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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."

#31

Post by yew »

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.

The big problem with LCD screens is that they give some people headaches. I can't do any serious reading on one. The attendant battery life problems are also a pretty serious issue.

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

#32

Post by nodata »

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 find ebooks perfect for fiction - and useless for everything else.

Do you have any ideas on how to improve ebooks for fiction?

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

#33

Post by wazoox »

The updated nook color has a new "skimming" bar. It allows to go from the beginning to the end of the book in a swipe, displaying chapter titles and sample phrases. It's really usable, but of course it couldn't work on an eInk device.

Unfortunately it only works on epub, not PDFs alas.

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

#34

Post by lparry »

radicalbyte wrote: post #13

I happily trade the ability to skim for the ability to search by keyword. The bigger problem with eBooks is that there are a lot of lazy publishers who don't bother proof-reading their ebooks, with the obvious impact on quality. I've personally resorted to buying the physical book (the cost is the same) and then acquiring high quality "fan made" versions for use on the PC/tablet.

iBooks has full text search, My kindle appears to as well although I think it might work off a prebuilt index

Definitely agree about the poor quality publishers dump for sale

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

#35

Post by HSO »

nodata wrote: post #32
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 find ebooks perfect for fiction - and useless for everything else. Do you have any ideas on how to improve ebooks for fiction?

I don't read lots of fiction lately but the one thing that bugs me is how clumsy sharing (of short passages, memorable quotes etc) is.

Imagine you could just share a memorable sentence or passage to twitter or FB or whatever directly from within your ebook app. And the quote should have a link to a source, for example Google Books or the Kindle web app, such that your friends or followers could see an excerpt of the source if they clicked on it. If you were so inclined, you could even turn the generated link into an affiliate one.

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

#36

Post by SatvikBeri »

levesque wrote: post #24
SatvikBeri wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it? I never found myself wanting for such an ability. For me, the e-ink display is much more interesting than dynamic scrolling/skimming.

Some examples of how an iPad/PDF saves me time vs a Kindle:

-Let's say I'm looking up how control flow works in a programming language I have little experience with. I can skip to the index, find control flow, and click on that in a few seconds.

-The current chapter covers a new technique that I think could be applied to a previous example, and I want to check that example out. With the iPad/PDF I can easily move back and forth, with a Kindle I can't.

-The current page references a technique from a few pages ago where I don't remember the exact details. I can easily scroll back and forth with an iPad, not so much with a Kindle.

-I want to see if a book covers a relatively obscure topic. The iPad or my computer let me do a search through a PDF for keywords and preview each section containing the keyword, a Kindle doesn't.

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

#37

Post by darasen »

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…

That would be helpful for many Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels as well. Especially the ones where people get bent out of shape if pronounce something wrong.

Full disclosure: I read Tolkien for years before I discovered that elvish names with C such as Celeborn or pronounced with a K sound.

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

#38

Post by HSO »

yew wrote: post #29
HSO wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before I migrated my entire library to my computer, I sometimes made carbon copies and cut the theorems out just to reach this sort of effect. Then I could reshuffle and have what I want in front of me instead of flipping around in a book (or across several books) which I hated for the sheer physicality of it. Nowadays, when I read mostly papers in PDF or books I have scanned in or ebooks, I do screenshots and copy/p…

Having some structure is useful when you don't know what you're looking for, or even what kind of thing you're looking for. And I find that's true of a lot of the technical documents I read. I also quite enjoy reading a physical book with a dozen bookmarks and fingers, being able to see several full pages of text at once. I could see your way of doing things being useful, though. I suspect it hasn't been partly becau…

I agree about the structure. The thing about most technical, or how to call them, non-literary? books is that clearly you are not expected to read everything. In a sense, you start with the given structure but make the book your own as you go along. You skim, see that you already know about this, that you are not interested in that, and are _very_ interested in that. What I'd like to see is a format that makes it easy and gives us new possibilities to make a book our own. What I didn't see is your second point. Perhaps I imagined it too easy, maybe it is actually a tough nut to crack. After all, the format must accomodate all sorts of books and styles. And the IP issue, oh my...

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

#39

Post by magicalist »

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…

Yes, we really need some kind of "hypertext" that allows an expression of "hyperlinks" between concepts so that a reader can follow conceptual paths through a corpus of text at will :)

I agree with you wholeheartedly, actually. It has been disappointing that the advances in electronic textbooks have, as you say, given us the equivalent of scanned-in copies of the old textbooks, but with some embedded encarta video clips.

The main problem, as efforts with XML and microdata and the semantic web (etc, etc) have taught us, is that this (parsing structure, displaying it, and allowing manipulation of that display) is really hard to solve in the general case, and even solutions that get you only part of the way may be so onerous that no one wants to actually author content at that point.

There are a few startups that are instead trying to solve this by producing great textbook content on a case-by-case basis, really thinking about what it means to try to transmit knowledge in a totally different medium. I think there is a huge opportunity there, so I'm hopeful that we'll see some really great innovation in that UI/UX space soon.

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

#40

Post by skymt »

HSO wrote: post #35
nodata wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find ebooks perfect for fiction - and useless for everything else. Do you have any ideas on how to improve ebooks for fiction?

I don't read lots of fiction lately but the one thing that bugs me is how clumsy sharing (of short passages, memorable quotes etc) is. Imagine you could just share a memorable sentence or passage to twitter or FB or whatever directly from within your ebook app. And the quote should have a link to a source, for example Google Books or the Kindle web app, such that your friends or followers could see an excerpt of the…

I'm don't know about the Kindle app, but Kindle devices have Facebook and Twitter sharing built in. Once you link to your account, you can just select some text and tweet it.
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