Comment by nirvdrum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nirvdrum | Hacker News Reader

I'm really lamenting the demise of physical books and am happy I went through college when I did. Without a doubt having a whole volume of books at hand in a lightweight device is awesome. But reading a book is about much more than just the content to me. None of the devices on the market adequately model how I interact with a book and I think fundamentally they can't.

E.g., I constantly refer back to previously read material. I never know 100% where it is or know in advance that I'm going, but I have a rough idea of where it was by the thickness of the book. If I'm reading a novel, I like to refer to some previous dialog. If I'm reading a math book, I like to go back to the motivating example. When the depth component is removed it's surprisingly difficult to find my place. Likewise, I can navigate through a book by thumbing through it much faster than I can press the "prev" or "next" button or try to perform a binary search by entering in random page numbers.

Having said all that, I have a Sony Reader and I keep it in my bag when I commute. If I end up getting stuck someplace longer than anticipated, it's really handy to have a whole library at my hands. It's just not my preferred way of reading.

I work principally in academia, and I recently bought a Kindle to cut down on printing costs for PDF files (acquired from various sources, principally JStor). I find it increasingly unsatisfying.

1. I have to cross-reference page numbers for every citation. When you're talking about hundreds of citations from dozens of sources, you come to regret not reading the originals in the first place. I don't see the day when citing Kindle locations becomes acceptable among the standardized citation guides (MLA, Chicago, etc.) since many users convert PDFs by themselves, and different settings (e.g. omitting introductory pages, dedication pages, title pages, etc.) mean different locations.

2. Annotations. Everyone tells me how easy it is to insert notes and highlight passages, but the currently available methods do not give me the same flexibility as a simple pen:

2A. Discontinuous highlighting/underlining. Sometimes I don't want to highlight every word in a particular passage, but Kindle does not allow me to do this; as soon as the highlight ends, the next highlight can only be treated as a completely new annotation.

2B. I can't draw. Arrows, lines, maps, even illustrations are an important part of my annotation process. On the bottom of one section of Plato's Meno, for example, I have about a half a dozen drawings trying to make sense of a particularly interesting geometry problem (about which several papers have been published) [1]

2C. Multiple language/character support. This is a particularly difficult issue when dealing with translations. Even if I'm not reading a Greek text, I may be on-the-fly translating between English, French, German, and Greek (often 3 or even 4 of the above within the same paper!). As such, quite a few of my notes are in Greek, and so you can imagine my disappointment with the Kindle.

3. Jumping between passages is difficult. Sure, I can search the text - but I guarantee that's actually slower than flipping through pages. And if I direct students to a particular passage? That one kid using a Kindle in the corner of the room is still looking for it by the time we have moved on.

These are not all just Kindle problems, they're obstacles that eBooks and their complimentary software have to overcome to actually obsolete the physical book. I don't mean to suggest that these issues can't be overcome [2], but I believe the paperless revolution is much further away than some like to believe.

For the small amount of for-pleasure-not-work fiction that I consume, I'm probably not going back to paper.

[1] http://homepage.mac.com/jholbo/writings/dialogues/meno/meno9...

[2] No doubt the failure to adopt these features stems from low demand -- most of the demand in the industry is for popular literature, not the sort of people who are writing all sorts of things in the margins of their books. There are also some curious UI/UX problems that need solutions, e.g. scanning pages.

I think the general answer in that the current generation of Kindle and similar readers were created to read paperback novels, not for technical documents. The same way it takes a lot of hard work to create a word processor for technical documents (compare TeX to MS Word), it will take a lot of work to create a good reader for such documents.

Plato's Meno is not a technical document. His complaints do not appear to be related to technical documents at all.

It is; it's just a very old technical document.

1) is pretty easy to implement. Ebooks are searchable; page numbers are hacks around the limitations of paper books. Example:

<quote source="Dune (Herbert, Frank)">A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.</quote>

This perfectly identifies a location in the work, regardless of page numbers and other nonsense. A smart viewer will have no problem linking it to the correct place.

I've found my iPad to be pretty good at dealing with academic PDFs, but there are still some difficulties that make it annoying. I started taking it to my discussion classes instead of printing the day's paper out, and it worked great. The PDF is reproduced exactly as it prints, and you can quickly scroll from one page to another, search, and zoom in on interesting bits. The ACM two-column format works well with the iPad's PDF reader and iBooks.

Later in the year the professor showed up with an iPad as well. :)

(There are apps to organize and cite papers with, like Mendeley, that help somewhat, but I haven't found a great one yet.)

My Nook is good for travel, but now the novelty is wearing off I use it less for that. Last week I went away for a week carrying only a small cabin bag, which should be the killer app for the Nook, but when it came time to pack I didn't feel like dealing with questions like "Is my Nook charged?" and "Where the hell is the charger cable for my Nook?" and "If I start charging now, will it have enough charge to make it for the entire flight?" so I just shoved four paperbacks into my bag. Heavier and bulkier, but less effort.

Should have gotten a Kindle, hardly any need to wonder if it's charged.

