother started having problems with eye strain with her Kindle a couple months back. She switched to a high DPI tablet and says it is easier for her. Rather odd since it goes against everything I think I know about eInk versus LCD, but the end user is always right!
I'm suprised that no one's mentioned this yet, but I've found that even for linear prose-text, my recall of what I've read is much better with paper books than with ebooks.
My working hypothesis for why this is true is that it's easily the mentally differentiate the paper books I've read: when I try to remember a book, often the first thing that comes up in my mind is the cover art. My mental records of paper books are indexed by a multitude of factors---what the cover looked like, what the paper felt like, approximate size, typeface, etc.---that just aren't there for ebooks
At first I was going to agree with this statement; however, I hate carrying all of my textbooks around, and if I have the e-book of the text that means I saved a lot of money. I do love reading paper books, you cannot replace the feeling of holding a paper book in your hands. It is something that I love about paper books. But I really do love the fact that I can have all 5 of my text books in one device that weighs less than any text book I am currently carrying around.
Last semester I had all E-Books and I was able to bring them all with me at work, and I was also able to read them while sitting in my work truck in the dark. This semester I do not have any E-Books and two of my text books are fairly large. Which really sucks, because I hate having a heavy back pack.
All around I do love having E-Books, on the Kindle I can slide back and forth to different sections, high light the pages and everything I do with paper books. I also take notes on paper as I go along with the E-Book, it really helps me to remember certain parts.
I am saying this at the beginning of the semester though, I might change where I stand but I currently love E-books, except when the battery runs out I hate the thing haha. Who wouldn't love to have 6 major textbooks on one device?
1) Hardware interface: People here are conflating hardware interfaces (e.g., on Kindles) with the data medium (e.g., paper or ebook). For serious knowledge work, such as studying, of course a large screen area (such as dual 22" monitors) and good input (such as a full-sized keyboard) are essential. I think the question is, in that environment, which data medium is better
2) Software interface: How much is an issue of basic interface design. Paper book interfaces have been perfected over centuries; ebook interfaces are still immature. With the right interface, could ebooks exceed paper?
3) Does anyone know if ebook formats combine these capabilities:
* I own the data; it's not licensed to me.
* Open formats, so the book is readable 20 years from now, including the annotations (see below)
* Annotation: I can add notes and associate them with specific locations in the text.
Love digital text. The find command saves me so much time than flipping and skimming.
Books with a lot of charts and graphs, it's a hassle even in print. Figuring out the placement so relavent text and visuals can be displayed on a single page would be better, and it would be easier to experiment with the format digitally.
It took me several years before I made the cognitive switch to preferring eBooks for large, complex, dynamically accessed textbooks over the paper variant. For the first few years I actually couldn't stand trying to read stuff on my laptop versus a nice healthy paper text book (of which I have about 4 boxes that I've incredibly carefully curated down from around 10 boxes). And even attempting to read them on the crappy kindle technology and laggy ipads just sucked beyond belief circa late 2010. It was probably around 2012/2013 that they became my preferred platform on Laptops. Two things probably changed things - SSDs became commonplace, so load times were instant, and, EPUB/CHM readers got a lot betters - allowing quick hotkey movement back/forth. Now, laptops work great - but tablets (in particular, everything I've tried on the iPad), still lags horribly for textbook reading (though they are great for longform prose - I devour books on my iPad - but it's not clear that the iPad is any better for reading fiction books for me than my iPhone - and I suspect the iPhone 6+ is going to replace reading on both in short form for everything except magazines/comics).
Recently, I purchased the Oreilly 5th Edition "Learning Python" and almost laughed. (A) The book is entirely infeasible to bring with you on a trip, (B) I actually had a hard time navigating it, compared to the electronic version which gives me the quickly navigated TOC on the side.
And, the deal breaker - I carry about 30 commonly used textbooks with me on 9 month+ international engagements, all the time in which I'm constantly moving from country to country. It's hard (but I guess possible) to imagine how I might do that with physical textbooks (Just keep shipping them to the hotels I'm next moving to, and hope I'm there long enough to meet up with them).
But I can think of no conceivable scenario in which I could be using these textbooks on the 22 Hour+ flights that I frequently take.
I'm willing to wager I'll never use a physical textbook again.
> There are two big issues. The first was they say they get distracted, pulled away to other things. The second had to do with eye strain and headaches and physical discomfort.
