Why the Smart Reading Device of the Future May Be Paper | Hacker News Reader

Why the Smart Reading Device of the Future May Be Paper

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32 pointsrelampago27 comments

Physical books give me the third dimension which is necessary for the ability to flip back and forth between sections or even pages very fast. This process, at least for me, is very critical to reading that is focused on knowledge-gaining rather than fun. Forget books; I find it uncomfortable and very little productive while reading academic papers on my iPad. These papers in my field are usually 15-30 pages long and often have double columns (so now I have to even zoom in).

Am I the only one here who highlights, underlines, and writes furiously in the margins? I don't know how you can process a text or technical book without being able to touch it.

I did in language courses, but not in others. For math/CS courses I've found old books with dozens of pages of engineering paper stuffed in them, however. Probably the same sort of content you write in the margins. Paperbacks also lended themselves better to making notes within the text for me, but that was a psychological block (expensive hardback? keep it pristine! cheap paperback? meh, who cares?). I'm mostly over that now.

One would expect that digital formats are more conducive to this. You can theoretically cross-reference and amend notes and you are not constrained by the margin. Perhaps Fermat's Last Theorem may have been proved centuries earlier if he had had access to a digital book reader.

For years, before Instapaper and Readability, I used a little script that copied the text out of the current page and pasted it in plaintext, then printed it from TextMate monospaced and 4-up. I'd shove the pages in a pocket or the backseat and read them in my free time.

It's a great way to take notes, circle interesting bits, and compare them later. I haven't been able to replicate that system digitally.

Is there a reason you chose a monospace font? I recall reading that they have lower legibility for prose.

I remember it being a mix of tinyness, printer quality, and TextMate's limitations. It had the side effect of lending everything a particularly neutral tone.

> The most influential factor, he found, was whether they could see pages in their entirety. When they had to scroll, their performance suffered.

There are still no good electronic devices for large format, color books. Which includes most textbooks. If a larger iPad is released, that will presumably be the primary target market.

I'm looking forward to such a device myself, as a nerd with a large collection of tabletop RPG PDFs.

What I'd like is a folding tablet similar in concept to [1]or Microsoft's Courier [2] with two iPad sized screens. Given how thin the current iPad Air is, or the MacBook Air for that matter, and still possessing decent horsepower, this seems particularly feasible these days. Give it a stylus input device for note taking. You can turn it over laptop style and get custom input layouts for different applications. Balance the thickness/weight of each side by balancing battery on one half, processing power on the other. I've been imagining a device like this for 20 years, maybe one day it'll happen or I'll try my hand at hardware hacking.

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/16/toshibas-dual-screen-libr...

[2] http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/05/microsofts-courier-digita...

Paper: among characteristics not mentioned, where a passage occurs in a page (or how far within a book or article) is part of the context, and I suspect that human's spatial memory comes into play with this. Online infinite-scrolling content lacks this particular clue, and even PDFs only offer the "where on the page" vs. "how far into the book" aspect. I can also often remember my place in a book simply by staring at the page number and committing it to memory -- at least for a few hours or overnight. Though bookmarks are useful.

Electronic: Over half a century into the digital age and I think a significant problem is that we still haven't settled on the "right" format for real information consumption. There are plain-text documents, simple HTML, word-processing formats, postscript and PDF documents, and now eBook formats. Absent its lack of text search, ghostview -- 'gv' on Linux -- is still one of the best reading clients I know of, particularly in how it advances through the text. The Internet Archive's online book reader is the best I've seen bar none, in particular its light-weight feel and auto-cropping of text so that the actual content of the book is centered on the page. I've submitted a request to evince (the GNOME PDF reader) that it do similarly. Still, I find myself constantly fighting with even the best PDF readers at finding the right balance between text sized large enough to read and fiddling with positioning the page onscreen.

Electronic formats may not be as good for first encounter and deep studying, but they are immensely useful for quick reference: the ability to 1) carry around a library of thousands of volumes and 2) instantly search to or open to a particular page or phrase is hugely useful. The ability to create an external reference that will find the relevant passage in whatever form of the work you have handy (similar to a URL, but not specific to a given instance) would be magical.

Some limitations of electronic formats can be mitigated somewhat: there are bookmarks, annotations, and other forms of marking up documents, though none match the immediacy of a penciled margin note, underlined passage, or dog-eared page.

> And research finds that kids these days consistently prefer their textbooks in print rather than pixels.

My students only look at their textbook for the assigned exercises. I'm sure they'd prefer not to have one at all.

What are they studying?

I find that scientific textbooks (machine learning, etc) are much more usable as books than as pdf, as I need to often jump from one chapter to another and it needs to be the matter of a split second (or I won't bother to look for the information).

