11 ms·

Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."

99 points by ssaraiya 15y ago

pnathan 15y ago
Meh, what really is frustrating is the inability to sell used ebooks.
ThomPete 15y ago
If the CPU usage isn't a problem then that seems pretty easily solvable. I can certainly see how it could work. But I take it's the processing part that's the problem?
- farnsworth 15y ago
  I think it's more just the screen update speed. You can flip pages about as quickly as the screen will update, which is fairly slow. Also, the visible page area is much smaller than a normal book, especially a textbook or a journal, and you can only see one page at a time. It makes for slow skimming and sort of tunnel vision that causes a loss of the visual structure.
  - sek 15y ago
    Sounds like a task for the GPU.
    - dangrossman 15y ago
      A faster GPU won't make the e-ink microcapsules rearrange more quickly.
      - sek 15y ago
        I heard from the kindle gen 4 announcement that the processor rate has influence on the refreshing speed.
- sek 15y ago
  It's a memory problem afaik and on the Kindle it's a display 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.
bo1024 15y ago
I absolutely agree. This is especially noticeable with more technical documents like research papers or textbooks. On the kindle, to flip to a particular page, you have to go into the menu, pop up a symbols list, navigate with arrows to each digit, then click go. And each of these keypresses takes a long time -- probably half a second -- for the screen to refresh. Then, you repeat log(n) times until you've found (via binary search) the section you were looking for. Poorly thought out.
- salvadors 15y ago
  You don't need to use the symbol list to type numbers — alt–Q will give you a 1, etc. That still doesn't make the process you describe good, but if you must do that, this should at least speed it up considerably.
alok-g 15y ago
Corel PDF Fusion [1] implements "flick" view for skimming. Implementation however is nowhere close to right (too slow, mouse gestures mishandled, etc.) [1] http://www.corel.com/corel/product/index.jsp?pid=prod4100140 http://www.corel.com/corel/product/index.jsp?pid=prod4100140
functionform 15y ago
I wish the popular e readers had apis for working with book content - skimming could be only one of the awesome enchancements the tech community could make. Among others would be tying words to wikipedia lookups or research citations to the actual content, aggregating all graphs in some sort of navigable 3d interface, page in page reading, the list could literally go on forever. on the negative side, we'd probably have to sift through tons of crappy word cloud for your book apps.
- DanBC 15y ago
  I'm reading lots of Scandinavian crime fiction (in translation to English) at the moment. 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.
  - darasen 15y ago
    That would be helpful for many Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels as well. Especially the ones where people get bent out of shape if pronounce something wrong. Full disclosure: I read Tolkien for years before I discovered that elvish names with C such as Celeborn or pronounced with a K sound.
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    You could, for starters, install a Scandinavian dictionary and learn to read pronunciation guides. Assuming the author uses common, and not extravagant invented, names. 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.
jellicle 15y ago
Current e-ink screens take more or less a full second to refresh, which makes a mockery of skimming. You can't skim through the entire contents of a website yet either - but you should be able to! Hint, hint, startup people.
- SatvikBeri 15y ago
  This is why I prefer reading on the iPad or a laptop as opposed to a Kindle. While a Kindle is certainly easier on the eyes, being able to quickly flip through pages and search through a book is just too great to give up.
  - levesque 15y ago
    Is it? I never found myself wanting for such an ability. For me, the e-ink display is much more interesting than dynamic scrolling/skimming.
    - SatvikBeri 15y ago
      Some examples of how an iPad/PDF saves me time vs a Kindle: -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.
      - nodata 15y ago
        I expect the OP was talking about reading fiction books. You don't skim fiction.
  - 15y ago
HSO 15y ago
Skimming is the least of it. Current ebooks, in their linear form, are essentially the equivalent of 19th century horse carriages with motors. "Books" need to be reimagined. While reading is and will remain a fundamentally linear activity, there is no reason why books need to be. 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...
- khafra 15y ago
  Wow, fascinating ideas. It'd be amazing to have a textbook that had "adaptive abstraction levels" that let you read only the parts you needed detail on in detail, while tying the rest together in a high-level model that made it more useful; and had several different models into which the data fit, letting you read through the same material in the logical order of each model.
  - HSO 15y ago
