7 ms·

I think the big mistake one can do when comparing digital and physical textbooks is compare then one-on-one with a level playing field. Why do that? Digital te

by ktta 9y ago

I think the big mistake one can do when comparing digital and physical textbooks is compare then one-on-one with a level playing field. Why do that? Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbooks. They can have embedded interactive content, ranging from extremely zoomable 2D content to see something in detail to rotatable 3D models. They can have videos. Or just audio, say to listen to case studies or know how a bird sounds. They can have automatically gradable quizzes and exercises. There is so much more digital books can offer. Once you bring in these advantages, I bet the pedagogical advantages will be enormous. I'd like to see that study, and I bet digital books will blow everything out of the water. There are advantages apart from learning benefits. Errata can be a thing of a past with updatable textbooks. You can search for every single word easily and save time. There's no wear and tear. Students can get away with having textbooks on their phones, avoiding carrying textbooks weighing several pounds. Another huge benefit is accessibility. From large font to audio output, all accessibility features ever possible on a computer are possible with the textbook with minimal effort. The publishing industry is only limiting itself because any innovation on its digital books will mean death of its money maker. It will mean much less production and distribution costs which will put in question its atrocious pricing.

nerdponx 9y ago
It doesn't matter if you don't retain anything. Anecdotally at least, I and most people I know absorb information better on the printed paper than on a computer screen. Even when I'm writing code, i'm usually taking notes and drawing diagrams in a notebook. Digital media or a supplement, not a replacement, for traditional dead-tree media.
- ktta 9y ago
  See this is what I'm saying is a bad comparison. Why compare text on paper to text on a screen? Compare text on a paper to rich interactive content on screen. Say you have a really good screen to write on like the iPad Pro where you have minimal latency, infinite space and colors to work with. Also I think you preferring paper is more out of habit than any real advantage. I know of professors who need real chalk on their hand because paper and pen just don't work for them. It has been a personal battle for me too. I love writing on fresh paper with a select few of my favorite pens. It felt like I was doing something, rather than hit away at a keyboard or a screen. But I've convinced myself of the advantages - instant accessibility anywhere, copies to share easily and backups that last a lifetime.
  - mwcampbell 9y ago
    Considering your anecdote about professors who need real chalk on their hand, I wonder if this is a generational thing. Do many people born in the 90s and later still prefer reading from paper and handwriting (regardless of surface)? FWIW, since I have low vision (from birth), the notion of handwriting being desirable is utterly foreign to me. I could do handwriting, slowly and tediously, but I was happy to do my homework (and later in-class note-taking) on a computer as soon as I could.
    - ktta 9y ago
      >I wonder if this is a generational thing Exactly.
    - lomnakkus 9y ago
      I don't think the grand-parent poster said anything about preference. It may very well be the case that retention of information is better from dead tree books even though people prefer digital media. (Example: I'm sure most people would prefer to eat chocolate most of the time, but that doesn't really work out so well...) That said, I think the accessibility argument is an strong one, especially if text can be read out loud and/or re-flowed properly (like on web pages) based on font size, but I honestly don't see why textbooks couldn't be provided both as digital and text. Surely the cost of producing the textbook is pretty marginal if you're already doing whiz-bang animations, etc. for the digital version? The bulk of the text should be identical, I should think.
  - musage 9y ago
    > Why compare text on paper to text on a screen? Compare text on a paper to rich interactive content on screen. How would a "rich interactive" version of, say, a historical speech or a short story look like?
    - ktta 9y ago
      Well, for starters you could have little 'Did you know?' pieces embedded in the text. Historical speeches need a ton of context to be assimilated properly. Immediate reference akin to a quick hyperlink based aside can give context without taking away from the continuity of the speech.
mcny 9y ago
> I think the big mistake one can do when comparing digital and physical textbooks is compare then one-on-one with a level playing field. Why do that? > Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbooks. They can have embedded interactive content, ranging from zoomable 2D content to see something in detail to rotatable 3D models. They can have videos. They can have automatically gradable quizzes and exercises. I absolutely agree. Moreover, there might be some situations where physical books might be BETTER and some situations where a digital textbook might be better. When it comes to textbooks, our effort should be focused on books that are unencumbered by copyright and other such malaise. The goal for the future should be open education resources such as open education resources > Open educational resources (OERs) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under a copyright license that permits anyone to freely use and repurpose them. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, journal articles, and any other tools or materials used to support learning. I am not saying CUNY's efforts are on the spot (I have no idea how far they've gotten so far tbh) but I think it is a step in the right direction http://www2.cuny.edu/libraries/open-educational-resources/ http://www2.cuny.edu/libraries/open-educational-resources/
