Encyclopaedias and their successors

Tim Carmody argues that Britannica didn't fall specifically to Wikipedia but, more generally, to the PC, as the tool parents buy to enhance their children's prospects. Wikipedia simply administered the final blow. Some nice musings on Britannica and reference tools generally as domestic status objects: Britannica sold $250 worth of books for $1500; apparently the books were rarely opened. (But at least, when opened, more use than the leather bound phone books filmed as Dumbledore's spell books.)

[via StatusQ]

QR codes and twitching

Hugo Andrade and David Parra Puente, of the Pacoche Nature Reserve in Ecuador, are trying to connect birdsong with identification information, using QR codes as a mediator between the two: something like Shazam for birdsong. The QR code step may seem a bit clunky but it allows a two-way interaction from song to book, and vice versa, recognising the limitations of typical birdsong descriptions ('tee-do-do-eet') in field guides and, perhaps, that mobile phones have limitations for field consultation.

[Reported by Jennifer Ouelette via NotExactlyRocketScience]

Extreme ebooks: the Dead Sea Scrolls

A collaboration between Google and the Israel Museum. Not only viewable, in superb detail as you zoom in, but delivering on-line translation and commentary as you select text elements.

[via Engadget]

Billy's no longer for books

The Economist has spotted that IKEA are increasing the depth of Billy's shelves, having noted that people use them for so many things other than books. It sparks another discussion of the future of the printed book.

[via Techcrunch]

Michael Stern Hart

...who quietly invented ebooks, 30 years ago, died on 6 September. He recalled 'I envisioned sending the Declaration of Independence to everyone on the net... all 100 of them... which would have crashed the whole thing...'. This toe in the water led to Project Gutenberg, run by volunteers and, currently, the largest repository of free books. Its mission statement is delightful including it's management policy, written by Hart:
Because we are totally powered by volunteers we are hesitant to be very bossy about what our volunteers should do, or how to do it.

[via Guardian books]

How to read a magazine

Lovely parody of instructional screens, by Khol Vinh, following his post on over-complex instruction overlays (most of which will never be read) for iPad and other apps. My issue is that these instructions often aren't easily found after first use i.e. at the time people start realising they're probably not using a tool efficiently and want to find out quickly what they're missing.

[via Eye magazine]

On finding new books

Brian O'Leary on (unaffordable) research by Forrester revealing how people find out about new books (commonly, friends recommend and lend them, or they get them from the library). So the licensing of e-books to one account blocks some of the traditional routes to finding out about new books and authors. Both the post and discussion bear reading, not least because of O'Leary's reference to having time to read, 'now is the winter of my desk content'.

[via Tim O'Reilly]

Information overload - again

More here on Ann Blair's book Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age, which I've written about here. This time quoting Seneca: "the abundance of books is distraction".

[via John Naughton]

Reading from small displays

Jakob Nielsen, emphatically, on the difficulty of reading complex texts (such as privacy agreements) from iPhone-size displays. Citing research by R.I. Singh and colleagues Nielsen notes that texts are more difficult to read on small displays because the smaller window of information means greater reliance on the reader's memory and because navigating to access more information both distracts from the reading task and introduces the new task of 'reacquiring location' in the text.

(And, yes, he's aware that most people never read privacy agreements in any case.)

[via InfoDesign]

Device, on-line article reading and time of day

 
Analysis by ReaditLater showing how different devices (computer, phone, iPad) come into play to read on-line articles, according to time of day. Not surprisingly, perhaps, iPad reading peaks at the end of the day.

Good fonts bad fonts

Several people have asked me about the research that provoked Jonah Lehrer's 'demonstration' (on Radio4's Today programme) of the apparent enhancement of memory for text content by 'poor' legibility (i.e. less than typical text fonts). Lehrer's thesis: making the brain work harder to read these fonts increases processing and hence memory. Eventually I read the Cognition article that spawned Lehrer's blog post and subsequent appearance on Today (where he did, rather unfortunately, seem to present the science as if it was his own). As far as one can tell the research is intrinsically well-designed (without really seeing the materials, one's at a bit of disadvantage) but the speculation about the locus of the effect (along the lines of Lehrer's) and the implications for education are surprising. In the discussion there was no consideration of whether the supposedly less legible fonts were actually less legible or just 'different' and hence more memorable. And in the discussion there was no mention of the impact of typeface on assessment of the ease or difficulty of a text (see Song and Schwartz's review of type legibility on information processing) which would, in the long run, affect the real usability of unusual text fonts.  It's a great undergraduate project but I feel Cognition's reviewers should have been a little more exacting.

Here's a summary of some of the comments I made when initially asked for reactions to the Lehrer interview:
- a shame that the BBC didn't think this merited inclusion of an additional point of view to Lehrer's, and indulged (probably encouraged) his bad science demo
- not surprising the Beeb picked up on the story because fonts are easy and fun to tweak in order to change document appearance, but document design is about so much more than just typeface choice (a lot should follow from that choice alone)
- shame the corpus of evidence that might provide an alternative perspective was only alluded to but not presented. One Today programme interview will likely influence many more than decades of scholarly texts and manuals
- Lehrer's initial example of 'easy' design that (in his view) led to poor information processing was reading in Arial on the Kindle. Not many text designers would recommend that as an approach to reading
- If you look at modern text book design (both the original article authors and Lehrer make much of the implications for designing text books) in fact all sorts of techniques of highlighting, illustrating etc. are used to make elements of text more distinctive and memorable. And, historically, designers have used the less legible italic version of fonts to make small elements of text more obvious and memorable
- 'reading' covers many activities, not just reading to memorise: browsing, searching, quoting, referring back etc.
- if the researchers had looked at text in, say, shocking pink they might have found a similar effect (a shame they didn't do this, actually, since it would have added another, helpful, dimension to the research). Would they have then recommended that books were all printed in colour?

