I’ve bought and read a couple eBooks. Non-fiction, mainly. Palm’s reader software’s impressed me, it was easy to use and fairly handy. Frankly, I don’t see why there aren’t more computer-type books in EBook form.
All this discussion about leaving an e-book on the beach is nice, but what about the most important use for books-- not just casual reading, but serious learning and absorbing new information? It’s almost impossible on a screen. You need a physical book to hold, to thumb through,to mark and re-read the complicated parts, to circle things with a colored pen, make notes in the margin,etc.
Try buying a totally new device that you don’t know how to operate
(think of a typical web surfer using Windows 98 buying a new Macintosh computer). You need a 1000 page manual, not 1000 help screens!
Even my old VCR is useless to me without its manual. I know how to do one thing with it–record tomorrow’s football game. But if I want to do something as simple as program it to record 3 shows a day for 2 weeks while I’m on vacation, I need to re-read the manual. Scrolling through a dozen help screens just confuses me.
And how would you study chemistry ? Flipping through endless screens, or in a traditional heavy text book? An e-book might be handy as a quick reference tool when you need a formula, but the deep learning has to come from a real book.
E books have MORE potential for learning stuff that traditional books. Can you have an effectively infinite amount of highliters and bookmarks in a paper book? Can you integrate a dictionary into a paper book? Can you link relevant sections together? Can you integrate sound, video and interactive media? can you compress a 1000+ page book into less than 100 grams?
Yes… its called take quality notes.
Actually, I would find it a lot easier to use an e-book style system to study science rather than conventional books. For locating relevant articles in journals it’s a lot easier to use a web search. Getting books out of the library is often a pain, as when a major assignment is due all the relevant materials are generally out on loan. If an e-book system was in place, I could access all the relevant journals, periodicals, textbooks and other written materials from my room, without having to worry about whether someone has borrowed them. While I can already do a lot of this on my laptop, being able to access textbooks from my room would be a HUGE plus.
Also, I often wish that my textbooks were in digital format so I could do a search on them. If I want to search my textbook to see if it mentions a particular study, it would be much quicker to search for “Allport (1954)” rather than look up the index (if there is one) for Allport and look to see if that study is mentioned.
Having said that, there are definitely massive implications regarding copyright. If all the textbooks for my courses were available in digital format, rather than being in the 2-hour loan section of the library, I wouldn’t buy them and I doubt many others would.
You hit the target with that comment!!
The most important part of learning is deciding which facts are relevant to you the moment, and SEPARATING them from rest of the background info. That is exactly what does NOT happen people like Shalmanese boast that they have 1000 pages of info at their fingertips.
Nobody learns 1000 pages of information. We absorb a few pages at a time. In other words, a well-read book with our personal notes.
E-books are okay for quick reference, AFTER you have learned most of the material from a real book, and only need to search for one specific word or math formula.
And how do the handwritten notes differ from what can be done electronically? If there’s any difference, then electronically taken notes should be easier to use than handwritten ones. Bookmarks and highlights are simple to do on an e-book, and if you attach a keyboard to your reading-device-of-the-future, you could easily annotate sections of the text yourself, with a context link. These notes and context links could go into a file of their own, making it extremely easy for you to review your own notes as you could click on the links to the relevant sections of text while you read through your annotations.
So e-books not only would be better for note-taking in the first instance, but would also have the added benefit of being a “quick reference”, as you mentioned.
I know a bit about this directly. Cheap, durable, and readable under most conditions? It’s going to take a while.
But it will come. And I think it will be BEST for text books. Upgrading texts is a HUGE expense for school districts or students; and developing and printing them a bit of a gamble for publishing companies.
Imagine the convenience and savings from supplying students with one reader for all their text book. And the texts can be revised and updated yearly without the expense and waste of printing new editions.
And we can still have our nice fat paperbacks to take to the beach.
They have some polarizing organometallic inks that could fit the “only changes when electricity is supplied” criteria. It’s also capable of being printed on a flexible medium (at this stage, something like transparency plastic). Currently, the focus is on using them for rapid prototyping of ciruits because you can, more or less, print them out using a bubble-jet printer with the special inks. It IS possible to print working circuits on regular paper, but they aren’t durable. Some sort of superfine mesh plastic fiber paper with a transparent sealant would probably be in order.