- ktta 9y ago
  >When it comes to textbooks, our effort should be focused on books that are unencumbered by copyright and other such malaise. The goal for the future should be open education resources such as open education resources I have the exact same opinion. I commented right here on HN about the importance of these kinds of free resources. The CS community is leading with this, but I see other fields catching up with this too. Edit: Found my comment[1](Google is amazingly powerful and scary). Check out the textbook to see what I'm talking about with the 'rich content' argument. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13905438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13905438
- speedplane 9y ago
  > When it comes to textbooks, our effort should be focused on books that are unencumbered by copyright and other such malaise. The cost of copyrighted textbook can be substantial, but they are usually dwarfed by the cost of the larger educational undertaking. Open access textbooks is a good goal, but I'm not sure I it as critical to improving education.
jcranmer 9y ago
> I'd like to see that study, and I bet digital books will blow everything out of the water. I'm not so sure. Static, printed 2D paper isn't nearly so limiting as you'd think. The time dimension is one of the hardest ways to convey information, and often times it ends up being used merely as animation gap-filling while you're waiting for slow narration to catch up. Auditory information could help people who process it better than written information, but outside of some rather limited scenarios where specifically auditory knowledge is required (such as language learning), it's not really providing anything useful for other people. Interactivity too is overrated: its biggest utility is in allowing people to explore data, whereas the main goal of textbooks is to convey information [1], at which point a well-chosen static snapshot is sufficient to direct people to the important information. The aspect of quizzing students and automatically grading is possibly beneficial, but it's really orthogonal to the question of digital or print textbooks. Indeed, textbook manufacturers already have embraced the online homework market, since a one-time-only key to access the site is an effective way to kill the used textbook market. But other than saving TAs the burden of grading assignments, it doesn't add much pedagogical value; the real pedagogical value would be in using such assessments to figure out what the student's internal memory map is and where it is going wrong, but that is not yet possible with our technology and I doubt it's on the cards anytime soon. [1] One can argue that it's better to let users draw conclusions for themselves so as to challenge the author's viewpoint. But that's not the metric that's going to be selected for in textbooks, which is to measure retention of information, and it's probably going to be somewhat counterproductive of the desired metric.
- speedplane 9y ago
  >I'm not so sure. Static, printed 2D paper isn't nearly so limiting as you'd think. The real benefits of e-textbooks aren't little interactive animations, but substantive learning-by-doing. For example, having a real interpreter or simulator built into the learning software. A good example of this concept is Resig's advanced javascript tutorial (https://johnresig.com/apps/learn/ https://johnresig.com/apps/learn/), but you could easily see something similar for learning accounting or other areas where software is integral to the concepts.
- ktta 9y ago
tpkj 9y ago
> Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbooks. Yes, digital textbooks can offer so much more, and yet maybe the "so much more" is their biggest pitfall: they (and/or the device serving as their platform) offer near limitless opportunities for distraction. While our attention span - or our lack thereof, trained as we are by the 3 second rule TV commercials push on us - might be able to get a major workout that leaves us exhausted and feeling like we have accomplished something (though in reality, hardly anything) - the digital format and form of delivery can rob us of our ability to freely focus. Let's face it, even with a good old-fashioned hard cover we can encounter distractions, and when we use digital, we're opening ourselves up to overwhelming levels of "opportunities for distraction" in which environment the human mind/body/condition is incapable of flourishing. Ironically, the very limitations of the physical textbook may be one of its liberating features.
- ktta 9y ago
