Forget skimming!
In ebooks I can search for words and phrases, that feature alone weights up any inconvenience.
Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."
51–60 of 66 posts
Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."
#52The 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.
Yes, and it has a full stack too, so you can, for example, look up the dictionary definition of a word in a footnote, and then follow another link in that definition, etc., and then, when you're done, just repeatedly go 'Back'.
Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."
#53I 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…
You don't need to use the symbol list to type numbers — alt–Q will give you a 1, etc. That still doesn't make the process you describe good, but if you must do that, this should at least speed it up considerably.
Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."
#54Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Try reading a multi-page footnote or manually exploring nearby footnotes.
Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."
#56What books need is more aggressive editing. Skimming wouldn't be necessary if the goal were maximizing signal versus noise. I'd pay a premium for the same book more aggressively edited. There's a cost associated with the benefit of reading. Time is now at a premium and part of the cost of a book along with the monetary cost.
Most books are around 250 pages, but I find that most of those 250 page books really only have about 120 pages worth of content.
A while back I asked about it on Quora and discovered that most book publishers aim for 50,000+ words. With the World reaching peak attention, especially for those that read a lot, it's ridiculous to keep insisting on books at 250 pages, especially in the case of technical books and non-fiction
http://www.quora.com/Do-book-publishers-push-for-books-to-be...
Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."
#57Closely related to skimming - can't do an equivalent of a binary search on it, if you have to jump back 100 pages to look at something you saw. I have a recipe book with 1000 recipes on the Kindle and it's a total nightmare to use. A paper copy is so much more usable.
This doesn't seem un-fixable, though. Something like dragging the page indicator backwards/forwards would help, or mirroring the iPod's wheel gesture to move back-forth more quickly. Spin two fingers for chapters, or something.
Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."
#58Closely related to skimming - can't do an equivalent of a binary search on it, if you have to jump back 100 pages to look at something you saw. I have a recipe book with 1000 recipes on the Kindle and it's a total nightmare to use. A paper copy is so much more usable. This doesn't seem un-fixable, though. Something like dragging the page indicator backwards/forwards would help, or mirroring the iPod's wheel gesture t…
The issue is not the interface, it's the speed--an e-ink display is naturally slower right now. It is a real problem but one due to technology rather than UI.
Coincidentally, on my 3rd-generation Kindle (the one with the keyboard), you can jump by chapters using the left and right arrow keys. This ameliorates going back in most books.
Also, Kindles have a nice text search which I've found useful on several occasions. This has also helped somewhat, although it's still lacking overall.
Ultimately, I would not want any non-linear books on my Kindle either--I'll stick to pdfs and actual textbooks for now.
Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Try reading a multi-page footnote or manually exploring nearby footnotes.
Did that on pg's Hackers & Painters. Back key works just as expected for me. It's like a stack - you can pop significant transitions from it, like following a reference or leaving the book.
Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 bac…
I expect the OP was talking about reading fiction books. You don't skim fiction.