3 ms·

There are tons of text features that suck or are absent in ebooks. Even footnotes aren't great, let alone things like facing-page translation—or anything else t

by ashark 12y ago

There are tons of text features that suck or are absent in ebooks. Even footnotes aren't great, let alone things like facing-page translation—or anything else that relies on two pages being visible side by side at once, which is quite a bit if you're reading much outside of mass-market fiction. Plus, yeah, diagrams, figures, et c. Poetry often blows in ebook form. A good paper book of poetry has a lot of care put in to precise placement of the text, and it can add a lot to the experience. Ebooks can't do that. Really, any book that benefits from fixed page boundaries has similar problems. Even one of ebooks' big advantages, full-text search, is worse than using an index unless either 1) you need to search for something that's not in the index, or 2) you're on a device with a full, real keyboard, so not a tablet or eink device. Ebooks are also very expensive and there's no used market—I'd effectively have to pay ~3x what I did to assemble my physical book collection to replace it with ebooks, provided there were an ebook version for all my dead-trees (not the case). It'd be even worse if most of my books were common paperbacks (the thing ebooks are best at replacing) since you can pick those up for next to nothing if you keep an eye out. 10x the cost to take such a collection digital, I'd imagine.

icebraining 12y ago
Sure ebooks can have precise text placement, just use a PDF. As for indexed vs full text search, an eBook can have both, and many do. No argument on the price, though it didn't hold for works out of copyright.
- ashark 12y ago
  > Sure ebooks can have precise text placement, just use a PDF. Not so hot on most e-ink devices, but yeah, you can use a print format to achieve print-like documents that throw the middle finger at your screen's dimensions/resolution with sometimes-nice results. > As for indexed vs full text search, an eBook can have both, and many do. Ah, but their indices are usually more of a pain to use than an index in a real book. Like footnotes, but even worse. As with full text search, though, it might beat the dead-tree if you're on a laptop/desktop (bigger screen that can show the index to the side of the text) but at that point there's not much distinction between an "ebook" and anything else one might read on a computer. > No argument on the price, though it didn't hold for works out of copyright. Unless they're not originally written in a language you can read, in which case odds are good that the best translation is still under copyright. In fact, it's not uncommon for there to be several copyright-protected translations all of which are better than any of the public domain ones. So technically, yes, you can go to PG and grab a ton of classics for free. Practically speaking, for non-[language(s) you can read] works, if it's worth putting in the time to read it you'll be well served by buying (or borrowing) a newer translation. All those 19th century ones have a way of being both less accurate and less pleasant for a modern reader.
- abakker 12y ago
  I'd love to see House of Leaves as an ebook. Even a PDF has limits, as do e reader screen sizes. If anyone makes that book work as well as paper, I'll consider ereaders a solved problem.
KeytarHero 12y ago
OneNote on my Surface Pro is about the best thing I've found, and yet it still has major flaws (this is without even getting into how bad its pdf import is). Capacitive touch + active-digitizer stylus can solve a lot of the problems with ebooks (and indeed does, particularly as far as annotation is concerned), but the software is still severely lacking. The main UX challenge that I haven't found anything has really solved yet is the ability to show 2 or more pages at once (and do so in a way that's simple & intuitive). Also related is some way to mimic the ability to, with a textbook, stick a pen or finger in between two pages as a "temporary bookmark", to make it easy to flip back & forth. Now that the hardware has caught up to where it needs to be, I think e-textbooks have the potential to get a lot better as software improves. I don't think the physical book will ever die, but I do suspect that ebooks will be much more prevalent in 10 years than they are now, when the software has finally solved UX challenges like these.
- ashark 12y ago
  >The main UX challenge that I haven't found anything has really solved yet is the ability to show 2 or more pages at once (and do so in a way that's simple & intuitive). Also related is some way to mimic the ability to, with a textbook, stick a pen or finger in between two pages as a "temporary bookmark", to make it easy to flip back & forth. Maybe a spot on the screen or a button on the side you can press to bounce to some "reference" bookmark, letting you navigate there normally until you release it, at which point you instantly return to the page you were reading.
azernik 12y ago
Depends on a) the quality of the e-book adaptation's typesetting and markup, and b) the size and quality of the device. The textbook publisher needs to invest a little (though possibly not as much as conventional typesetting) and the student needs to shell out on a full 10-inch screen (which need to be used on several books for the investment to amortize out correctly). Layout/markup: for well-done academic volumes (using Google Play and Sugimoto's "An Introduction to Japanese Society" as my reference piece) things like footnotes are actually a better experience than print - you tap a blue-highlighted superscript, and you get a model that pops up inline for you to read and then swipe away. No looking up the number at the bottom or (even worse) in the endnotes. Tables are all linkable and back buttons work, etc. On the other hand, a straight import of the original text and graphics without any semantic markup can be truly painful to use. Device quality: this matters more for things like academic volumes with charts/figures (as you mentioned) and graphic novels. If you have content that needs to be viewed on a single screen, and it's organized to fit on 10-inch-diagonal paper page (or larger), it's going to suffer a lot on a 7 inch tablet. especially on small form factors. If you try to read a book with tables and charts built for a full-size hardcover on a 7-inch tablet, it will go badly (I have tried this). On a ten-inch tablet with a screen closer to the hardcover size it's actually quite pleasant. These two issues interact a bit with the layout/markup issue; for example, I've seen linguistics books that try to give the same text in three versions (foreign language, individual-word translation, and idiomatic translation) as three-line clusters, like so: mah nishma`? what hear.PASS How are you doing? The typesetter didn't know how to make these reflow correctly using e-book markup (which may not be possible given the tools available?), which means that the line breaks are hardcoded, and the ends of long lines will be unviewable past the edge of the screen on 7-inch tablets. On a 10-inch tablet this works quite well. Doing the things college students do with textbooks (flipping back and forth between a pset and the material, for example) requires a bit of familiarity with the software but it's very doable and I think very pleasant once you get used to it. It is a barrier to entry, though, and I think e-book UIs need to make it easier to learn. This might just be my personal experience, but I find full-text search, even with a tablet screen, much faster than index lookup in print.