  I think that argument is often made because it is easy to make. Just because one reads from a paper textbook means one is avoiding distractions? What about phones and their incessant alerts? One way you can avoid distractions is to limit the features of the device. Pull internet access. The problem here is with the student more than the device. I tend to get distracted a lot when reading a digital textbook too. It takes effort, but also does not looking at your phone when you are reading a textbook.
  - afarrell 9y ago
    One has the option of leaving the phone in a dorm room and going to the library. > the problem here is with the student. In all such things, we need to think about the combined student-device system, no? Especially since it is orders of magnitude cheaper and more straightforward to change the device than to change the student.
  - d0lph 9y ago
    Still, I think it's easier to ignore a distraction on a phone, which you can easily put on silent vs. a computer where you're a click away from facebook. The less effort that's required to focus, the better.
methodover 9y ago
> Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbooks. They can have embedded interactive content, ranging from extremely zoomable 2D content to see something in detail to rotatable 3D models. They can have videos. Or just audio, say to listen to case studies or know how a bird sounds. They can have automatically gradable quizzes and exercises. There is so much more digital books can offer. Yes yes yes yes! I love your thinking. I'd love to see a startup specifically targeting this-- A new type of publication. You pay for it like an e-book, but it's interactive like an application, and super high quality. Maybe we could start with programming books? Take the best of the programming books out there and re-interpret them as this new sort of interactive product.
- gfodor 9y ago
  You might be interested in the work done by Mike Matas + Bret Victor for Al Gore's "Our Choice", I was expecting that project would be the first of a wave of digital books, but I guess it never happened. (Or maybe it did?) http://pushpoppress.com/ourchoice/ http://pushpoppress.com/ourchoice/ edit: Related: https://www.ted.com/talks/mike_matas https://www.ted.com/talks/mike_matas (Mike Matas is now at Facebook and worked on Facebook Paper and Instant Articles, probably other stuff not on his website. Bret Victor is now working on Dynamicland at HARC.)
pdm55 9y ago
>> Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbooks. I agree. I was recently in China lecturing. I took about 100 textbooks on a portable hard drive. It was magic having immediate access to that knowledge. By way of comparison, there was no way I could have taken more than a couple of physical textbooks with me. BUT I still needed to make my own notes on paper. Physically writing notes on paper seems to me to be the best way of summarising material that I need to remember.
- ktta 9y ago
  >Physically writing notes on paper seems to me to be the best way of summarising material that I need to remember. Re-iterating what I said elsewhere in the thread. It is a false notion that writing on a paper is somehow superior to typing it out on a keyboard. I feel the only reason people feel better when writing paper notes is because they're used to it. Taking notes on electronic devices is fairly new. It is alien to our brain which have known the other way for a long time.
  - chw9e 9y ago
    If you need to quickly add a note or draw a quick sketch then writing on paper has a lot of advantages as compared to typing it out on a keyboard.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    Those studies are usually done on students (because they are readily available as research subjects) and those tend to be "digital natives" who are quite used to keyboards. From an article[1] about one such study: The results revealed that while the two types of note-takers performed equally well on questions that involved recalling facts, laptop note-takers performed significantly worse on the conceptual questions. The notes from laptop users contained more words and more verbatim overlap with the lecture, compared to the notes that were written by hand. Overall, students who took more notes performed better, but so did those who had less verbatim overlap, suggesting that the benefit of having more content is canceled out by “mindless transcription.” “It may be that longhand note takers engage in more processing than laptop note takers, thus selecting more important information to include in their notes, which enables them to study this content more efficiently,” the researchers write. I.e. because a keyboard lets you take more notes, you have to think less about them. Good for literal transcription, bad for actually understanding. Of course this suggests that taking notes on a laptop might be better if you make it more difficult. E.g. if you had to retype your notes multiple times to avoid them fading away, that would certainly improve retention and encourage conceptualization. You could also enhance it by sending each typed-out word to a text-to-speech engine, thus adding another sensory reinforcement. But as it is currently practiced, taking notes on a computer apparently still loses out to pen and paper. [1] http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/take-notes-by-hand-for-better-long-term-comprehension.html http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/take-notes...
vacri 9y ago
