The page interface is a pain. When I lose my place in a fat ebook, it is very hard to find it again. I think they need to keep an infinite stack of bookmarks for each page visited, so I can scroll back and forth through my history. That would let me find my place after accidentally scrolling a ~100 pages forward or backward, and would keep a most recently used page stack for multiple pages in a reference book.
Switching between phone & desktop browser in google books is painless, too, and the phone and browser will play kindle books, as well. I appreciate google's efforts to make public domain texts freely available. Apple and Amazon seem more inclined to sell me new e-editions of public domain works, but maybe I haven't tried hard enough to access the classics with them. -- rec -- On Feb 9, 2013 2:15 PM, "Bruce Sherwood" <bruce.sherw...@gmail.com> wrote: > I've been very happy with the Kindle ecology because I can pick up and > leave off from any device -- phone, Kindle reader, desktop computer. I > haven't found the format wars significant because, thanks to the wonders of > modern electronics, there are readers and/or convertors for all formats. > For example, Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com) will convert just about > anything to anything. My wife stopped reading books on her iPad (iPad 1) > and switched to a Kindle reader because the iPad was just too > inconveniently heavy for reading. > > There is however a problem that I'd like to see addressed. When I read a > novel or most nonfiction, I read almost exclusively linearly, from start to > finish. When I read/study/refer to a technical book (and I use quite a few > technical books in my Kindle environment, whether or not they came from > Amazon) I jump around a lot. The existing user ebook interfaces just don't > cater to this kind of use. > > A simple example with a technical book on paper: I stick one finger in the > book at the page where I'm reading, and I flip back and forth, very fast, > looking for something related, then go back to where I was. The equivalent > is hard to do with an ebook. It's true that the ebook gives me something > the paper book doesn't, a word-lookup search capability, but that's a > clumsy scheme for the example I just gave. In fact, usually I wouldn't even > know what search term to give, because my page flipping has more to do with > visual pattern matching to a page that has a particular diagram. Even just > the page-flipping itself is awkward. On an e-ink reader like the Kindle, > page replots are a lot slower than my quick scans of a paper page. > > The closest I've come to experiencing a usable interface is the Kindle > reader on my desktop computer, which has a very large screen adequate for > side-by-side two-page displays. There's a horizontal slider under the > pages, and I can drag quickly forward and backward, with rapid page > changes. Alas, there is no intelligent acceleration in the slider, so for a > long book (i.e. most technical books) an infinitesimal slider jumps many > pages. Sigh. > > I don't claim to know exactly what a good interface would be for technical > books, but I'm convinced that I haven't seen one. Incidentally, there seems > to be some resistance from students to technical e-textbooks despite their > much lower cost and the potential, sometimes realized, of including > interactive elements, animations, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if the > problem isn't exactly the same problem I encounter with technical books. > > Bruce > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com >
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