Still, my ideal eBook (or iBook, if Apple makes it) WOULD NOT be a single display page with little buttons. It would be trade paperback size (about 6.5" by 8"… standard mass-market paperbacks (most of them) are smaller than this) and have about 200 pages of display material. It would look, for all intents and purposes, like a normal every day paperback, if somewhat thin. The control circuitry could be embedded in the spine, or printed on the pages in a transparent OM ink, underneath the display circuits. It would have the page you were on and a hundred pages in both directions. No electricity would be required to maintain these pages.
It would also be possible to have the pages be pressure sensitive or responsive to an included stylus, allowing you to scribble notes in the margin. But the notes would be included with the display data for that page, not actually on any specific page… or it could be stored seperately from the book’s page data. The software could note the last page spread you were on when you closed the book, so whatever page you open it to the next time would be the right page.
It would also be possible to print transparent solar cells on the pages, so, provided you do enough of your reading at the beach, it could be self-powering or stretch out its battery life past that 6 hour baseline stated above. Since the display should look like regular (if somewhat glossy) paper, it would have the same readability as real paper.
Durability would probably be a problem, but since you’d be able to print replacement pages at Kinkos (or possibly on your own printer, if it’s accurate enough), it might not be too much of a hassle. The only functionality you’d lose is the ability to dog-ear pages for fear of damaging the printed electronics. BUT, since many people dog-ear to hold their place, or mark pages that contain important passages, there would be other ways to mark and save pages or passages via software, making dog-earing unnecessary.
Having read a couple of books on my computer (both as just huge TXT files and in PDF) I didn’t really like scrolling through the text or the push-button-for-next-page interface… so I doubt I’d ever buy a tablet type eBook reader.
Back in the 1960s, the big news was that dresses, shirts, etc. were going to made out of paper. Actually it wasn’t paper, but instead it was fibers normally used to weave cloth. They were run through the same process used for making paper and that was the cause of the confusion. It was a hybrid that became known as nonwovens. The first materials were not very strong, but different means were found to add strength. One was a process developed by DuPont, called spun-bonded material. There was Reemay, Typar and Tyvek. The first two caught on fast, but Tyvek took awhile. Eventually DuPont dumped Reemay and Typar, but kept Tyvek for obvious reasons. All this to tell you that Tyvek has it’s roots in the paper industry.
Attach a keyboard??!! Christ on a freakin crutch boy! My pen fits in my pocket; takes 3 seconds to pull out and flick the cap off and start writing. Why on earth should I carry all that detachable crap around? Not to mention my notebook weighs well under a pound, it AND my pen can be wedged into most of my pockets. And when I was considering buying a PDA, the notebook cost ONLY FIVE dollars! The pen I borrowed from the Credit Union.
well as i’ve already mentioned before, i can (with an obsolete model btw) add annotations/highlights/voice comments etc right into my pda with a stylus, finger or whichever pointy stuff i can find in handy…
i’ve said earlier that my pda was ideal for casual outdoors reading but on second thought, thinking over what others had to say, i remember that i’d learnt more (outside of school) from the internet than i would have if i’d only the library to rely on, mostly because of convenience, mostly.
to add to the defense of the ‘1000 pages’ remark, i’d like to point out that having a virtual interactive library on your fingertips means you’ll not only have taken whatever quality notes you can from the electronic version of whatever book was mentioned, you’ll be free to reference every other related resources at hand and discuss with other people etc etc.
:smack: Good point. Change the keyboard for a touch-screen like Shijinn’s obsolete model PDA. I still believe that it would be easier to annotate on an e-book than by conventional means, mainly due to the potential for nifty features like Shijinn mentions.
And as for weight, I don’t see how that would be an issue in the future. Current day laptops seem to me to be becoming comparable in weight to a lot of the books I have to read. In the future, there could be different size readers for different purposes. Just like monitor sizes for computers.
Now to prove I am not a total Luddite: The primary thing I use my notebook, the old fashioned paper kind, for is to write down books that I find in bibliographies that look like an interesting read. With the e-book/pda discussed here it would really rock my world to be able to enter books and have them magically alphabetized and categorized for me. Would save me a lot of effort standing in a bookstore thumbing through 60+ pages of notes for one notation on a specific book. sigh Now I am lusting!
too bad they haven’t digitised the library yet, copyright and manpower issues i think. somewhere on the line i got into thinking more about the potentials of e-book rather than what they have today, which is still relatively new. 