Tag Archives: ebook readers

5 Reasons Why Print Books Don’t Cut the Mustard

(With apologies to Wired.)

No-one can dispute that print books have been pretty popular over the last several centuries. But really they are fundamentally flawed. Unless they can precisely duplicate the experience provided by an e-reader they’re doomed, because all people want the exact same reading experience and never compromise on some criteria in order to fulfill others.

Let’s skip a page of boring context and cut to the bulletpoints that are the only things anyone cares about anyway.

1. An unfinished print book isn’t a constant reminder to finish reading it.

You know the drill. You pick up a print book, start reading it, get distracted and leave it next to the sofa. Next day, when your eye’s caught by another print book on the wooden bookshelf and you open its cover, the print book doesn’t display the page of the print book you were reading yesterday to remind you where you were at. Two weeks later you’ve got a dozen half-read print books in a dozen obscure locations of your house (some of them with scraps of paper marking the point you left off – that’s right, even if you pick up the same print book you were reading yesterday, it won’t automatically remember your page number). Eventually you realise you’re never going to finish any of them and in a tidying frenzy you dump them all back on your wooden bookshelf.

2. You can’t keep your print books all in one place.

Print books on the wooden bookcase, beside your bed, in your handbag, at work, in the car, at the physical library – it’s impossible to keep track of them all. And if you finish reading a print book at the start of a commute, you can’t just open it again to choose and start reading a new print book, because all the other print books are at home, on the wooden bookshelf.

Worse yet, you can’t keep your print books all in two places. There’s no app for syncing a print collection between two locations. If your print books are on the wooden bookshelf at home, they can’t be in your handbag at the same time.

To add credibility and pathos to my opinions, I shall here mention a friend who lost access to her house post-earthquake and with it her entire collection of print books. When she got the occasional half hour to retrieve items she had to rapidly choose which to spend her time rescuing. If they’d been electronic they’d have been in her iPhone all along — and if she’d lost that, she could have retrieved her computer on which they’d have all been synced.

3. Notes on paper margins are pointless

You spend hours reading a print book and making ink notes in its paper margins and what have you got at the end of it? All that useful information is still stuck inside the print book. You can’t click and drag it into your word processor where you actually need it. You could cut and paste it and make a nice collage, but even librarians who appreciate marginalia are likely to look askance at that.

4. Print books are priced as disposable, but aren’t marketed that way.

I talked with someone today who had some print items he no longer wanted and wanted to donate them to the library. The library didn’t want them and I couldn’t think of any library or used bookstore that would. The best thing to do would be to throw them in the recycling bin. But he hesitated, and I found even I hesitated to make this suggestion in so many words. Because we’ve developed this utterly idiotic idea that the print book, each with runs of thousands or millions, is nevertheless a priceless artefact whose destruction is a kind of sacrilege.

5. Print books can’t be used as a clock.

Look at the bottom of your print book and you won’t see the time – only a page number. You can’t go back to the title page and open up a game of sudoku. Storing too many polaroids in it makes the pages bulge. If you want to check a definition, you have to fetch an entirely different print book. The only thing a print book does is let you read that one novel.

Well, not quite the only thing. It does make nice kindling.

Which e-reader should I buy?

Between earthquakes and RSI, I’ve reached a point in my life where an e-reader would be an advantage. I’m not fussy about features.

  • I basically want to read books on it, synced from my (Mac) laptop.
  • I rarely if ever read anything that requires colour.
  • It must have native ePub capability (I’m not buying a Kindle); ideally I’d like it to support a range of basic formats like pdf, txt, rtf, html, but can survive if some of these have inexplicably not been implemented.
  • I like the idea of e-ink but am comfortable with LCD screens too.
  • Storage space and battery life are important though not to the exclusion of other considerations (including price).
  • Something RSI-friendly would be nice – lightweight, comfortable, with left-hand/right-hand redundancy.

I think I’m probably looking at a Nook or a Kobo and of the two I think I like the Nook better, but this is based entirely on looking at websites and feature comparison charts. All the charts say you should try them out yourself, but last time I saw anything one could try out was in a bookstore just before Christmas, and as near as I could tell approximately a gazillion other customers had already tried them out and broken them. As for now… half the bookstores in town are destroyed or inaccessible and the other half are on the verge of bankruptcy (okay, I admit it, I can name two exceptions, but neither has e-readers) and right now unnecessary travelling wears me out.

Bonus features I’d like but aren’t necessary since I don’t know if they really exist:

  • Full Unicode support (including Māori macrons). You wouldn’t think this would be so hard, and yet… Seriously, let me know if you know of anyone doing this.
  • Note-taking functionality – but not if to get that I have to also get a thousand other features and pay through the nose for the combo. An iPad, for example, would be ridiculously overpowered for my purposes.