But perhaps mileage varies.

I still don't see how a book with text's "realness" helps. I don't see how flat paper with ink printings is "tactile" enough and not in fact just as abstract as any method of digesting information second or third hand (at a computer terminal, reading a newspaper, attending a lecture, etc.) vs. our evolution's first method of information gathering: experience; you know, going outside, feeling a rock, finding your way through town and mapping it out in your head... I'm 24, but I still remember before the internet became what it is today and even then, reading was considered "boring" by everyone other than nerds because, surprise! it was a pretty abstract activity.

I think the real factor is the preference for paper and the learned habits with reading on it. People simply have learned first to "deep read" with books, so they read/learn easier since they can tap those already familiar (perhaps subconcious) habits without having to figure out new ones. Unfortunately, phone and tablet screens are associated with mindless or at least light reading and aversion, not deep cognition, so perhaps that's why there is some observed deficit in reading on them.

Still, I'm going to accept the "science is not quite settled" part of the article. Obviously there is some deficit ninnsome cases but we don't know why.

Math. Students pretty much don't read their textbooks from algebra through calculus. And it's even sadder when you get a student in PDEs or abstract algebra who acts as if reading their textbook would reveal their illiteracy.

This is probably because you can get through many early math classes just by listening to the lectures.

Yeah, my digital textbooks (Algebra II and Biology) are consistently awful Flash-apps, with all the disadvantages of paper, no copy-and-pasting and bad search.

I love my Kobo eReader, but I think it's important to note that 90% of the use it gets is reading fiction. When it comes to tech books or anything I hope to be learning and referencing, I go straight to paper.

To add my anecdote of others, I feel magazines don't do as good a job with deep understanding as more 'academic' layouts. Is this a font & design issue hiding as a device issue?

Asimov wrote an essay in 1973 "The Ancient and the Ultimate" about a portable reading device that didn't need power etc; it turned out it was the book.

That was an excellent essay. It started off speculating about the future of the video cassette. He speculated that they would eventually be mobile with a self-contained power source, and that they would be able to present their images to you without disturbing those around you. Controls would become almost automatic. They would stop when you looked away and resume when you looked back, and you could skip around or repeat sections at will, and play the cassette at your own pace. He finishes:

   You'll have to admit that such a cassette would
   be a perfect futuristic dream: self-contained,
   mobile, non-energy-consuming, perfectly private,
   and largely under the control of the will.

   Ah, but dreams are cheap so let's get practical.
   Can such a cassette possibly exist? To this, my
   answer is Yes, of course. The next question is:
   How many years will we have to wait for such a
   deliriously perfect cassette?

   I have an aster for that, too, and a quite
   definite one. We will have it in minus five
   thousand years--because what I have been
   describing...is a book!

Print is particularly important for learning and "deep" reading. I find my IQ is at least a few points higher when reading in print rather than on screen. eInk devices are kind of good, but made awkward by the 0.5 sec screen refresh delay...

There is something to be said about the versatility of hypertext, but I think we lose something in concentration, attention span, etc. because of the links.

I agree with everything except the screen refresh delay making things awkward. That has absolutely no effect on my reading and is barely noticeable in the last few Kindle generations (I've owned three).

What does bug me about ereaders is the software. I have 50 or so books on my Kindle and instead of just quickly grabbing a book off of my bookshelf and reading it until I want to grab another I have to scroll through and find the book- where the screen refresh DOES become noticeably annoying. Not to mention I own a ton of books on my Kindle that I've forgotten about simply due to the fact that they're hidden on page 10 of the library list.

While this is certainly possible, I'm surprised to hear it. I thought my reading was progressing at the same pace but then noticed that I took a week to finish a book that I'd otherwise finish in a few days.

Perhaps your eyesight is better than mine and you are able to use a smaller font (which permits more content per 'page'). The problem for me is that legibility suffers at lower font sizes.

I agree, eInk delay is totally OK when you're reading sequentially, but becomes annoying if you want to quickly flip back to revisit something.

Anecdotally, I find this to be true. Also for note-taking. During projects where I used pen and paper for jotting down thoughts and ideas, the information tends to be stickier. There seems to be a direct connection between tactile senses and the thoughts and memories in the brain (and from what I recall from psychology, there's some truth to this.)

I'd be very curious to see if it's age dependent.

I agree that I absorb more with the printed page, but I wonder if this is habit or conditioning. I didn't grow up reading material on a device.

Disclaimer: I'm old :).

I think the article can be summarized by this sentence: "When students preferred screen reading, they learned less when required to read from paper, and vice versa."

I'm pretty sure this is all just a matter of personal preference.

I think I'll probably be the last person alive still buying paper books!

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