Yes, digital textbooks can have all those nifty things, but usually don't. And cross-referencing something in a digital textbook? Forget about it. In a paper book it's so much easier to flip back to check something out than in a digital textbook - even more so if you're quickly flipping back and forth comparing passages, or comparing between books. Textbooks work in most lighting conditions, don't need power/recharging, and don't have reflections of the overhead lights to distract you. They both have their pros and cons, but the actual experience of digital textbooks falls far short of their promise.
- ktta 9y ago
  We've had textbooks a couple centuries now. It has been about 7 years since the iPad has been released (and then followed the tablet revolution). I'd say give it time.
- chw9e 9y ago
  While I do think that current implementations of digital books are very lacking and thus don't compare as well with physical books as they could, this is one area I have to disagree. Flipping back through a physical book requires a process of trial and error while looking for that previous page, or referencing the index. A digital book usually comes with a search function that can knock that out a lot quicker.
  - eric_h 9y ago
    > Flipping back through a physical book requires a process of trial and error And yet I am so much faster at finding that vaguely remembered section or passage by using that process of trial and error in a paper book than I am on an ereader. That physical third dimension makes it so much easier to remember roughly where it is.
greenyouse 9y ago
The flexibility of having a computer read the text via text to speech is a huge benefit IMO. My reading speed is painfully slow but with espeak or a screen reader I can parse about 400 wpm. One thing that helped me a lot was doing a keybinding for espeak via: xsel | espeak -v en-us -s 400 I have a relative with dyslexia and it was a helpful hack for him to get reading faster too. Too bad this doesn't usually work as well in school settings where they use physical textbooks.
- kagamine 9y ago
  For any Mac users wanting to try out text to speech and who didn't already know, it's built into OSX. Have a look in your Preferences panel. It can be very useful if you want to 'read' something while looking at something else, like a game.
  - nathyong 9y ago
    You might not know this, but you don't need to go through the Preferences panel. You can use the `say` command from the command line, which uses the same engine, but you can pipe text to it. For example, to dictate whatever's on the clipboard, pbpaste | say
gaius 9y ago
Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbook There's no digital interface as fast or intuitive as sticking a finger in a page to flip back and forwards, or scribbling in a margin, or any of the other ways that people physically interact with books. Maybe there will be one day but reading a PDF on a screen doesn't even come close.
- BlackFly 9y ago
  I hate buying text books in electronic form. I still more where or less to find the equations I am looking for in the 1300 odd page Gravitation by MTW, yet zooming back and forth in even a small pdf is an exercise in frustration.
- qznc 9y ago
  What digital could offer is interaction. See Bret Victor: http://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/ http://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/
  - gaius 9y ago
    I strongly suspect the act of "self-visualisation" of a concept trumps being just shown it for developing true understanding.
jansho 9y ago
This is an excellent point. If digital textbooks are sold as alternatives to physical ones, then I’m not interested as they’re the same copies but one is in a more convenient format (for me.) Why aren’t digital features taken advantage of more often? When I first saw iBooks, that got me excited. Sadly that kind of interactive eBooks never really took off.
- yorwba 9y ago
  I think interactive features aren't used more often because there tends to be significant programming work required to make them. The "explorable explanations" movement has produced amazing works (e.g. http://ncase.me http://ncase.me), but there's a lot of custom code involved. Some aspects of interactivity can be handled by a one-size-fits-all solution (like zoomable charts or embedded video/audio), but I don't think that it will be possible to go much further without involving programmers. And that makes interactive features orders of magnitude more expensive than just a static image, leaving the cool stuff to hobbyists who have the time to make it work.
  - jansho 9y ago
    I know there are specialist JavaScript libraries for this, but I find it hard to believe that there aren’t any WYSIWYG tools that allows you to create layouts and add interactivity such as hotspots and simple animation..
Santosh83 9y ago
Ebooks will replace physical books when they get integrated with VR. Even then... I still refer to a book printed in 1857. Not sure my digital content will last that long without massive maintenance and transformations. A physical book only needs to be kept in a dry place, that's all.
swiley 9y ago
In general I'd rather just have text. The only nice thing about e-books is that they're cheaper and have copy/search. The DRMed ones remove this and charge as much as the physical books, which just defeats the whole point.
posterboy 9y ago
you can have plain video and podcasts, too. i mean that's why people go to lectures, because that format is easier to poick up yet, we are wired for that.