Experiences, (dis)recommendations?

Links of interest 26/8/10

Scandal du jour (aka the power of social media)
JSTOR’s new interface made searches default to covering their entire database – so results might include articles students didn’t have access to on JSTOR and which wouldn’t even be linked via OpenURL to the library’s subscription in another database. (Meredith Farkas describes the problems neatly.) Librarians complained loudly on blogs, JSTOR’s Facebook page, and elsewhere, and a day later JSTOR has announced that they’ll change the default while they continue work on OpenURL.

Tools
WolframAlpha has added widgets that focus on a specific kind of data and can be embedded into a webpage by copying and pasting the code. Categories cover all kinds of subject areas – some widgets might be relevant in a subject guide. (You’d need to add a new rich text box, then select the plain text editor and copy/paste in the embed code from WolframAlpha.)

Librarian as resource
University of Michigan Library’s search results now bring back subject librarians as well as relevant databases, catalogue items, subject guides, institutional repository hits, and external websites. Their blog about this links to some examples.

eBooks and compatibility
Jason Griffey writes a clear explanation about why ebook filetypes and digital rights management means that purchasing an ebook doesn’t mean you can read it on any old e-reader.

Library instruction
Cooke, R., Rosenthal, D. Students Use More Books After Library Instruction: An Analysis of Undergraduate Paper Citations College and Research Libraries (preprint)

“In Fall 2008, students from first-year Composition I and upper level classes at Florida Gulf Coast University participated in a citation analysis study. The citation pages of their research papers revealed that the students used more books, more types of sources, and more overall sources when a librarian provided instruction. When these results were compared to those produced by students in upper level classes (all of whom received instruction), it was discovered that as the class level increased, the number of citations and the percentage of scholarly citations generally increased and there was a high preference for books from all disciplines, especially history.”

(They compared classes which received library instruction with identical classes which didn’t.)

Non-English blog roundup #9

On a meta note, Google Reader now incorporates automatic language recognition and translation. For some reason this doesn’t come across to the Reader widget in iGoogle, so what language I see depends on where I am — this is actually a bonus because, while I read far faster in English, Google Translate can produce… unusual results.

Bibliothèques 2.0 (French) reports that the library in Toulouse has latched onto the city’s SMS contract to SMS users for

  • the first overdue notice, and
  • notice that a reserved book is available.

They also send a pre-overdue notice by email, and additional overdue notices by email then by post. They acknowledge that SMS, at 10 euro-cents apiece, is more expensive than mail. But I think (and evidently so do they) that it’s worth it to get a book back earlier and save the need of sending a post message later. We introduced SMS messages for overdue hourly-loans at our own library, and the number of times you see a student sprinting inside with the book – they didn’t mean to have it overdue, they’re just busy and preoccupied – makes it all worth while.

La Feuille highlights a quote from Marin Dacos’ post about ebook readers (French): “Readers of today display all the shortcomings of physical books and almost none of the qualities of digital text.” [This is an example of where Google Translate fails utterly, with “The reading of today are the shortcomings of the book and almost none of the qualities of the text.” Reading is just stupid, are is odd, and why oh why does it simply miss out a word (numériques) that it can’t cope with? Though I’ll give it ‘shortcomings’, which I stole for my own translation.]

Álvaro Cabezas reports on the integration of Google Scholar results into Google proper (Spanish). If you don’t have access via a library subscription you can click on the “All 3/whatever versions” to increase your chances of finding an open access copy or preprint.

Also from Álvaro is a great post on The user as generator, and the library as redisseminator of content (Spanish again). [Another failure of Google Translate, which renders “como redifusora de contenidos” as “of content as redisseminators”. I see what it’s trying to do – Romance languages often write an X of Y where English would have a Y X – but it’s being incompetent about it; there’s no earthly reason why a machine couldn’t get the correct “as content redisseminator”.] He points out that creating and maintaining a website full of quality content takes time and money – but also that web 2.0, with its remixing ideology, provides the opportunity to reuse existing information, and the opportunity to empower users to do some of the work for us. Risks, yes – but weighed against the risk of being “relegated to the archaic image which society, in general, holds of libraries”….

And via multiple blogs, the new Europeana went down due to popular demand shortly after launching. “Europe’s digital library, museum and archive” hopes to re-open mid-December, at which time it will “be bringing you digitised books, films, paintings, newspapers, sounds and archives from Europe’s greatest collections.” More about the project is available in the meantime at the project development site (English; Europeana itself will be in multiple languages).