Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."
blog.findings.com
blog.findings.com
For example: Why is text presented flatly? Isn't that a direct consequence of the limitation of physical paper? Where are the ebooks that allow you to dynamically fold text according to hierarchical order? In a mathematical text, say, sometimes I'd like to highlight the core results; other times, I want to home in on a particular result and highlight the "path" (i.e. the "helper thms" that are needed to establish the core result). Yet other times, I'd like to see the connection between results across sections _on the page_, i.e. without paging back and forth and holding everything in short-term memory. Sometimes I want the author's comments and discussion and "connective tissue"; other times, I don't want to see anything but the structure.
Apple did a good thing, a first step with the option to generate flashcards from your highlighting and notes. This is one extremely obvious thing that ebooks were missing, although I think the implementation is not yet very good, rather clumsy in fact. Sometimes I get frustrated that people keep making ebooks as if they were still limit to the same physical constraints as paper books. The whole form and structure and interaction could be made much more malleable, such that the presentation of ideas "adapts" to your brain rather than your brain adapting to a successive, linear, "rectangular", fixed presentation and compensating for it. It's not like "ebooks" simply means adding a bit of "multimedia" like it's the 90s...
Nowadays, when I read mostly papers in PDF or books I have scanned in or ebooks, I do screenshots and copy/paste to OmniOutliner, an outliner program.
It's all still a hack though. I'm still waiting for a clean way from within standard ebook reading apps. For example, an API by iBooks that would allow any 3rd party flashcard app to interact with my notes/highlights.
I used to think this use case is so obvious that it'd be a matter of months that someone would come up with a way to make it more easy to both read and write/organize content this way. As it is, now I'm increasingly asking myself whether I'm an exception or whether this is not the way non-literary books _should_ be read after all.
I could see your way of doing things being useful, though. I suspect it hasn't been partly because it's harder than it sounds (look at the design process for HTML, and all of the mistakes that were made and alternatives that were proposed) and partly because so much of the relevant IP (and thus market) is already locked up pretty tightly.
That said, if I may play devil's advocate for a second, another way to look at the linear structure imposed by print is as a useful constraint for conveying thoughts in an effective manner. Every once in a while, I come across a "classic", math or otherwise, where the author has put so much thought into structuring her argument that I don't need to flip around. Invariably I absorb more from these rare gems than I would from a sort of hypertext arrangement, simply because somebody thought hard about the best way to learn the material.
It's funny you mention Apple because this strikes me as a very Apple thing to do--impose something on its users which initially seems quite cumbersome (one-button mouse, no floppy, one-button cell phone, no CD/DVD, hell the whole HIG), but actually turns out to be a clever mechanism for enhancing usability.
Still, I would appreciate if the form would give me the option to "mess" with it sometimes, e.g. suppressing some stuff that I may or may not come back to later after a first glance; or generating quick links between passages (for example, a proof uses a previous result, can I quickly link back to it); or when I point at a technical term, can I see the formal definition from the text. etc etc. That would be amazing.
Of course this would be cumbersome on the keyboardless models, but they are designed purely for novellas et al anyways.
No doubt this will change. E-book consumption is rising rapidly, and it's abundantly clear that the e-reader/tablet/etc. is the future of the industry. But right now, the e-book is still in its infancy, and publishers haven't yet shifted their priorities in its favor.
Do you have any ideas on how to improve ebooks for fiction?
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.
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.
The way these would work is that in their initial, unexpanded state, everything is presented the way it would be presented to an expert in the field. For instance, if you are interested in seeing how the prime number theory is proved, the unexpanded view would present the proof the way it would be presented if it were a new result being published in a top analytic number theory journal.
This would, of course, be over the head of most people--even most mathematicians who are not number theorists. This is where the "expandable" part comes in.
For any part of the proof, you would be able to expand it. There would be several kinds of expansion available.
1. Horizontal expansion. This keeps the argument at the same level, but fills in more steps.
2. Vertical expansion. This is for when you run into something you don't know. It expands to give you the necessary background to continue.
3. Calculation expansion (I need a better name for this). This would be used for things like evaluation of integrals or solving differential equations or similar things that show up in the proof. It's for when you know how to evaluate integrals or solve differential equations, but just aren't seeing the particular substitution or integration by parts or whatever that makes this particular calculation work.
The difference between calculation expansion and horizontal expansion is that calculation expansion is for where you need something expanded that is relatively elementary compared to the current level, whereas horizontal expansion is where you need more steps at the current level to follow the argument.
All of these expansions would in an ideal expandable ebook be applicable recessively, with vertical expansion going all the way down to high school math. The net result would be if you took, say, an expandable ebook on the prime number theorem, and did maximum vertical expansion, you'd end up with in effect a course of study that takes you from high school to understanding the proof of the prime number theorem--it would teach you all the number theory and calculus and complex analysis and so on that you need to understand that proof.
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.
Definitely agree about the poor quality publishers dump for sale
You can't skim through the entire contents of a website yet either - but you should be able to! Hint, hint, startup people.
-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.
I'm a big ebook fan, but only for novels or books that read like them. (Which is 90% of the reading I do, so still a big win.)
I only need to see a snippet of text to remind me "oh yeah, it was around here somewhere..." I should whip up a proof-of-concept to test it, I guess.
If so, we could keep the canonical version of our ebook libraries in iBooks and have additional apps that can access the content in myriad and interesting ways. It would allow the main iBooks app to remain simple and focused, while allowing useful innovations to sprout up around it.
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...
As pointed out note tasking is less natural in digital format.
In many books, such as DnD books, I know I can find certain rules (or other needed information,) by about where they are in the book.
It shows how skimming could actually work on an iPad, and it's fantastic.
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.
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.
on the negative side, we'd probably have to sift through tons of crappy word cloud for your book apps.
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 can just use a computer and browser and a search engine, but it'd be nicer if it was built in.
Full disclosure: I read Tolkien for years before I discovered that elvish names with C such as Celeborn or pronounced with a K sound.
If memory serves, highlighting the word brings up not only the definition, but the pronunciation guide. And, even if it doesn't, it isn't much of a pain to click through to the dictionary.
But I take it's the processing part that's the problem?
On the PC nothing should prohibit you from doing this. I don't know how much memory a whole 500 Site E-Book takes, but my 8GB should be enough.
[1] http://www.corel.com/corel/product/index.jsp?pid=prod4100140
Unfortunately it only works on epub, not PDFs alas.