After a round of price reductions, Nook has now joined Amazon Kindle in offering a software application to read books on Android devices. I take this as more evidence in support of my earlier assertion that dedicated book reading hardware is not useful for customer who also carry other devices such as smart phones or tablets, and that multi-purpose devices will win out in the not-so-distant future.
I was excited to see annotations mentioned in the description of the updated Papers app for the iPad, but was disappointed in the execution. They added two kinds of annotations: text notes and highlighted passages. While both are useful for active reading and appropriate given the characteristics of the device, the implementation left a lot to be desired.
Recently, I came across an interesting article on students’ attitudes to reading online vs. in textbooks. The article appeared in the Nieman Reports, published by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Esther Wojcicki, a teacher, relates her students’ reactions to being asked to read online. She reports that
…early in the school year many of these students had written a fiery editorial about e-textbooks in their social studies classes. In part it read, “… online textbooks hinder study habits and force the use of computers. … and are detrimental to learning and inconvenient.” The editorial concluded with these words: “If the school wishes to cultivate the use of e-books, it should at the very least offer students the option to continue using the old, hardcover books.”
The teacher thought that six months of use of online reading devices (she doesn’t say which, but I am assuming that a Kindle device was involved, since she says that this happened before the iPad was released) would accustom students to the new medium. She was wrong.
To try to understand the software limitations of inking on the iPad, I had earlier described an ad hoc writing experiment I had conducted on some free iPad applications designed for drawing. The goal was to understand whether the software imposed any fundamental limitations on marking on an iPad using a finger or a stylus. Because the device is designed to be operated with a finger, there seem to be some hardware-based limitations on the size of the tip of the stylus that prevent the kind of fine-grained visual feedback one needs to write. My conclusion at the time was that there was something wrong with the way applications got stroke data from the device that made all of them track so poorly.
It appears that I was over-generalizing. First, given the capabilities of the iPad platform to download and render video, it seems unlikely that the hardware is not capable of providing events fast enough; the question was really about the software. A reader of this blog pointed out that I had missed the Penultimate app, and this app was apparently quite good at handling ink. I had indeed not tested it because at the time I was testing only free apps.
I am trying to understand the capabilities of existing iPad applications with respect to active reading. In this spirit, I have reviewed iAnnotate, and have written about e-books in general. Mekentosj Papers is a Mac application for managing academic papers; a version of it has been ported to the iPad. The idea is that you can use it to find papers you need to read, read them, and also manage their re-finding. The app fails on all accounts.
In a recent post, James Landay compared Dan Bricklin’s note-taking app with a research project called NotePals done at FXPAL during a summer internship by Richard Davis, James’ student. The idea behind both is that writing on a small device (or with poor spatial resolution) is hard, but if you write large and then scale down the ink, you get much more legible results.
Dan’s iPad app works great for this purpose, and with only a little practice one can get really proficient with it. I’ve used it as my primary sketching tool on the iPad, including for sketching interface designs. I wish I could import background images into it for sketching on, but otherwise it’s a nice basic tool. The same idea — write on a zoomed out image & then shrink the ink — works great on the iAnnotate app as well, although the interaction is not really optimized for that the way that Briklin’s app is.
Last week, I went to a SF Bay Area ACM Chapter talk by Peter Binfield and Sara Wood of PLoS, which they covered the motivation for establishing the PLoS journals, and talked about some of the challenges of running this operation. PLoS is a non-profit publisher of scientific and medical information that arose out a desire to reduce journal subscription costs to academic libraries.
PLoS publishes six specialized open-source journals, and one additional uber-journal, PLoS-One, that includes everything else. While they refer to themselves in print (and in the talk) as publishers of scientific research literature, they in fact appear to be focused more narrowly on the biomedical literature.
Miles Efron and I have written about micro-IR in the past (see here, here, and here), and I recently came across another interesting example in the form of the Houzz App for the iPad. Houzz is an interface that fronts a collection of photographs of house interiors, the kind of stuff you might find in magazines and interior design/decoration books. It provides (an imperfect) browsing and search interface to find images by geographic area, by room function, etc. It also has a mode which brings together sets of images on a theme, curated by a designer with a blog. Each set of images comes with an introduction by the blogger, a bit of background on the person, commentary on each image, and even blog-like discussions among readers and designers associated with each theme.
Last week I made a handshake bet that Amazon will stop selling the Kindle device in a year’s time. Today I am putting it in writing. Amazon will stop selling its devices for several reasons: because the margins are higher on books, because ultimately people won’t want to have multiple, specialized devices with significantly-overlapping functions, and because the devices themselves are quite limited.
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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about iAnnotate, a document annotation app for the iPad. On Friday, the folks who develop the app left a comment on the blog enumerating some of the changes made to program. In addition to redesigning the document view, the most significant change made it easier to import documents. Now not only can you download documents through a dedicated server that you run on the network (I run it on my laptop) but also from an integrated web browser. This makes it easy to collect PDF files and then to switch back to the reading mode of iAnnotate to read the newly-downloaded documents.