These problems may be common with laptops and tablets, but e-readers fix that. You can't get distracted if the device is only capable of reading books, and e-ink screens offer far less eyestrain than typical LCDs.
Personally, I would say that I prefer reading print books over ebooks, but I vastly prefer reading ebooks on an e-reader over reading them on a different device. I also have almost no shelf space, so being able to store hundreds of books on my device is a great benefit. I get print copies of my favorite books, but in general I use the e-reader for everything else.
This is what I don't like about this headline and study. It seems to conflate pretty easily iPads/tablets and "ereaders", because it doesn't look like they only tested e-ink ereaders, but "ebook readers", and many use iPads for reading ebooks. That's how they got the eye strain.
We'll know the solution is near at hand when there's a satisfying way to represent a book like "House of Leaves" (colored words, intentionally blank/sideways/mirrored pages, backwards text, and other typographic mischief) or "Gödel Escher Bach" (diagrams, puzzles embedded in formatting, messages riffing self-referentially on the medium in which they're represented). This is apparently a long way off, given that after all these years, the Kindle hasn't even evolved to the point where it can render a page without what is often sparse and uncomely full justification (to the best of my knowledge).
[+] [-] saosebastiao|11 years ago|reply
With your average novel, you only read from beginning to end, and you only read words. With a textbook, you not only read words, but you read diagrams and figures. You also skip around...you follow footnotes, references, and you also might follow a curricula that was not defined by the author. You will often refer to two or three different hotspots while studying a single chapter...for example, while working on practice problems, you will flip back and forth between the practice problems, the chapter intro, the context for that problem, and possibly a chapter recap.
This user-adoption gap is not one of the underlying medium, but rather of the user interface. Flipping pages one at a time is not sufficient.
[+] [-] ashark|11 years ago|reply
Poetry often blows in ebook form. A good paper book of poetry has a lot of care put in to precise placement of the text, and it can add a lot to the experience. Ebooks can't do that. Really, any book that benefits from fixed page boundaries has similar problems.
Even one of ebooks' big advantages, full-text search, is worse than using an index unless either 1) you need to search for something that's not in the index, or 2) you're on a device with a full, real keyboard, so not a tablet or eink device.
Ebooks are also very expensive and there's no used market—I'd effectively have to pay ~3x what I did to assemble my physical book collection to replace it with ebooks, provided there were an ebook version for all my dead-trees (not the case). It'd be even worse if most of my books were common paperbacks (the thing ebooks are best at replacing) since you can pick those up for next to nothing if you keep an eye out. 10x the cost to take such a collection digital, I'd imagine.
[+] [-] baddox|11 years ago|reply
I have purchased several physical books from Amazon and chuckled seeing them offered for Kindle. The most recent examples were a large and dense musical theory book that's very reference-oriented and has a lot of diagrams, and a book of Bay Area hiking spots that is obviously very map-oriented and meant to be thumbed through. I can't imagine using either on an e-reader.
I wish I knew more details about what sorts of material they were having these young people read, but I suspect it was largely not prose-oriented.
[+] [-] Osmium|11 years ago|reply
Completely agreed. E-books are great for linear text, but the moment you have any kind of cross-referencing it falls apart (even footnotes are troublesome; why can't footnotes be display inline?) Most importantly, they lack discovery; it's a lot harder to flip to a random page.
That said, I have started reading a programming Apple iBooks textbook [1] and I find the format great because it's interactive and because [edit: in principle...] you can copy and paste code snippets directly. In this sense, I think it's actually a lot better than its paper counterpart–but perhaps coding books are a niche (and, I'm sure, some would argue that having to re-type code yourself is a worthwhile exercise in its own right).
[1] http://scenekitbook.com
[+] [-] icebraining|11 years ago|reply
And an epub is just a collection of HTML files anyway, so it shouldn't be difficult to make a website instead. I think what's missing is a "website archive format" supported by all major browsers, so the user can have an offline copy of the "book".
[+] [-] bsder|11 years ago|reply
To me, this is precisely backwards.
I would LOVE to have all my technical library in e-book form where I could easily reference it on a tablet instead of the 4 bookshelves and 42 boxes that it sits in.
I never need my entertainment book on a tablet.
In addition, e-readers are still too slow for me. I can flip a page faster than anything renders. This is STUPID given the vast amounts of processing power we have but continues to hold true.
[+] [-] manicdee|11 years ago|reply
The resolution of an iPad Mini 3 or iPad Air is sufficient to render all the technical books I use quite adequately.
eInk devices do not have the resolution and screen size required for comfortable technical reading. With "Retina" displays on a decent form factor, magic happens.