by ktta 9y ago

nerdponx 9y ago

It doesn't matter if you don't retain anything. Anecdotally at least, I and most people I know absorb information better on the printed paper than on a computer screen. Even when I'm writing code, i'm usually taking notes and drawing diagrams in a notebook. Digital media or a supplement, not a replacement, for traditional dead-tree media.

ktta 9y ago
See this is what I'm saying is a bad comparison. Why compare text on paper to text on a screen? Compare text on a paper to rich interactive content on screen. Say you have a really good screen to write on like the iPad Pro where you have minimal latency, infinite space and colors to work with. Also I think you preferring paper is more out of habit than any real advantage. I know of professors who need real chalk on their hand because paper and pen just don't work for them. It has been a personal battle for me too. I love writing on fresh paper with a select few of my favorite pens. It felt like I was doing something, rather than hit away at a keyboard or a screen. But I've convinced myself of the advantages - instant accessibility anywhere, copies to share easily and backups that last a lifetime.
- mwcampbell 9y ago
  Considering your anecdote about professors who need real chalk on their hand, I wonder if this is a generational thing. Do many people born in the 90s and later still prefer reading from paper and handwriting (regardless of surface)? FWIW, since I have low vision (from birth), the notion of handwriting being desirable is utterly foreign to me. I could do handwriting, slowly and tediously, but I was happy to do my homework (and later in-class note-taking) on a computer as soon as I could.
  - ktta 9y ago
    >I wonder if this is a generational thing Exactly.
  - lomnakkus 9y ago
    I don't think the grand-parent poster said anything about preference. It may very well be the case that retention of information is better from dead tree books even though people prefer digital media. (Example: I'm sure most people would prefer to eat chocolate most of the time, but that doesn't really work out so well...) That said, I think the accessibility argument is an strong one, especially if text can be read out loud and/or re-flowed properly (like on web pages) based on font size, but I honestly don't see why textbooks couldn't be provided both as digital and text. Surely the cost of producing the textbook is pretty marginal if you're already doing whiz-bang animations, etc. for the digital version? The bulk of the text should be identical, I should think.
- musage 9y ago
  > Why compare text on paper to text on a screen? Compare text on a paper to rich interactive content on screen. How would a "rich interactive" version of, say, a historical speech or a short story look like?
  - ktta 9y ago
    Well, for starters you could have little 'Did you know?' pieces embedded in the text. Historical speeches need a ton of context to be assimilated properly. Immediate reference akin to a quick hyperlink based aside can give context without taking away from the continuity of the speech.

mcny 9y ago

> I think the big mistake one can do when comparing digital and physical textbooks is compare then one-on-one with a level playing field. Why do that? > Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbooks. They can have embedded interactive content, ranging from zoomable 2D content to see something in detail to rotatable 3D models. They can have videos. They can have automatically gradable quizzes and exercises. I absolutely agree. Moreover, there might be some situations where physical books might be BETTER and some situations where a digital textbook might be better. When it comes to textbooks, our effort should be focused on books that are unencumbered by copyright and other such malaise. The goal for the future should be open education resources such as open education resources > Open educational resources (OERs) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under a copyright license that permits anyone to freely use and repurpose them. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, journal articles, and any other tools or materials used to support learning. I am not saying CUNY's efforts are on the spot (I have no idea how far they've gotten so far tbh) but I think it is a step in the right direction http://www2.cuny.edu/libraries/open-educational-resources/ http://www2.cuny.edu/libraries/open-educational-resources/