The Nook seems to go flat when I'm not using it, but never when I am.

And even if it isn't charged, you just need a standard micro USB cable, not anything proprietary. I can use the same cable (including the car charger!) for my phone and for my Kindle and for a number of other little peripheral devices.

That, and the only time I've ever had my Kindle go dead on me was when I accidentally left the WiFi on and used it constantly for like three weeks.

Though you can do the same thing with the Nook. The Nook Color (like the iPad) requires more power than conventional USB to charge quickly, but you can use a standard micro USB cable to charge it.

The other advantage of a paperback on a flight is the FAA allows you to use it during takeoff and landing. I overlooked that the last time I packed my ebook reader.

  Where the hell is the charger cable for my Nook?

If you haven't read it already, DNA wrote the definitive essay on the evils of proprietary power cables and connecters. It's a great read.

"Dongly Things" by Douglas Adams

http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-03-a.html

Don't know about the Nook, but I have a Kindle (had it for 3 months already) and I use it everywhere.. in a bus, bathroom, waits on a queue... and the charge is good enough that I can take it for a weekend and not worry.

It should definitely last for 4 paperbacks. Maybe your Nook is the color version?

Charge isn't a problem if I plan ahead and charge it before I go. But if I'm packing a few hours before my flight I'll look at my Nook and see that it's gone flat.

Does it have an exchangeable battery? I recently went on a four day hiking trip and switched off my phone most of the time, so that I would have power in case of an emergency. Only later did it occur to me that I could simply have packed another battery. I was thinking all complicated, solar chargers and what not.

For my digicam I have two batteries. One is always in the device, one is either in the charger or packed with the camera fully loaded. I find that works very well.

I think this just explains that physical books will be practical and widespread until we see some groundbreaking eBook user interface that can match those benefits (I'm not holding my breath).

It's worth learning to use the highlighting and bookmarking features in the iBooks/Kindle readers.[1][2] I felt exactly the same way as you until I started actively bookmarking and annotating as I read, which makes it much easier to cross reference and skip back. It's made a world of difference to how I feel about e-books.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=help... [2]: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4059 (under 'iBooks features')

Well the point was I don't know I want to reference back to something until I encounter something new. Good writing isn't all foreboding. So a depiction or conversation may seem innocuous but become much more relevant 70 pages down the line. I'm not good enough to predict those situations, but have strong enough recollection to want to go back and review the older passage.

Agreed, the same goes for reference books. In a paper book, I'll often find things that I didn't realise were important at the time, or a later conversation will bring to mind, and I'll recall something fuzzy like: "It was in the lower half of the right-hand page, a few pages after that diagram with the donkey in it", but can't recall anything that will allow hard searches.

I think this is a technology issue-skipping back pages or searching is difficult with today's e-book readers, but I can easily see it becoming easier with e-books than with paperback books in the future. As with many technological advances, I imagine it'll take more initial effort to learn how to efficiently read the way you want with e-books, but once you do it'll be significantly faster.

In other words, someone needs to develop what Vim/Emacs is to text editors, for e-book readers.

I guess, but the behavior I have with books wasn't learned (outside of the obvious in learning to read, use a ToC, look up an index, etc.). Flipping back to a previous section is just a natural behavior -- it's flipping through a stack of anything. There's no analog in ebook devices. Perhaps there could be one, but it'd have to be a learned behavior, not a natural one, and thus will always feel unnatural.

Personally I don't think learned behaviors have to be unnatural. Writing and driving are learned behaviors which feel completely natural to a lot of people.

In fact, writing is an interesting example because many people say that they can think perfectly while writing by hand, but not while typing. But the ones I know who have been typing since they were extremely young, or have just been typing for a long time, often say they can think perfectly while typing. I have actually noticed the transition in myself-5 years ago it was very hard to think deeply while typing, today it's completely natural.

An e-book searching system doesn't need to be nearly as complex as typing. For example, you could theoretically have a little scrollbar that you drag your finger across and can easily anywhere from the beginning to the end of the book. In just a couple weeks I imagine this would be totally natural behavior.

I'm quite happy with simple PDFs and a laptop or at home on my desktop. I don't know what PDF readers you're using, but at least Okular has bookmarks, notes, markings, underlinings, highlights... Dog-earings and other book mutilations are so primitive! Index searches aren't as useful anymore, I love ctrl+F. :P

I find PDF search for tech books almost wholly useless, whereas the index does a really good job. I guess it's because it has that human touch to give a high relevancy score shrug

Well, depending on the PDF some have hard links in the index, table of contents, etc., so that balances out any problems of ctrl+F and saves the step of thumbing to the page or entering the page number and pressing enter... I'll admit for me the fastest way of finding stuff is usually through the table of contents. Even so I still can't think of a case where PDF search absolutely failed me and I could only find what I was looking for in the index or ToC, and my primary reading materials are tech and math and science... For the fiction I read it's superb for finding quotes or dialog if I can't remember a general area in the book where it was (which is frequent, especially if I hadn't read it for months). Looks like Okular doesn't have regex search though, too bad.

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