Lurdan
old wave
I've been going digital mainly for reasons of basic practicality. I live in a tiny flat with far too many physical books - to the point that some of them I can't easily get at if I want to. In terms of organizing ebooks I use the computer (I intend to move them onto their own network enabled external drive soon), and at the moment I convert things (except pdfs) to epubs because I've gradually been shifting over to using my cheap android tablet rather than the kindle for reading.
There's very much a trade off with all of these decisions. I like the larger form factor of the tablet, but having to charge the thing daily is a pain. As the articles I cited on the previous page indicate the largest area in which ebooks have been successful is fiction. And the ebook reading experience whether it be the older kindle design, the first generation mobi format or the current design of android ebook readers is heavily geared to the fiction reading experience.
The formatting of ebooks at the moment is a bit analogous to the early days of web design in which cumbersome attempts to get the format to do things it's not designed for meet extremes of bad usability implementation and awful aesthetics. One consequence is that in android epub readers the tendency has been to override publisher set styles (which are often really crap) to provide a better standardized reading experience. But it's weighted towards the fiction reading experience and sadly it's not always possible to override the readers own defaults when you need to.
I was trying to read Christopher Frayling's book about the yellow peril on the tablet - unfortunately the numerous quotations in the text were formatted as blockquotes without any other styling such as quotation marks. A common 'feature' of epub readers is that they ignore publisher set indentation. The one I was using formatted paragraphs identically ignoring the blockquote tags, so it was no longer possible to see what was a quotation and what was Frayling's own words. And although there was supposedly the ability to turn this off it didn't work. I found another reader which did allow me to turn off its indentation default (although I also lost some of the more attractive font styling as well). But the implementation of footnotes (of which there were a lot in Frayling's book) was significantly worse in this second reader. Whereas the first reader opened them up in a pop over so it was possible to see quickly whether the footnote contained anything interesting, the second rather clumsily implemented the publishers links to them (which are sometimes too small to easily tap) and then sometimes left you stranded if the publisher hadn't implemented a return link. The point I'm trying to make with this tediously long example is that for non-fiction texts it's still somewhat early days. (For scientific texts it's significantly worse of course). However I have no doubt that good practise whether in the design of ebooks or of ebook readers will improve over time.
Why bother with that kind of nonsense at the moment ? As I said it's a trade off. Sometimes it's easier to look up something up in a physical book, particularly for texts you're reasonably familiar with. On the other hand the ability to do a text search in an electronic text is just invaluable. I like the electronic reading experience, although I understand others don't. In the future as my onset cataracts get worse the usability advantages of reading things on a screen will undoubtedly become more important. But at the moment it's simple. If I buy physical books at the rate I used to they will very likely fall on me and kill me.
There's very much a trade off with all of these decisions. I like the larger form factor of the tablet, but having to charge the thing daily is a pain. As the articles I cited on the previous page indicate the largest area in which ebooks have been successful is fiction. And the ebook reading experience whether it be the older kindle design, the first generation mobi format or the current design of android ebook readers is heavily geared to the fiction reading experience.
The formatting of ebooks at the moment is a bit analogous to the early days of web design in which cumbersome attempts to get the format to do things it's not designed for meet extremes of bad usability implementation and awful aesthetics. One consequence is that in android epub readers the tendency has been to override publisher set styles (which are often really crap) to provide a better standardized reading experience. But it's weighted towards the fiction reading experience and sadly it's not always possible to override the readers own defaults when you need to.
I was trying to read Christopher Frayling's book about the yellow peril on the tablet - unfortunately the numerous quotations in the text were formatted as blockquotes without any other styling such as quotation marks. A common 'feature' of epub readers is that they ignore publisher set indentation. The one I was using formatted paragraphs identically ignoring the blockquote tags, so it was no longer possible to see what was a quotation and what was Frayling's own words. And although there was supposedly the ability to turn this off it didn't work. I found another reader which did allow me to turn off its indentation default (although I also lost some of the more attractive font styling as well). But the implementation of footnotes (of which there were a lot in Frayling's book) was significantly worse in this second reader. Whereas the first reader opened them up in a pop over so it was possible to see quickly whether the footnote contained anything interesting, the second rather clumsily implemented the publishers links to them (which are sometimes too small to easily tap) and then sometimes left you stranded if the publisher hadn't implemented a return link. The point I'm trying to make with this tediously long example is that for non-fiction texts it's still somewhat early days. (For scientific texts it's significantly worse of course). However I have no doubt that good practise whether in the design of ebooks or of ebook readers will improve over time.
Why bother with that kind of nonsense at the moment ? As I said it's a trade off. Sometimes it's easier to look up something up in a physical book, particularly for texts you're reasonably familiar with. On the other hand the ability to do a text search in an electronic text is just invaluable. I like the electronic reading experience, although I understand others don't. In the future as my onset cataracts get worse the usability advantages of reading things on a screen will undoubtedly become more important. But at the moment it's simple. If I buy physical books at the rate I used to they will very likely fall on me and kill me.