    Before I migrated my entire library to my computer, I sometimes made carbon copies and cut the theorems out just to reach this sort of effect. Then I could reshuffle and have what I want in front of me instead of flipping around in a book (or across several books) which I hated for the sheer physicality of it. 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.
radicalbyte 15y ago
I happily trade the ability to skim for the ability to search by keyword. 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.
- lparry 15y ago
  iBooks has full text search, My kindle appears to as well although I think it might work off a prebuilt index Definitely agree about the poor quality publishers dump for sale
mrspeaker 15y ago
I was thinking it would be cool (well, it might only work for me...) to have a "skim" mode on e-readers which let skip, say, 8 pages at a time - but the screen would be horizontally split into 8 sections to show the text from each of the 8 pages. 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.
- rkudeshi 15y ago
  Do iOS apps have access to one's personal library in iBooks? (The same way music apps like LyricWiki can access your music on an iPhone, I mean.) 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.
yock 15y ago
For me, this problem is manifested in referencing bible verses. I love my Kindle, but use it once and you quickly learn that it wasn't designed for random access.
- darasen 15y ago
  This. Try opening right to Mathew on an e-reader. Then try to realize you need to take a look at another scripture so you keep your finger between the pages you are on flip back a bit read what you need then then easily return to where you were. This holds true in programming books as well. 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.
- skymt 15y ago
  The Kindle version of the ESV Bible makes clever use of the Kindle's index feature. All the verses in the Bible are indexed using abbreviated book names. So if I want to reach John 3:16, I hit Menu -> Index and type "jn 3 16<enter>". I'd rather have proper fuzzy matching ("jhn 3 16" wouldn't work, you need the exact abbreviation), but it's a workable substitute.
wazoox 15y ago
The updated nook color has a new "skimming" bar. It allows to go from the beginning to the end of the book in a swipe, displaying chapter titles and sample phrases. It's really usable, but of course it couldn't work on an eInk device. Unfortunately it only works on epub, not PDFs alas.
jrockway 15y ago
The worst ebook feature is that the Kindle only stores max(last_read_page, current_page). This means that if you follow a footnote to the end of the book, your reading position is lost forever. This makes flipping through the book a mentally-expensive proposition. (The screen refresh also makes this impossible.) 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.)
- hinathan 15y ago
  Yes, this is intensely annoying. I've stopped buying technical and reference books on Kindle because of this 'feature'.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  I could be wrong in this case, but I believe that is what the "Back" key is for.
  - TeMPOraL 15y ago
    On my Kindle, the Back button works perfectly well in this case, returning you from footnote to the point where you followed it in the main text.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - jrockway 15y ago
      Try reading a multi-page footnote or manually exploring nearby footnotes.
      - TeMPOraL 15y ago
        Did that on pg's Hackers & Painters. Back key works just as expected for me. It's like a stack - you can pop significant transitions from it, like following a reference or leaving the book.
pooriaazimi 15y ago
Take a look at this short video: http://www.macrumors.com/2012/01/23/multi-touch-page-flipping-ebook-concept-shown-on-an-ipad/ http://www.macrumors.com/2012/01/23/multi-touch-page-flippin... It shows how skimming could actually work on an iPad, and it's fantastic.
tessellated 15y ago
Forget skimming! In ebooks I can search for words and phrases, that feature alone weights up any inconvenience.
malandrew 15y ago
What books need is more aggressive editing. Skimming wouldn't be necessary if the goal were maximizing signal versus noise. I'd pay a premium for the same book more aggressively edited. There's a cost associated with the benefit of reading. Time is now at a premium and part of the cost of a book along with the monetary cost. 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-around-250-pages-plus-or-minus-50-pages http://www.quora.com/Do-book-publishers-push-for-books-to-be...
richardw 15y ago
Closely related to skimming - can't do an equivalent of a binary search on it, if you have to jump back 100 pages to look at something you saw. I have a recipe book with 1000 recipes on the Kindle and it's a total nightmare to use. A paper copy is so much more usable. 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.
- tikhonj 15y ago
  The issue is not the interface, it's the speed--an e-ink display is naturally slower right now. It is a real problem but one due to technology rather than UI. 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.