by ashark 12y ago

icebraining 12y ago

Sure ebooks can have precise text placement, just use a PDF. As for indexed vs full text search, an eBook can have both, and many do. No argument on the price, though it didn't hold for works out of copyright.

ashark 12y ago
> Sure ebooks can have precise text placement, just use a PDF. Not so hot on most e-ink devices, but yeah, you can use a print format to achieve print-like documents that throw the middle finger at your screen's dimensions/resolution with sometimes-nice results. > As for indexed vs full text search, an eBook can have both, and many do. Ah, but their indices are usually more of a pain to use than an index in a real book. Like footnotes, but even worse. As with full text search, though, it might beat the dead-tree if you're on a laptop/desktop (bigger screen that can show the index to the side of the text) but at that point there's not much distinction between an "ebook" and anything else one might read on a computer. > No argument on the price, though it didn't hold for works out of copyright. Unless they're not originally written in a language you can read, in which case odds are good that the best translation is still under copyright. In fact, it's not uncommon for there to be several copyright-protected translations all of which are better than any of the public domain ones. So technically, yes, you can go to PG and grab a ton of classics for free. Practically speaking, for non-[language(s) you can read] works, if it's worth putting in the time to read it you'll be well served by buying (or borrowing) a newer translation. All those 19th century ones have a way of being both less accurate and less pleasant for a modern reader.
abakker 12y ago
I'd love to see House of Leaves as an ebook. Even a PDF has limits, as do e reader screen sizes. If anyone makes that book work as well as paper, I'll consider ereaders a solved problem.

KeytarHero 12y ago

OneNote on my Surface Pro is about the best thing I've found, and yet it still has major flaws (this is without even getting into how bad its pdf import is). Capacitive touch + active-digitizer stylus can solve a lot of the problems with ebooks (and indeed does, particularly as far as annotation is concerned), but the software is still severely lacking. The main UX challenge that I haven't found anything has really solved yet is the ability to show 2 or more pages at once (and do so in a way that's simple & intuitive). Also related is some way to mimic the ability to, with a textbook, stick a pen or finger in between two pages as a "temporary bookmark", to make it easy to flip back & forth. Now that the hardware has caught up to where it needs to be, I think e-textbooks have the potential to get a lot better as software improves. I don't think the physical book will ever die, but I do suspect that ebooks will be much more prevalent in 10 years than they are now, when the software has finally solved UX challenges like these.

ashark 12y ago
>The main UX challenge that I haven't found anything has really solved yet is the ability to show 2 or more pages at once (and do so in a way that's simple & intuitive). Also related is some way to mimic the ability to, with a textbook, stick a pen or finger in between two pages as a "temporary bookmark", to make it easy to flip back & forth. Maybe a spot on the screen or a button on the side you can press to bounce to some "reference" bookmark, letting you navigate there normally until you release it, at which point you instantly return to the page you were reading.

azernik 12y ago

Depends on a) the quality of the e-book adaptation's typesetting and markup, and b) the size and quality of the device. The textbook publisher needs to invest a little (though possibly not as much as conventional typesetting) and the student needs to shell out on a full 10-inch screen (which need to be used on several books for the investment to amortize out correctly). Layout/markup: for well-done academic volumes (using Google Play and Sugimoto's "An Introduction to Japanese Society" as my reference piece) things like footnotes are actually a better experience than print - you tap a blue-highlighted superscript, and you get a model that pops up inline for you to read and then swipe away. No looking up the number at the bottom or (even worse) in the endnotes. Tables are all linkable and back buttons work, etc. On the other hand, a straight import of the original text and graphics without any semantic markup can be truly painful to use. Device quality: this matters more for things like academic volumes with charts/figures (as you mentioned) and graphic novels. If you have content that needs to be viewed on a single screen, and it's organized to fit on 10-inch-diagonal paper page (or larger), it's going to suffer a lot on a 7 inch tablet. especially on small form factors. If you try to read a book with tables and charts built for a full-size hardcover on a 7-inch tablet, it will go badly (I have tried this). On a ten-inch tablet with a screen closer to the hardcover size it's actually quite pleasant. These two issues interact a bit with the layout/markup issue; for example, I've seen linguistics books that try to give the same text in three versions (foreign language, individual-word translation, and idiomatic translation) as three-line clusters, like so: mah nishma`? what hear.PASS How are you doing? The typesetter didn't know how to make these reflow correctly using e-book markup (which may not be possible given the tools available?), which means that the line breaks are hardcoded, and the ends of long lines will be unviewable past the edge of the screen on 7-inch tablets. On a 10-inch tablet this works quite well. Doing the things college students do with textbooks (flipping back and forth between a pset and the material, for example) requires a bit of familiarity with the software but it's very doable and I think very pleasant once you get used to it. It is a barrier to entry, though, and I think e-book UIs need to make it easier to learn. This might just be my personal experience, but I find full-text search, even with a tablet screen, much faster than index lookup in print.