I use the iBooks reader almost exclusively since it has very good note-taking and place marking tools.
The only thing iBooks can't handle is position sensitive layout, such as some "art" books which rely on specific typography and layout for conceptual flow. PDF can handle some of this, but if the format is not exactly the same as the iPad screen we're back into "I can tell I'm reading a PDF on an iPad" territory rather than "I'm reading a book".
The Kindle is optimised for flowed text. Of course it is painful for technical books.
[+] [-] joshstrange|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danmaz74|11 years ago|reply
On the other hand, the convenience of looking for a book online, being able to choose one or a couple, and having it in your e-reader after a few minutes is also something not to discard.
[+] [-] sbov|11 years ago|reply
The two that come to mind are post-it notes and flipping through the book. If, perhaps, I could press and hold my finger one end of a tablet to flip through it, maybe it would make them more suitable. Also, perhaps if bookmarks I made in the book were always visible at the top of the reader, it would also make it more suitable.
It might even be useful to make the application present a 3d view of a real book based upon the orientation of the device. That way I could angle it to find roughly how deep within the book a bookmark is.
[+] [-] dalore|11 years ago|reply
So if they learn and read from websites then they are learning from ebooks. I think they would prefer to have the internet than to have paper books.
[+] [-] intopieces|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SilasX|11 years ago|reply
But it seems like a solvable problem: there should be some brilliant user interface that makes it easy, it's just that no one has found it yet. And I'm not sure it's even possible on the classic Kindle (the epaper one), where each view update is clunky.
[+] [-] jccalhoun|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CompanyLaser|11 years ago|reply
But yes, learning-oriented Ebooks I always read on my laptop. Nothing can compete with the power of cmnd/ctrl+F and multiple windows IMO.
[+] [-] thrownaway2424|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexland|11 years ago|reply
Using a laptop or e-reader to read textbooks is awesome for a couple of reasons. First off, having multiple textbooks doesn't weigh anything, and I can carry them around at all times. Secondly, when doing assignments and the like, I can bookmark the answer section in the back, and flip back and forth between questions and answers arguably faster than I could with a paper book. Finally, the best part of electronic books is the ability to search through it. Every definition in the book is a Ctrl+F away.
So maybe reading books electronically isn't as great when you're doing a lot of actual reading, but in my experience using more math/science textbooks, electronic wins out every time.
[+] [-] xur17|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lqdc13|11 years ago|reply
Ctrl+f is great, but you end up losing the part of the book you were at before you started searching. So basically I needed to have 4 copies open at a time. 3 for different parts of the book I needed to refer to and one for searching. This made the actual size of the text way too small on a laptop screen.
Some of the problems could probably be solved with bookmarking software, but then you have to remember where each bookmark is instead of glancing at it.
[+] [-] ecspike|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vlunkr|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lbotos|11 years ago|reply
I'm also imagining the time I first saw the animated unit circle gif (years after trig class):
http://i.stack.imgur.com/1oSJw.gif
If that was in my "e-textbook", I think some concepts would be easier to explain. I think we are sitting at just the cusp of what "e-books" in school should be. They shouldn't just be for words, but for conceptual learning in a school setting.
[+] [-] ashark|11 years ago|reply
Since they're so obviously superior for that purpose, I can only assume it's because there's not enough money in it for one reason or another.
Seems like some sort of free multimedia web textbooks resource would be a great way to spend public money helping some of those unemployed/underemployed professional scholars and scientists that are often covered on HN. Shouldn't even cost much, as government education expenditures go.
[+] [-] bphogan|11 years ago|reply
ePub has some potential, but again, the e-readers handle it poorly in my experience.
What options and tools are out there to solve this problem? I've looked at SCORM, I've hacked some web page stuff together, but those all seem to require you to sit in front of an actual computer, not in a self-contained book format. Some friends of mine have done amazing things with iBooks Author, but the reach is very narrow from what I can tell.
[+] [-] baddox|11 years ago|reply
(By the way, it's not at all an introductory or comprehensive music theory book. It's about the history of harmony, temperament systems, and psychoacoustics.)
http://www.amazon.com/Harmonic-Experience-Harmony-Natural-Ex...
[+] [-] ecspike|11 years ago|reply
That's a nice sentiment but there were a bunch of books in college that purposely changed portions from year to year to kill to resale market. Some profs were cool and researched what sections/questions would be so that you could use one of the 3 editions available but others didn't care.