ktta 9y ago
>When it comes to textbooks, our effort should be focused on books that are unencumbered by copyright and other such malaise. The goal for the future should be open education resources such as open education resources I have the exact same opinion. I commented right here on HN about the importance of these kinds of free resources. The CS community is leading with this, but I see other fields catching up with this too. Edit: Found my comment[1](Google is amazingly powerful and scary). Check out the textbook to see what I'm talking about with the 'rich content' argument. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13905438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13905438
speedplane 9y ago
> When it comes to textbooks, our effort should be focused on books that are unencumbered by copyright and other such malaise. The cost of copyrighted textbook can be substantial, but they are usually dwarfed by the cost of the larger educational undertaking. Open access textbooks is a good goal, but I'm not sure I it as critical to improving education.

jcranmer 9y ago

> I'd like to see that study, and I bet digital books will blow everything out of the water. I'm not so sure. Static, printed 2D paper isn't nearly so limiting as you'd think. The time dimension is one of the hardest ways to convey information, and often times it ends up being used merely as animation gap-filling while you're waiting for slow narration to catch up. Auditory information could help people who process it better than written information, but outside of some rather limited scenarios where specifically auditory knowledge is required (such as language learning), it's not really providing anything useful for other people. Interactivity too is overrated: its biggest utility is in allowing people to explore data, whereas the main goal of textbooks is to convey information [1], at which point a well-chosen static snapshot is sufficient to direct people to the important information. The aspect of quizzing students and automatically grading is possibly beneficial, but it's really orthogonal to the question of digital or print textbooks. Indeed, textbook manufacturers already have embraced the online homework market, since a one-time-only key to access the site is an effective way to kill the used textbook market. But other than saving TAs the burden of grading assignments, it doesn't add much pedagogical value; the real pedagogical value would be in using such assessments to figure out what the student's internal memory map is and where it is going wrong, but that is not yet possible with our technology and I doubt it's on the cards anytime soon. [1] One can argue that it's better to let users draw conclusions for themselves so as to challenge the author's viewpoint. But that's not the metric that's going to be selected for in textbooks, which is to measure retention of information, and it's probably going to be somewhat counterproductive of the desired metric.

speedplane 9y ago
>I'm not so sure. Static, printed 2D paper isn't nearly so limiting as you'd think. The real benefits of e-textbooks aren't little interactive animations, but substantive learning-by-doing. For example, having a real interpreter or simulator built into the learning software. A good example of this concept is Resig's advanced javascript tutorial (https://johnresig.com/apps/learn/ https://johnresig.com/apps/learn/), but you could easily see something similar for learning accounting or other areas where software is integral to the concepts.
ktta 9y ago

tpkj 9y ago

> Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbooks. Yes, digital textbooks can offer so much more, and yet maybe the "so much more" is their biggest pitfall: they (and/or the device serving as their platform) offer near limitless opportunities for distraction. While our attention span - or our lack thereof, trained as we are by the 3 second rule TV commercials push on us - might be able to get a major workout that leaves us exhausted and feeling like we have accomplished something (though in reality, hardly anything) - the digital format and form of delivery can rob us of our ability to freely focus. Let's face it, even with a good old-fashioned hard cover we can encounter distractions, and when we use digital, we're opening ourselves up to overwhelming levels of "opportunities for distraction" in which environment the human mind/body/condition is incapable of flourishing. Ironically, the very limitations of the physical textbook may be one of its liberating features.

ktta 9y ago
I think that argument is often made because it is easy to make. Just because one reads from a paper textbook means one is avoiding distractions? What about phones and their incessant alerts? One way you can avoid distractions is to limit the features of the device. Pull internet access. The problem here is with the student more than the device. I tend to get distracted a lot when reading a digital textbook too. It takes effort, but also does not looking at your phone when you are reading a textbook.
- afarrell 9y ago
  One has the option of leaving the phone in a dorm room and going to the library. > the problem here is with the student. In all such things, we need to think about the combined student-device system, no? Especially since it is orders of magnitude cheaper and more straightforward to change the device than to change the student.
- d0lph 9y ago
  Still, I think it's easier to ignore a distraction on a phone, which you can easily put on silent vs. a computer where you're a click away from facebook. The less effort that's required to focus, the better.

