Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."
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Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."
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Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."
#2If the CPU usage isn't a problem then that seems pretty easily solvable. I can certainly see how it could work.
But I take it's the processing part that's the problem?
Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."
#3I absolutely agree. This is especially noticeable with more technical documents like research papers or textbooks. On the kindle, to flip to a particular page, you have to go into the menu, pop up a symbols list, navigate with arrows to each digit, then click go. And each of these keypresses takes a long time -- probably half a second -- for the screen to refresh. Then, you repeat log(n) times until you've found (via binary search) the section you were looking for. Poorly thought out.
Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."
#4Corel PDF Fusion [1] implements "flick" view for skimming. Implementation however is nowhere close to right (too slow, mouse gestures mishandled, etc.)
[1] http://www.corel.com/corel/product/index.jsp?pid=prod4100140
Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."
#5I wish the popular e readers had apis for working with book content - skimming could be only one of the awesome enchancements the tech community could make. Among others would be tying words to wikipedia lookups or research citations to the actual content, aggregating all graphs in some sort of navigable 3d interface, page in page reading, the list could literally go on forever.
on the negative side, we'd probably have to sift through tons of crappy word cloud for your book apps.
Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."
#6If the CPU usage isn't a problem then that seems pretty easily solvable. I can certainly see how it could work. But I take it's the processing part that's the problem?
I think it's more just the screen update speed. You can flip pages about as quickly as the screen will update, which is fairly slow. Also, the visible page area is much smaller than a normal book, especially a textbook or a journal, and you can only see one page at a time. It makes for slow skimming and sort of tunnel vision that causes a loss of the visual structure.
Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."
#7Current e-ink screens take more or less a full second to refresh, which makes a mockery of skimming.
You can't skim through the entire contents of a website yet either - but you should be able to! Hint, hint, startup people.
Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."
#8If the CPU usage isn't a problem then that seems pretty easily solvable. I can certainly see how it could work. But I take it's the processing part that's the problem?
It's a memory problem afaik and on the Kindle it's a display problem.
On the PC nothing should prohibit you from doing this. I don't know how much memory a whole 500 Site E-Book takes, but my 8GB should be enough.
Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."
#9If the CPU usage isn't a problem then that seems pretty easily solvable. I can certainly see how it could work. But I take it's the processing part that's the problem?
I think it's more just the screen update speed. You can flip pages about as quickly as the screen will update, which is fairly slow. Also, the visible page area is much smaller than a normal book, especially a textbook or a journal, and you can only see one page at a time. It makes for slow skimming and sort of tunnel vision that causes a loss of the visual structure.
Sounds like a task for the GPU.
Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's more just the screen update speed. You can flip pages about as quickly as the screen will update, which is fairly slow. Also, the visible page area is much smaller than a normal book, especially a textbook or a journal, and you can only see one page at a time. It makes for slow skimming and sort of tunnel vision that causes a loss of the visual structure.
Sounds like a task for the GPU.
A faster GPU won't make the e-ink microcapsules rearrange more quickly.