99 points by ssaraiya 15y ago

Meh, what really is frustrating is the inability to sell used ebooks.

If the CPU usage isn't a problem then that seems pretty easily solvable. I can certainly see how it could work. But I take it's the processing part that's the problem?

farnsworth 15y ago
I think it's more just the screen update speed. You can flip pages about as quickly as the screen will update, which is fairly slow. Also, the visible page area is much smaller than a normal book, especially a textbook or a journal, and you can only see one page at a time. It makes for slow skimming and sort of tunnel vision that causes a loss of the visual structure.
- sek 15y ago
  Sounds like a task for the GPU.
  - dangrossman 15y ago
    A faster GPU won't make the e-ink microcapsules rearrange more quickly.
    - sek 15y ago
      I heard from the kindle gen 4 announcement that the processor rate has influence on the refreshing speed.
sek 15y ago
It's a memory problem afaik and on the Kindle it's a display 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.

bo1024 15y ago

I absolutely agree. This is especially noticeable with more technical documents like research papers or textbooks. On the kindle, to flip to a particular page, you have to go into the menu, pop up a symbols list, navigate with arrows to each digit, then click go. And each of these keypresses takes a long time -- probably half a second -- for the screen to refresh. Then, you repeat log(n) times until you've found (via binary search) the section you were looking for. Poorly thought out.

salvadors 15y ago
You don't need to use the symbol list to type numbers — alt–Q will give you a 1, etc. That still doesn't make the process you describe good, but if you must do that, this should at least speed it up considerably.

alok-g 15y ago

Corel PDF Fusion [1] implements "flick" view for skimming. Implementation however is nowhere close to right (too slow, mouse gestures mishandled, etc.) [1] http://www.corel.com/corel/product/index.jsp?pid=prod4100140 http://www.corel.com/corel/product/index.jsp?pid=prod4100140

functionform 15y ago

I wish the popular e readers had apis for working with book content - skimming could be only one of the awesome enchancements the tech community could make. Among others would be tying words to wikipedia lookups or research citations to the actual content, aggregating all graphs in some sort of navigable 3d interface, page in page reading, the list could literally go on forever. on the negative side, we'd probably have to sift through tons of crappy word cloud for your book apps.

DanBC 15y ago
I'm reading lots of Scandinavian crime fiction (in translation to English) at the moment. 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.
- darasen 15y ago
  That would be helpful for many Sci-Fi and Fantasy novels as well. Especially the ones where people get bent out of shape if pronounce something wrong. Full disclosure: I read Tolkien for years before I discovered that elvish names with C such as Celeborn or pronounced with a K sound.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  You could, for starters, install a Scandinavian dictionary and learn to read pronunciation guides. Assuming the author uses common, and not extravagant invented, names. 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.

jellicle 15y ago

Current e-ink screens take more or less a full second to refresh, which makes a mockery of skimming. You can't skim through the entire contents of a website yet either - but you should be able to! Hint, hint, startup people.

SatvikBeri 15y ago
This is why I prefer reading on the iPad or a laptop as opposed to a Kindle. While a Kindle is certainly easier on the eyes, being able to quickly flip through pages and search through a book is just too great to give up.
- levesque 15y ago
  Is it? I never found myself wanting for such an ability. For me, the e-ink display is much more interesting than dynamic scrolling/skimming.
  - SatvikBeri 15y ago
    Some examples of how an iPad/PDF saves me time vs a Kindle: -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.
    - nodata 15y ago
      I expect the OP was talking about reading fiction books. You don't skim fiction.
- 15y ago

HSO 15y ago

Skimming is the least of it. Current ebooks, in their linear form, are essentially the equivalent of 19th century horse carriages with motors. "Books" need to be reimagined. While reading is and will remain a fundamentally linear activity, there is no reason why books need to be. 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...

khafra 15y ago
Wow, fascinating ideas. It'd be amazing to have a textbook that had "adaptive abstraction levels" that let you read only the parts you needed detail on in detail, while tying the rest together in a high-level model that made it more useful; and had several different models into which the data fit, letting you read through the same material in the logical order of each model.
- HSO 15y ago
  Before I migrated my entire library to my computer, I sometimes made carbon copies and cut the theorems out just to reach this sort of effect. Then I could reshuffle and have what I want in front of me instead of flipping around in a book (or across several books) which I hated for the sheer physicality of it. 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.

