On Sat, 28 May 2005 19:31:48 -0700, "Alan" wrote:

>> When I'm reading a book, I often flip back through the last several
>> pages... flip forward... insert Post-it sheets as bookmarks...
>
>I do these things, too, and I agree that a properly designed e-book should
>make them *easier*, not harder. That's why it's compelling to me....
>
>Post-it notes: you announce "mark this page" or "mark the sentence
>starting with ... " or press a "mark this page" button or use a tablet pen to
>underline something you want to remember. Later, when you come back
>to the book, you can ask to see the marked pages or passages...

You've described several intelligently conceived features for making
these operations easier for an e-book user to perform. The problem is
that while you can make these operations much easier than they would
be on a poorly designed e-book, you can't make them nearly as easy as
they are with a physical book.

The reason for this is that the e-book is an artificial construct,
with artificial features and rules. Everything you do with it,
starting with how you load it and turn it on, must be _learned_, and
then must be practiced as a learned skill.

In contrast, a physical book shares most of the properties of any
other physical object. It has size, texture, and weight. It has parts
which are connected to each other in certain ways which determine the
ways they interact. Our brains are partly hard-wired to deal with
these properties, and are partly conditioned to deal with them from
the time we start interacting with the physical world, a few weeks
after birth. Thus the skills that we need to perform basic operations
on a book -- to pick it up and hold it, to turn the pages, to place
and find bookmarks -- are either instinctive, or are so deeply
conditioned that they might as well be instinctive.

Even if you learn a skill so well that it becomes automatic, it still
takes more "bandwidth" than one that is instinctive or conditioned.
Thus, while you may feel that you can "turn the page" on an e-book
just as easily as on a paper book, it's not exactly true. It may be
true under good conditions, but under stress -- when you're tired, or
when you're trying to keep three other things in short-term memory at
the same time -- the greater difficulty is reflected in your
performance.

The real problem is for the casual user, who does not use the gadget a
lot, and is not strongly motivated to learn it. That person may never
learn to use it well enough to become comfortable with it, and then
will say, "Yeah, I tried an e-book, but it was no good; you can't set
bookmarks." And for him, it's true, even though it's not true for the
gadget itself.

This is not "the fault of the user, not the product"; it's just the
way people think. No, it's not logical. Technology lovers are
not-logical too, in the same ways, just about different things.

You're correct that e-books can support sophisticated features like
look-up that are difficult with conventional books, and which
sophisticated readers will intuitively value. My point is not that
those features are impractical or useless, but that devices which
offer them will still have trouble gaining acceptance unless they do
the simple stuff about as easily as conventional books, and about as
well. And that, ironically, the simplest stuff is the most difficult
for an e-book to do in a satisfactory way.

This is why I favor the concept of a bound e-book, which can be
handled (although not loaded) without need for any learned skills at
all. Here's a link that shows what I mean. Note the paragraph that
begins, "For applications requiring more rapid and direct electronic
update..."

http://www2.parc.com/hsl/projects/gyricon/


My email address is LLM041103 at earthlink dot net.