I was happy to get all some of my books in digital form in grad school. Preparing for finals was so much easier.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] stegosaurus|11 years ago|reply
This is probably the biggest draw away from e-readers for me and the reason I gave up on them.
For prose, Amazon's Kindle achieved the right form factor, battery life, display combo many iterations ago for me; but I seemingly can't handle having so much information available with a button press. It's just too little effort.
It's one of those oddities of being human, I feel. It seems perfectly possible in theory to learn about a complex field fairly rapidly by simply using Wikipedia and Google, but in practice the discipline required to not wander off-topic I find impossible to manage.
The sort of semi-procrastination that occurs when you're still being productive (because you're still learning), but you realise that you've gone from studying waveforms to ventricular fibrillation.
The thing that's so strange about it to me is that books themselves are alien concepts, there's nothing inherent about them - humans chugged along for millenia without them. Yet somehow, clicking off of an e-book for 'just a few seconds' to look something up seems to function differently to, say, closing one book and opening another.
Reminds me of the Doorway Effect.
[+] [-] stegosaurus|11 years ago|reply
Immersion, the sense of losing hours to a good book (or a good movie, or video game, etcetera) I seem to find more difficult as availability increases. There's a constant nagging feeling that I could be making better use of that time, that perhaps the next book on Gutenberg would be 'better' (whatever that means).
It's very difficult to really pin down why that is. If I were fantastically wealthy and could buy books by the truckload without even thinking about it, would I feel detached from them all in the same way?
[+] [-] walterbell|11 years ago|reply
When the flexible eink screen from the 13" Sony Digital Paper goes mainstream with a bluetooth keyboard and Android clones, students can have access to a large yet lightweight device for reading PDF+epub, handwritten annotations and typed notes.
http://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/sony-digital-...
[+] [-] Htsthbjig|11 years ago|reply
I used a Fujitsu ScanSnap(amazing scanner with automatic feeder) to digitalized them using a Wood saw to cut the back of the books. I stored them in boxes in a locker room.
I love it because I control it. I could analyze my documents, I could index them, I could organize them as I want. I could mark them too on my tablet.
Much better than paper.
But most people can't do it(each of my kids going with a USD400 device to school sounds ridiculous to me). A tablet is expensive just for reading, and more expensive if you are going to add an active pen, like I use.
What is quite shocking is that the device I use the most for reading is a new 55 inches LG OLED screen, rotated 90 degrees. I use software that converts black over white "paper" to green on black.
Einks are slow, very bad resolution, monocrome(exchanging resolutions for tones using halftoning), and very small screen.
If only Qualcomm Mirasol or other technologies were cheaper it will be totally different. Not ready yet for the mass market.
[+] [-] walterbell|11 years ago|reply
Is that because you prefer to focus at a longer distance?
> I love it because I control it. I could analyze my documents, I could index them, I could organize them as I want. I could mark them too on my tablet.
Do you store them as PDFs? What software do you use for indexing/ocr?
[+] [-] hobbes78|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taylorwc|11 years ago|reply
Is this really any surprise for "serious reading"? Reading a textbook, especially one with lots of graphs, charts, figures, etc., is miserable on an e-reader. I suppose I always assumed that pleasure reading was the most popular use case for an e-reader. Maybe I'm way off.
EDIT: while muddling through this in my brain, I realized that I've been mentally defining e-readers as E-Ink readers.
[+] [-] vph|11 years ago|reply
I am sick and tired of reading reviews of devices based on their ability to watch videos and play games. I want to get things done. I want screens that do not reflect. I want screens on which I can read comfortably in different lighting situations. Give me those.
[+] [-] davesque|11 years ago|reply
Honestly, I'm inclined to look sideways at this article. The college text book industry is just too entrenched and future-phobic for me not to believe that special interests funded these findings.
[+] [-] bbcbasic|11 years ago|reply
None of that is practically true.
The Kindle can run out of battery but lets face it it lasts weeks so you just need to remember to charge it occasionally. It is unlikely to die on you like a mobile phone.
I am not sure what they mean by hurt your eyes, but the ability to change the font size and still have convenient paging is brilliant. With a paper book you have to don your 2x non-prescription glasses I guess.
And they do work with the operator in the bath, and the eReader just above the surface. Just keep the window open so it isn't too steamy, and have a table ready for when you want to put the reader down (stop reading once your toes start to wrinkle!).