radicalbyte 15y ago

I happily trade the ability to skim for the ability to search by keyword. 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.

lparry 15y ago
iBooks has full text search, My kindle appears to as well although I think it might work off a prebuilt index Definitely agree about the poor quality publishers dump for sale

mrspeaker 15y ago

I was thinking it would be cool (well, it might only work for me...) to have a "skim" mode on e-readers which let skip, say, 8 pages at a time - but the screen would be horizontally split into 8 sections to show the text from each of the 8 pages. 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.

rkudeshi 15y ago
Do iOS apps have access to one's personal library in iBooks? (The same way music apps like LyricWiki can access your music on an iPhone, I mean.) 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.

yock 15y ago

For me, this problem is manifested in referencing bible verses. I love my Kindle, but use it once and you quickly learn that it wasn't designed for random access.

darasen 15y ago
This. Try opening right to Mathew on an e-reader. Then try to realize you need to take a look at another scripture so you keep your finger between the pages you are on flip back a bit read what you need then then easily return to where you were. This holds true in programming books as well. 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.
skymt 15y ago
The Kindle version of the ESV Bible makes clever use of the Kindle's index feature. All the verses in the Bible are indexed using abbreviated book names. So if I want to reach John 3:16, I hit Menu -> Index and type "jn 3 16<enter>". I'd rather have proper fuzzy matching ("jhn 3 16" wouldn't work, you need the exact abbreviation), but it's a workable substitute.

wazoox 15y ago

The updated nook color has a new "skimming" bar. It allows to go from the beginning to the end of the book in a swipe, displaying chapter titles and sample phrases. It's really usable, but of course it couldn't work on an eInk device. Unfortunately it only works on epub, not PDFs alas.

jrockway 15y ago

The worst ebook feature is that the Kindle only stores max(last_read_page, current_page). This means that if you follow a footnote to the end of the book, your reading position is lost forever. This makes flipping through the book a mentally-expensive proposition. (The screen refresh also makes this impossible.) 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.)

hinathan 15y ago
Yes, this is intensely annoying. I've stopped buying technical and reference books on Kindle because of this 'feature'.
sliverstorm 15y ago
I could be wrong in this case, but I believe that is what the "Back" key is for.
- TeMPOraL 15y ago
  On my Kindle, the Back button works perfectly well in this case, returning you from footnote to the point where you followed it in the main text.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - jrockway 15y ago
    Try reading a multi-page footnote or manually exploring nearby footnotes.
    - TeMPOraL 15y ago
      Did that on pg's Hackers & Painters. Back key works just as expected for me. It's like a stack - you can pop significant transitions from it, like following a reference or leaving the book.

pooriaazimi 15y ago

Take a look at this short video: http://www.macrumors.com/2012/01/23/multi-touch-page-flipping-ebook-concept-shown-on-an-ipad/ http://www.macrumors.com/2012/01/23/multi-touch-page-flippin... It shows how skimming could actually work on an iPad, and it's fantastic.

tessellated 15y ago

Forget skimming! In ebooks I can search for words and phrases, that feature alone weights up any inconvenience.

malandrew 15y ago

What books need is more aggressive editing. Skimming wouldn't be necessary if the goal were maximizing signal versus noise. I'd pay a premium for the same book more aggressively edited. There's a cost associated with the benefit of reading. Time is now at a premium and part of the cost of a book along with the monetary cost. 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-around-250-pages-plus-or-minus-50-pages http://www.quora.com/Do-book-publishers-push-for-books-to-be...

richardw 15y ago

Closely related to skimming - can't do an equivalent of a binary search on it, if you have to jump back 100 pages to look at something you saw. I have a recipe book with 1000 recipes on the Kindle and it's a total nightmare to use. A paper copy is so much more usable. 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.

tikhonj 15y ago
The issue is not the interface, it's the speed--an e-ink display is naturally slower right now. It is a real problem but one due to technology rather than UI. 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.