methodover 9y ago

> Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbooks. They can have embedded interactive content, ranging from extremely zoomable 2D content to see something in detail to rotatable 3D models. They can have videos. Or just audio, say to listen to case studies or know how a bird sounds. They can have automatically gradable quizzes and exercises. There is so much more digital books can offer. Yes yes yes yes! I love your thinking. I'd love to see a startup specifically targeting this-- A new type of publication. You pay for it like an e-book, but it's interactive like an application, and super high quality. Maybe we could start with programming books? Take the best of the programming books out there and re-interpret them as this new sort of interactive product.

gfodor 9y ago
You might be interested in the work done by Mike Matas + Bret Victor for Al Gore's "Our Choice", I was expecting that project would be the first of a wave of digital books, but I guess it never happened. (Or maybe it did?) http://pushpoppress.com/ourchoice/ http://pushpoppress.com/ourchoice/ edit: Related: https://www.ted.com/talks/mike_matas https://www.ted.com/talks/mike_matas (Mike Matas is now at Facebook and worked on Facebook Paper and Instant Articles, probably other stuff not on his website. Bret Victor is now working on Dynamicland at HARC.)

pdm55 9y ago

>> Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbooks. I agree. I was recently in China lecturing. I took about 100 textbooks on a portable hard drive. It was magic having immediate access to that knowledge. By way of comparison, there was no way I could have taken more than a couple of physical textbooks with me. BUT I still needed to make my own notes on paper. Physically writing notes on paper seems to me to be the best way of summarising material that I need to remember.

ktta 9y ago
>Physically writing notes on paper seems to me to be the best way of summarising material that I need to remember. Re-iterating what I said elsewhere in the thread. It is a false notion that writing on a paper is somehow superior to typing it out on a keyboard. I feel the only reason people feel better when writing paper notes is because they're used to it. Taking notes on electronic devices is fairly new. It is alien to our brain which have known the other way for a long time.
- chw9e 9y ago
  If you need to quickly add a note or draw a quick sketch then writing on paper has a lot of advantages as compared to typing it out on a keyboard.
- yorwba 9y ago
  Those studies are usually done on students (because they are readily available as research subjects) and those tend to be "digital natives" who are quite used to keyboards. From an article[1] about one such study: The results revealed that while the two types of note-takers performed equally well on questions that involved recalling facts, laptop note-takers performed significantly worse on the conceptual questions. The notes from laptop users contained more words and more verbatim overlap with the lecture, compared to the notes that were written by hand. Overall, students who took more notes performed better, but so did those who had less verbatim overlap, suggesting that the benefit of having more content is canceled out by “mindless transcription.” “It may be that longhand note takers engage in more processing than laptop note takers, thus selecting more important information to include in their notes, which enables them to study this content more efficiently,” the researchers write. I.e. because a keyboard lets you take more notes, you have to think less about them. Good for literal transcription, bad for actually understanding. Of course this suggests that taking notes on a laptop might be better if you make it more difficult. E.g. if you had to retype your notes multiple times to avoid them fading away, that would certainly improve retention and encourage conceptualization. You could also enhance it by sending each typed-out word to a text-to-speech engine, thus adding another sensory reinforcement. But as it is currently practiced, taking notes on a computer apparently still loses out to pen and paper. [1] http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/take-notes-by-hand-for-better-long-term-comprehension.html http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/take-notes...

vacri 9y ago

Yes, digital textbooks can have all those nifty things, but usually don't. And cross-referencing something in a digital textbook? Forget about it. In a paper book it's so much easier to flip back to check something out than in a digital textbook - even more so if you're quickly flipping back and forth comparing passages, or comparing between books. Textbooks work in most lighting conditions, don't need power/recharging, and don't have reflections of the overhead lights to distract you. They both have their pros and cons, but the actual experience of digital textbooks falls far short of their promise.