[+] [-] com2kid|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dublinben|11 years ago|reply
[0]https://www.kobo.com/koboaurah2o
[+] [-] rishubhav|11 years ago|reply
My working hypothesis for why this is true is that it's easily the mentally differentiate the paper books I've read: when I try to remember a book, often the first thing that comes up in my mind is the cover art. My mental records of paper books are indexed by a multitude of factors---what the cover looked like, what the paper felt like, approximate size, typeface, etc.---that just aren't there for ebooks
[+] [-] jimkri|11 years ago|reply
Last semester I had all E-Books and I was able to bring them all with me at work, and I was also able to read them while sitting in my work truck in the dark. This semester I do not have any E-Books and two of my text books are fairly large. Which really sucks, because I hate having a heavy back pack.
All around I do love having E-Books, on the Kindle I can slide back and forth to different sections, high light the pages and everything I do with paper books. I also take notes on paper as I go along with the E-Book, it really helps me to remember certain parts.
I am saying this at the beginning of the semester though, I might change where I stand but I currently love E-books, except when the battery runs out I hate the thing haha. Who wouldn't love to have 6 major textbooks on one device?
[+] [-] SixSigma|11 years ago|reply
> When students were given a choice of various media—including hard copy, cell phone, tablet, e-reader, and laptop
How many have actually compared those devices? And what digital format were they using epub, pdf, HTML, txt ?
I have all those devices to try out the same books on. And I'm a student. I would rate them
1) E-reader - least eye strain, good bookmarking, one more device to carry - I only have one without a backlight
2) Tablet - better pdf support, good bookmarking, backlight is handy, multi function can be a boon and a distraction
3) Hard copy - I still read a lot of paper books - too bulky, I bought a sheet feed scanner just to scan my library and dump it
4) Laptop - at least it's not a phone
5) Phone - too small but I have read whole books using it when I had no option
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] hackuser|11 years ago|reply
1) Hardware interface: People here are conflating hardware interfaces (e.g., on Kindles) with the data medium (e.g., paper or ebook). For serious knowledge work, such as studying, of course a large screen area (such as dual 22" monitors) and good input (such as a full-sized keyboard) are essential. I think the question is, in that environment, which data medium is better
2) Software interface: How much is an issue of basic interface design. Paper book interfaces have been perfected over centuries; ebook interfaces are still immature. With the right interface, could ebooks exceed paper?
3) Does anyone know if ebook formats combine these capabilities:
* I own the data; it's not licensed to me.
* Open formats, so the book is readable 20 years from now, including the annotations (see below)
* Annotation: I can add notes and associate them with specific locations in the text.
4) An interesting article on ebooks disrupting the college textbook business: http://www.fastcolabs.com/3028855/why-cant-e-books-disrupt-t...
[+] [-] withdavidli|11 years ago|reply
Books with a lot of charts and graphs, it's a hassle even in print. Figuring out the placement so relavent text and visuals can be displayed on a single page would be better, and it would be easier to experiment with the format digitally.
[+] [-] ghshephard|11 years ago|reply
Recently, I purchased the Oreilly 5th Edition "Learning Python" and almost laughed. (A) The book is entirely infeasible to bring with you on a trip, (B) I actually had a hard time navigating it, compared to the electronic version which gives me the quickly navigated TOC on the side.
And, the deal breaker - I carry about 30 commonly used textbooks with me on 9 month+ international engagements, all the time in which I'm constantly moving from country to country. It's hard (but I guess possible) to imagine how I might do that with physical textbooks (Just keep shipping them to the hotels I'm next moving to, and hope I'm there long enough to meet up with them).
But I can think of no conceivable scenario in which I could be using these textbooks on the 22 Hour+ flights that I frequently take.
I'm willing to wager I'll never use a physical textbook again.
[+] [-] joshuapants|11 years ago|reply
These problems may be common with laptops and tablets, but e-readers fix that. You can't get distracted if the device is only capable of reading books, and e-ink screens offer far less eyestrain than typical LCDs.
Personally, I would say that I prefer reading print books over ebooks, but I vastly prefer reading ebooks on an e-reader over reading them on a different device. I also have almost no shelf space, so being able to store hundreds of books on my device is a great benefit. I get print copies of my favorite books, but in general I use the e-reader for everything else.
I have no experience with e-textbooks, however.
[+] [-] higherpurpose|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redler|11 years ago|reply