All this aside, looking at the type of text teenagers many learn and revise from now (maybe the typical Princeton entrant didn't), it's clear book designers have got there first.

US students prefer paper books, apparently

Press-released survey research by the US Book Industry Study Group (Student Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education) reveals that 75% of the students surveyed preferred paper textbooks over e- versions because of "print's look and feel, as well as its permanence and ability to be resold." Much about students' evaluation of the 'worth' of different kinds of learning material (of course, this is important for the industry to know), but less about their impact on learning.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Kindle and page numbers

Sarah Lacey writes on the limitations of Kindle's page numbering and footnotes (each Kindle 'page' has a location, allowing for the expansion or reduction of text size and consequent variable spread across screens. Locations are citable, but are still relatively exclusive, and don't make for the standard referencing format that Lacey seeks). The comments aren't sympathetic, reminding her that even in printed texts, page numbers aren't consistent across editions. Could Steven Johnson's proposal of a url for each page eventually help?

[via John Naughton]

On web openness and net neutrality

Tim Berners-Lee makes the case eloquently. Somewhat related, Steven Johnson argues at Web 2.0 summit for 'web redundancy', the mirror indexing of the pages of e-books (and possibly some apps) on the web, even if behind a copyright wall of some sort, so that they could be accessible to and citable and linkable. Without this access route, the scholarly traditions of referencing and citation, which have stood for centuries (starting with the indexing of the earliest printed books which, Johnson claims, underpinned the development of ideas in the enlightenment) lie at risk with the rise of 'stand-alone' e-books.

Berners-Lee makes specific mention of the stranglehold iTunes now has on music distribution. The final capitulation of Apple (records) to Apple (iTunes) last week is lamented by Christopher Caldwell in the FT. I would probably disagree with Caldwell about most things but understand why he finds this business so dispiriting.

What a coffee table e-book can do

Excellent Robert Scoble interview with Jean-Marie Hullot about his development of Fotopedia Heritage, an interactive compilation of photos of UNESCO World Heritage sites, compiled by photographers, app curators and the communityof users, and linked to aggregated information (currently drawn from UNESCO, Wikipedia and TripAdvisor) about each site. This is a first step towards personalised travel guides, and other applications Hullot has yet to reveal. Hullot describes how the essential components of the 'book', community, curation and iPad (or iPhone) technology are bound together by his team's understanding of software, a capacity he feels traditional publishers still lack.

Aside from the technical merits of the application, the delicious presentation of the photos (which are curated rigorously for quality) sent me straight to Google with thoughts (ahead of Hullot's travel application) of future destinations.

[via John Naughton]

Paper books are objects; eBooks are interactive

ReadWriteWeb has two recent posts: 5 ways that paper books are better than ebooks and 5 ways that ebooks are better than paper books. Boiled down: paper books are objects; eBooks are interactive.

Thumbs down for iPad

Several people are finding it hard to be excited by the iPad. Their verdict, in summary: an over-grown iPhone, with less functionality and connectivity than its smaller sibling, that locks users into consumption (of Apple-approved apps) rather than supporting creation.

Aaron Swartz and Cory Doctorow both rail against the boundaries of Apple's walled garden (which, Tim Bray has described as Disneyfied). Jeff Jarvis is modifying his initial enthusiasm. And this, by Quinn Norton, on the lack of impact of hyped technology on poor people, is salutary.

Incidentally iPad's backlit LCD display, while ideal for video and games, is, apparently, no match for Kindle.

[Quinn Norton and Tim Bray links via John Naughton]

Kindle and real reading

John Naughton has picked up (via The Princetonian) on the experience of Princeton students using Kindles donated by Amazon for their course work. One student reports:

“Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” he explained. “All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.”

Which takes us back to Lisa Jardine's comments that ebooks don't yet support 'real reading.'

Will they ever? Will the iPod ever substitute for orchestral listening, or even B&O?

Lisa Jardine on eBooks

BBC's magazine features Lisa Jardine's sceptical response to claims that ebooks will replace printed books. The mistake, she points out, is to ignore some of the ways we use conventional books e.g. annotating and sharing. So ebooks are likely to augment, rather than replace.

While I'm not so convinced about limitations in annotating ebooks (apps are bound to appear to augment the current, passive experience), sharing certainly doesn't seem to gel with ebook commerce at least as it has appeared so far. One thing I'm less sure about is the claim that e-books will never replace the sense/emotional experience of bound books. Apple has certainly delivered sensual and emotional experience across electronic platforms, and most particularly on personal devices such as the iPhone and iPod Touch. So why not for ebooks too?

[via Nico_MacDonald tweet]

Colour screens for e-books

Technology Review summarises the current technology options.