ktta 9y ago
We've had textbooks a couple centuries now. It has been about 7 years since the iPad has been released (and then followed the tablet revolution). I'd say give it time.
chw9e 9y ago
While I do think that current implementations of digital books are very lacking and thus don't compare as well with physical books as they could, this is one area I have to disagree. Flipping back through a physical book requires a process of trial and error while looking for that previous page, or referencing the index. A digital book usually comes with a search function that can knock that out a lot quicker.
- eric_h 9y ago
  > Flipping back through a physical book requires a process of trial and error And yet I am so much faster at finding that vaguely remembered section or passage by using that process of trial and error in a paper book than I am on an ereader. That physical third dimension makes it so much easier to remember roughly where it is.

greenyouse 9y ago

The flexibility of having a computer read the text via text to speech is a huge benefit IMO. My reading speed is painfully slow but with espeak or a screen reader I can parse about 400 wpm. One thing that helped me a lot was doing a keybinding for espeak via: xsel | espeak -v en-us -s 400 I have a relative with dyslexia and it was a helpful hack for him to get reading faster too. Too bad this doesn't usually work as well in school settings where they use physical textbooks.

kagamine 9y ago
For any Mac users wanting to try out text to speech and who didn't already know, it's built into OSX. Have a look in your Preferences panel. It can be very useful if you want to 'read' something while looking at something else, like a game.
- nathyong 9y ago
  You might not know this, but you don't need to go through the Preferences panel. You can use the `say` command from the command line, which uses the same engine, but you can pipe text to it. For example, to dictate whatever's on the clipboard, pbpaste | say

gaius 9y ago

Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbook There's no digital interface as fast or intuitive as sticking a finger in a page to flip back and forwards, or scribbling in a margin, or any of the other ways that people physically interact with books. Maybe there will be one day but reading a PDF on a screen doesn't even come close.

BlackFly 9y ago
I hate buying text books in electronic form. I still more where or less to find the equations I am looking for in the 1300 odd page Gravitation by MTW, yet zooming back and forth in even a small pdf is an exercise in frustration.
qznc 9y ago
What digital could offer is interaction. See Bret Victor: http://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/ http://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/
- gaius 9y ago
  I strongly suspect the act of "self-visualisation" of a concept trumps being just shown it for developing true understanding.

jansho 9y ago

This is an excellent point. If digital textbooks are sold as alternatives to physical ones, then I’m not interested as they’re the same copies but one is in a more convenient format (for me.) Why aren’t digital features taken advantage of more often? When I first saw iBooks, that got me excited. Sadly that kind of interactive eBooks never really took off.

yorwba 9y ago
I think interactive features aren't used more often because there tends to be significant programming work required to make them. The "explorable explanations" movement has produced amazing works (e.g. http://ncase.me http://ncase.me), but there's a lot of custom code involved. Some aspects of interactivity can be handled by a one-size-fits-all solution (like zoomable charts or embedded video/audio), but I don't think that it will be possible to go much further without involving programmers. And that makes interactive features orders of magnitude more expensive than just a static image, leaving the cool stuff to hobbyists who have the time to make it work.
- jansho 9y ago
  I know there are specialist JavaScript libraries for this, but I find it hard to believe that there aren’t any WYSIWYG tools that allows you to create layouts and add interactivity such as hotspots and simple animation..

Santosh83 9y ago

Ebooks will replace physical books when they get integrated with VR. Even then... I still refer to a book printed in 1857. Not sure my digital content will last that long without massive maintenance and transformations. A physical book only needs to be kept in a dry place, that's all.

swiley 9y ago

In general I'd rather just have text. The only nice thing about e-books is that they're cheaper and have copy/search. The DRMed ones remove this and charge as much as the physical books, which just defeats the whole point.

posterboy 9y ago

you can have plain video and podcasts, too. i mean that's why people go to lectures, because that format is easier to poick up yet, we are wired for that.