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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."

#41

Post by skymt »

yock wrote: post #23

For me, this problem is manifested in referencing bible verses. I love my Kindle, but use it once and you quickly learn that it wasn't designed for random access.

The Kindle version of the ESV Bible makes clever use of the Kindle's index feature. All the verses in the Bible are indexed using abbreviated book names. So if I want to reach John 3:16, I hit Menu -> Index and type "jn 3 16". I'd rather have proper fuzzy matching ("jhn 3 16" wouldn't work, you need the exact abbreviation), but it's a workable substitute.

Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."

#42

Post by jrockway »

The worst ebook feature is that the Kindle only stores max(last_read_page, current_page). This means that if you follow a footnote to the end of the book, your reading position is lost forever. This makes flipping through the book a mentally-expensive proposition. (The screen refresh also makes this impossible.)

I'm a big ebook fan, but only for novels or books that read like them. (Which is 90% of the reading I do, so still a big win.)

Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."

#43

Post by pooriaazimi »

SatvikBeri wrote: post #11
jellicle wrote: post #7

Current 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.

This is why I prefer reading on the iPad or a laptop as opposed to a Kindle. While a Kindle is certainly easier on the eyes, being able to quickly flip through pages and search through a book is just too great to give up.

I too like reading on iPad more then kindles, but iPad is unfortunately not very fast either. Opening an interactive ebook (the ones they introduced last month) on my iPad 2 takes about 2 seconds...

Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."

#45

Post by hinathan »

jrockway wrote: post #42

The worst ebook feature is that the Kindle only stores max(last_read_page, current_page). This means that if you follow a footnote to the end of the book, your reading position is lost forever. This makes flipping through the book a mentally-expensive proposition. (The screen refresh also makes this impossible.) I'm a big ebook fan, but only for novels or books that read like them. (Which is 90% of the reading I do,…

Yes, this is intensely annoying. I've stopped buying technical and reference books on Kindle because of this 'feature'.

Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."

#46

Post by sliverstorm »

hyperbovine wrote: post #18
HSO wrote: post #12

Skimming is the least of it. Current ebooks, in their linear form, are essentially the equivalent of 19th century horse carriages with motors. "Books" need to be reimagined. While reading is and will remain a fundamentally linear activity, there is no reason why books need to be. For example: Why is text presented flatly? Isn't that a direct consequence of the limitation of physical paper? Where are the ebooks that a…

I read a lot of math too and the points you raise are good ones. I bought a Kindle DX in hopes of jettisoning a large part of my hardcopy math library; thanks to TeX, a huge swath of math literature is available by PDF (most of it free, if you have university access). I guess I wasn't prepared for how cumbersome it would be. Flipping back 10 pages to check a lemma takes, well, 10 seconds. It really detracts from the…

It occurs to me, you could submit a feature request to Amazon... "while reading, type CTRL+5 to go forward 5 pages, ALT+5 to go back" or something like that.

Of course this would be cumbersome on the keyboardless models, but they are designed purely for novellas et al anyways.

Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."

#47

Post by sliverstorm »

jonnathanson wrote: post #20
HSO wrote: post #12

Skimming is the least of it. Current ebooks, in their linear form, are essentially the equivalent of 19th century horse carriages with motors. "Books" need to be reimagined. While reading is and will remain a fundamentally linear activity, there is no reason why books need to be. For example: Why is text presented flatly? Isn't that a direct consequence of the limitation of physical paper? Where are the ebooks that a…

It's actually pretty disheartening how few e-reader-native e-books there are these days. Most of the e-books I read are simply reformatted paper books. The better ones -- and, anecdotally, I'd say these represent 5% of the e-books I own -- have hyperlinked chapters. It's pretty clear that the big publishers are still treating e-book editions as afterthoughts. No doubt this will change. E-book consumption is rising ra…

This is basically why I pay money for Amazon e-books.

Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."

#48

Post by sliverstorm »

jrockway wrote: post #42

The worst ebook feature is that the Kindle only stores max(last_read_page, current_page). This means that if you follow a footnote to the end of the book, your reading position is lost forever. This makes flipping through the book a mentally-expensive proposition. (The screen refresh also makes this impossible.) I'm a big ebook fan, but only for novels or books that read like them. (Which is 90% of the reading I do,…

I could be wrong in this case, but I believe that is what the "Back" key is for.

Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."

#49

Post by sliverstorm »

DanBC wrote: post #19
functionform wrote: post #5

I 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 ha…

I'm reading lots of Scandinavian crime fiction (in translation to English) at the moment. I have no idea how to pronounce any of the names, so some kind of link from the written name to an audio clip would be useful. Also, it'd be nice to have some "translator's notes". Perhaps there's some nice phrases in the original that just don't translate well; or some idiom that doesn't have an exact English version. Sure I ca…

You could, for starters, install a Scandinavian dictionary and learn to read pronunciation guides. Assuming the author uses common, and not extravagant invented, names.

If memory serves, highlighting the word brings up not only the definition, but the pronunciation guide. And, even if it doesn't, it isn't much of a pain to click through to the dictionary.

Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."

#50

Post by TeMPOraL »

sliverstorm wrote: post #48
jrockway wrote: post #42

The worst ebook feature is that the Kindle only stores max(last_read_page, current_page). This means that if you follow a footnote to the end of the book, your reading position is lost forever. This makes flipping through the book a mentally-expensive proposition. (The screen refresh also makes this impossible.) I'm a big ebook fan, but only for novels or books that read like them. (Which is 90% of the reading I do,…

I could be wrong in this case, but I believe that is what the "Back" key is for.

On my Kindle, the Back button works perfectly well in this case, returning you from footnote to the point where you followed it in the main text.
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