5 Misconceptions About E-Books October 26, 2006
Posted by charris in : Community , trackbackLet me preface this with a full disclosure - I read e-books. This is, therefore, going to be a post that is unabashedly biased towards e-books. Which isn’t to say that this is a widely held view. In an entirely unscientific and completely informal “survey” of pre-service teachers at Alderson-Broadus College in West Virginia, 90% of the students (and 100% of the female students) had no desire to switch over to electronic textbooks regardless of any potential cost savings. In fact, cost had very little impact on the decisions against e-books. Instead, what surfaced where the usual statements I encounter whenever someone learns that I read e-books.
By the time I have a chance to explain what reading e-books truly involves, and especially if I can pull out my handheld and provide a demonstration of the technology, I can usually turn a hearty no into a questioning maybe. The problem is that I have been working at this e-book conversion business with a one-on-one restriction. By my carefully unscientific calculations, it will only take me about 2,984 years to reach everyone in education (slightly longer if I stop to sleep sometimes). So here goes my attempt at mass conversion. If you run into me at a conference, however, please feel free to ask for the demonstration =)
What I often hear:
1) I just can’t imagine curling up with a laptop in bed!
2) The text is so small - how can you manage to read it?
3) My book doesn’t take 10 minutes to boot up…
4) Looking at a screen for too long hurts my eyes.
5) I love books…why would I want to get rid of them?
Please understand that this is not any sort of attack on those statements. I felt the same way when I first heard about reading e-books. Actually, they are all true statements…or at least they were. You may recall the dismal failure that was the Rocket e-book reader. Short battery life, an almost unreadable screen, a dearth of books and a wealth of DRM made it quite an unpleasant experience. But oh boy have things changed!
Taking a look at the current status of each statement will help us reach a new understanding about e-books.
1) While you can certainly read e-books on your laptop or desktop, the real power of the format is in its mobility. I have been reading e-books on my Palm handheld computers for about five years. And while the initial quality wasn’t great, the new screens are very nice. New dedicated e-book machines are emerging as well. The iRex iLiad is a new e-book reader built using electronic ink on a sort of digital paper. The screen is about 6″x8.5″ - slightly wider than a half sheet of paper or about the size of a hard cover book. The difference is that it is less than a quarter of an inch thick. Compared to curling up with the latest Harry Potter (6.2″x9.3″ and almost 2 inches thick!) the iLiad is featherweight. The size of your e-book reader can drop even more if you are using a handheld computer like I do. But wait you say…wouldn’t the text be too small then?
2) The size of the e-book text displayed on a Palm T|X Handheld Computer using i-Silo and the “medium” font display is pretty much the same size (+/- 1mm) as 12pt printed computer fonts or the font used in AASL’s print version of Knowledge Quest (roughly 1/16th of an inch for a lowercase “s”). Unlike printed text, however, e-book fonts can usually be increased in size to accommodate different visual capabilities. In other words, every e-book can be a large-print book (i-Silo’s “largest” font size is about twice as large as the smallest, with a lowercase “s” measuring roughly 1/8th of an inch).
3) Reading e-books on a regular computer can include a lengthy boot-up time, as well as additional time lost to all the stuff that goes along with using computers (crashes, clicking to update virus software, clicking off the e-mail updates, etc.). Where e-books really shine is on handheld computers or specially designed readers. These devices tend to be “solid state” (a geeky way of saying that they lack moving parts like hard drives and use memory chips instead) and are designed to “sleep” instead of powering down. This means instant on access with the press of a button! And, since your e-book will come right back to where you left off, no fumbling for a lost page due to your bookmark “crashing on boot-up.”
4) Well…not much can be said here. Constant use of a screen can lead to tired eyes, headaches, etc. What I will say is that the new versions of LCD screens found in handheld computers are much better than before. If you are basing this on eye fatigue from looking at flickering CRT monitors or the old grayscale handheld screens, take another look. My Palm T|X handheld computer has a very nice screen that I can read from for hours without problems. The new readers from iRex and others are also using electronic ink which means that once the page is displayed there is no refreshing of the screen. Most monitors (including LCD screens) have to refresh the screen 60 or more times per second to maintain a changing image. This potentially distracting flicker is removed from e-ink displays.
5) This is always a difficult point to discuss, but here goes. When people speak of loving books, there are a number of points to consider. Do you love the feel of a well-bound book? The smell of fine paper and (we can dream) leather bindings? Or is it the stories that the books hold that you love? For me, it is both. I love nice books, and have been known to purchase multiple editions of the same book for purely aesthetic reasons. However…when it comes to accessing the stories held within, I find e-books more efficient.
Comments»
no comments yet - be the first?