TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

I guess I don’t understand your gripe, Joe. Want to watch a video, read a book, access your e-mail, peruse the web simultaneously? Use a laptop or your iPhone if you wnat portability, your desktop if you don’t care about portability. Why does the Kindle (or any other dedicated reading device) have to evolve to include all these things that I, for one, am trying to get away from? You already have options available. There is nothing you can do on your Kindle that you can’t do your laptop right now.

Does content have to evolve, too, to, as you put, make the same kind of leap as occurred from rradio to TV? No, it doesn’t. In fact, TV hasn’t been such a wonderful leap. I’m old enough to remember listening to radio programs that actually required me to imagine what a character was doing, or looked like, or was capable of. How many more devices do we need that take away or reduce the need for us to use our imagination and minds. Reading is pleasurable because, among other things, it allows us to use our imagination to envision a person, place, or thing; TV, OTOH, removes any need to exercise our minds because it displays everything for us (and with HD TV you can even see the pimples on your favorite sports figure’s face — how stimulating is that!).

TV was a technology with great promise that has let that promise pass by the way side as it sought the lowest common denominator in a mass audience. Books, although sometimes also guilty of the same thing, tend to be less focused on the most common denominator and at least try to reach a more discerning audience.

If publishers want to provide more of what you call content-rich options, they can, and if I care about those options, I can take advantage of them on my laptop. However, I prefer not to be spoon fed content and to actually have to use my mind for something more strenuous than keeping my eyes open to view another mind-numbing TV program.

I may have a neanderthal outlook in this regard, but I think it is tragic what the so-called 24-hour news channels on TV have done to our world. Now news has to be in 10-second soundbites (real indepth coverage there) to hold interest. In the old days, one got a snippet of a news story and then had to actually read a newspaper to get the details. Today, most people have no patience, time, interest, and perhaps even ability for reading newspapers when 10-seconds of Fox tells you all you need to know. Expanding dedicated reading devices to include these options will simply drive another nail into the coffin of reading to learn or for pleasure.

Joe leaves unaddressed _why_ you’d want all the links and media inside a book.

I can see times when links are good. Take, for example, _The Informant! A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald. He has extensive references for all the facts, comprising 10% of the book. I’d like to have seen “mouse-over” buttons (like the annotations we can make on the Kindle) for that info, rather than link to the appendix, then go back to the page. That would be a good use of the technology. Linking out to the court documents might be possible, and even interesting, but it would detract from the book (a lot for me, already prone to distractrions) and dilute the narrative.

My answer to Joe: because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should do something.

I also agree with all the comments. To go a step further each disadvantage associated with the traditional book is an attribute in disguise. Are books limited, unconnected, finite and static? Maybe just such qualities provoke comprehension and learning. In all communication functions of legibility, navigation, persistence, authentication books are considered obsolete. But for critical learning, thinking and exercise of imagination books are actually more advanced than searchable, connected, continuously revised and hyperlinked multimedia.

There is a reason that the delete key is first required in a context of screen reading. Distraction and interruption, unwanted pop-ups and too many search results damage what scholars regard as the “performative space” of the traditional book.

There is no avoiding the fact that with every “advance” in technology, we lose something along the way. When cars replaced trains, we gained convenience and independence. On the other hand, we filled our air with pollution, and defaced our landscape with miles of ugly highways. Unlike Europe, the USA does not now have a viable system of train transportation. We were able to advance into the new world, without preserving what was valuable in the old one.

As we shift our reading from paper books to ebooks, we gain some things and lose some things. Every computer-related interaction is filled with countless opportunities for distraction. It might be nice to offer a “distraction free” reading option in our ebooks — similar to the various software programs that give you “distraction free” writing, by putting a big white page onto a black background, without all the buttons and menu options — and without a lifeline to the outside world of the Intenet.

I would like that “distraction free” reading option as an option only. In order to enjoy all the benefits and advantages of reading ebooks, I want my ebook reading device to do everything — everything except make coffee and remove my already-purchased files.

Michael Pastore
50 Benefits of Ebooks

I need ‘distraction free’ reading. Believe it or not, there are still some things in this world that require a serious attention span. Some of our jobs, for example. Mine certainly does. I imagine that surgeons don’t do a lot of multitasking. Multitasking and *driving* frequently results in *death*. Having an attention span requires training to develop and to retain. The only distraction I *welcome* in the midst of my long-form reading, is looking up words in an integrated dictionary. Which in that setting is *less* distracting than in meatspace with a printed book, because it doesn’t require me to walk over to the shelf and grab the dictionary.

I guess I have another question about this. Let’s say that we do end up with total multimedia devices. It could happen; if it were the only option, I’d probably accept it, as long as the device were e-ink. But what about, you know, ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’? Or ‘The Brothers Karamazov’? It sounds a bit like you and a couple of the commenters are suggesting a new art form, and that serious readers of texts should maybe just stick to printed books for actual reading? ??

Anyone into the dead trees critique should try bringing up a Rocket Book or Soft Book among the dead handheld readers. There is nothing more illegible than a black screen. There is also the zombie aspect. Try comparing two or more books without two or more Kindles. Or try direct navigation between a print source index and a screen location.

Oh, and what about power requirements of a paper book? Paper books work for centuries and display for free. All electronic communications are pretty dead without current. Oh, and what about application of digital technologies? Paper book production including on-the-fly Amazon fulfillment is fully digitized. The revolution has advanced paper books more than screen books.

Screen books are the real dead end. And their fatal error, all along, has been to try and mimic paper books.

There are a few things I’d like to see added to Kindle and eBook publishing — hyperlinks within a book.

I’ve seen this with chapters, which for fiction isn’t so important. But for non-fiction type of reference books, it would be great to have a hyperlinked table of contents, hyperlinks to footnotes (which eReaders could make endnotes because there are no “pages” per se), and hyperlinks within an index at the end.

These would be pretty basic but great. They would require publishers spend time creating the hyperlinks and hyper indices. I’ve purchased several non-fiction books and they don’t have anything approaching this, which would only be using what the Kindle has available today.

The Kindle, though, does have a few hyper features already — the dictionary for looking up words (not just for definitions, but for additional nuance), wikipedia available online (it actually looks and works at an excellent level but isn’t great in its feel yet), and searching for text within a book.

Even while reading fiction, I find this amazingly useful — sometimes I like to look backwards to when a character was first mentioned to see if the foreshadowing earlier was something I mentally flagged as unusual or noteworthy before.

Text navigation and crunching will come to the Kindle much sooner than multi-media. Thanks to many web sites becoming more and more mobile friendly, the Kindle is getting better at reading web sites.

A major problem for the mobile web, though, is that many sites have a mobile version of their own pages, but all of their hyper links are not mobile friendly, which results in people like me reading on Kindles and BlackBerry phones dreading all the hyperlinked content to pages with Flash and extensive Java applets.

I think many of the commenters here are missing Joe’s point – that pushing the envelope opens us to new experiences. We shouldn’t be satisfied with devices that haven’t explored the opportunities that interactivity can give us.

I’ve been online long enough to remember a college friend complaining about images on the web (they were distracting, they choked the connection, interfered with finding information…). My recommendation was that he leave them turned off via his browser settings and let the rest of us enjoy the “new” visual nature of the web.

Just because your car has cruise control doesn’t mean you have to use it – some new features you’ll like, others you won’t. Not taking advantages of better technology is a mistake.