technical images and linear text

I have an e-book reader (sony PRS-505), and I love it for a variety of reasons. Partly because I can pirate hard-to-find and/or expensive things, but also because I can load up journal articles, chapters downloaded from electronic resources through the library, and CC-licensed content from great sources like re.press or Cory Doctorow. I do try to occasionally purchase content from authors whom I want to support, but it’s hard to find good DRM-free e-books of titles I want. This is an interesting technology, and I still derive a surprising amount of joy just from the way the screen looks and how it feels in my hand. More than any other piece of technology I’ve owned it gets surprised looks from people in public. Lots of people ask me what it is, partly because in its leather case it really does look like a bizarre science-fiction idea of a book. Now that it’s becoming more of a ‘buzzy’ technology with the Kindle 2 and the Nook, I thought I would post a few thoughts on how, after almost a year, I feel about the way reading on this kind of technology works.

Specifically I’d say that anyone who is thinking they will get such a device and load all of their school textbooks on it, never having to carry a paper book again, is wrong. I had the same idea before I got my Sony – get all the textbooks in there and I’ll be set! But unfortunately in my field few, if any, books are available in electronic formats, especially not by legit means. The actual mechanics of reading on these devices, while absolutely conducive to recreational novel-reading, are not exactly up to snuff for focused educational reading. I think I’m not alone in that when reading stuff for school, I tend to like to flip back and forth, to go over passages from earlier or skip ahead to later ones, to scan quickly through pages for references to specific topics, to peruse the index, and so on and so forth. Sometimes, I have to jump between the body of the text and endnotes far away, scanning through 50-100 pages of notes to find the specific one I’m trying to source. And of course I like to mark up my pages, write marginal notes, and so on. Stuff like this is a huge pain on an e-book reader. The screen takes a noticeable amount of time to refresh between each page change, and there is just no way to ‘flip’ through pages in an intuitive way. Of course one gains the advantage of searching through the text, but for this one needs a device with a keyboard and a search function (like the Kindle or the Nook), along with text documents (rather than scanned PDF images).

This could be remedied by better note-taking and mark-up mechanisms (not sure how the Nook addresses this, but touchscreens reduce the effectiveness of the e-Ink technology in terms of contrast), and by more extensive use of hypertext in e-books. The number of electronic books available in the future will only increase, of course, as will the refresh rate of these displays and their size. But I feel like as this technology becomes more functional, it will be quickly surpassed by something new: namely, a technology that combines the battery life and sunlight contrast of E-Ink with the colour and refresh rate capabilities of LCD… and not by just jamming them both into one device, although it is an interesting kludge. For the time being, while I’m very happy with my reader, its principal usage will continue to be science fiction novels.