The advantages of paper books that I have in mind here have already been discussed in some earlier posts and comments, namely notation and random access. I think these issues are worth further examining for two reasons: (1) these features must be carried over from one generation of reading device to the next; (2) the first company who gets them right will command the coveted academic and business markets (at least until someone comes up with The Great Universal eReader).
The quagmire of production and delivery aside, books are in fact very functional pieces of technology in their present form. They are durable, easy to use, and accommodating to different purposes. If we’re only reading for pleasure, then we can simply sit back and read at our own pace. If we’re reading for a seminar or a meeting, then we can ramp up our involvement and make notes in our reading material in any old idiosyncratic way we like, circles and arrows, exclamation points, question marks, underlining, highlighting, book marking to hell and gone. This is one way in which many readers (this reader included) make books their own while also making them more useful.
The challenge isn’t enabling any one particular note-taking tactic, but creating an interface that is as open as a page of paper (without the absurd price-tag of the iRex1000S), and though no ereader seems to have leapt this hurdle successfully so far, theoretically, ereaders should someday offer greater note-taking convenience than books. Someday we should be able to switch our marginalia on and off like switching layers on and off in PhotoShop; we should be able to search out notes and post-its just like searching the body of the primary text; in short, our notations should gain all the advantages of digital storage and presentation right along with our books.
Random access may not have the same rosy efuture. It’s far from effective on any ereader I’ve seen or read about, and I don’t know how many manufacturers are taking its development seriously. By random access I simply mean the ability to open a book to an unspecified page, to flip or skim. This may not sound important but it enables us to read in different ways. It allows us to control our access to the material rather than having our access prescribed for us. Admittedly, we do most of our reading in a strictly prescribed, linear fashion, (left to right and down), but we aren’t always reading to get from A to B, especially when we’re asked to make something out of what we read, to write a paper or give a presentation.
We need to be able to search for specific entries or passages, and digital technology will only improve on the index. We also need to be able to skim and flip pages freely in the event that we don’t know exactly what it is we might be looking for. Random access allows us to wander through our books as freely as any hunch might wander through our minds. We compare random examples of narrative voice against a hypothesis, or dig through a report to see where a certain word or phrase has been omitted. Most of these hunches inevitably lead to dead ends, but when they don’t they lead to the ideas which are most worth writing about, ideas that become articles, other books, or business ventures.
If digital technology can’t improve on random access capabilities, I do have hope that someday it can emulate them. Until it does, paper books will have a decided advantage over ebooks in their flexibility to different kinds of interactions. And that’s really the key word: interaction. We don’t always read carefully, but people never pick up a book to ignore it the way we sometimes turn on the radio or the TV just to provide a backing track for daily tasks. Reading takes work, and we need to be able to work with what we read.
I’m holding out against reading digitally because, as you point out, the physical book still has everything I want and the ereader has yet to catch up. The hard part for ereader manufacturers right now seems to be exactly what you are writing about: the challenge of transferring all the existing benefits of the book to ereaders. Adding a “track-changes” option, like in Word, might be one way to take notes, but not without first attaching either a keyboard or a stylus to the already amorphous “ereader”. But then the ereader would become another tablet or blackberry or PDA instead of just a “reader,” which is why incorporating ereader functions into existing, pervasive technology and devices (laptops, tablets PCs, cellphones) may be more beneficial for ebooks in the long run. I have a nagging suspicion that ereaders will eventually go the way of the portable DVD player, PDA, CD player, and PalmPilot when they gets steamrolled into our next generation of computers or, most likely, cellphones.
I don’t know how useful a random search program will be in the ebook future, though. For me, the basis for randomly flipping through a book is not the reading, but the actual flipping of the pages. It’s just an unconscious physical reaction to picking up a book, the way you automatically juggle a baseball whenever holding one, that sometimes leads to brief reading. I don’t think a quickly-scrolling screen will recreate this. Instead, a kind of extended preview of a good part(like they have in beginning of some thriller and horror novels) might become more common for ebooks.
So the challenges for ereaders go. But I have a question for you: When will you start reading novels digitally? Will you wait to buy a special e-reading device until you can comfortably read from it, write on it, flip through it, stain the epaper with rings of beer and turn the corners of your favorite epages down, or will you start reading novels on a device that you already own, like your cellphone, if it was as easy as opening a text message? Or will you ever eread?
Eric’s borrowing my BeBook right now, so presumably he’s ereading as we speak.
I agree that ereaders aren’t there yet, but a lot of these features are in various ereaders in inchoate form.
The Sony Reader, for example, has number buttons with which you can enter any random page number. Not ideal, but not nothing either.
And the Kindle has a keyboard. Eric’s onto something though. Being able to write directly on documents with a stylus and save those notations as a second file that overlaps like an old transparency would be a huge selling point for me. The technology already exists for computer software, so I imagine once the ereader hardware starts playing catchup with the potential of ereaders as a readers tool, something like this will be a no brainer. Hopefully.