Why the Smart Reading Device of the Future May Be Paper

Physical books give me the third dimension which is necessary for the ability to flip back and forth between sections or even pages very fast. This process, at least for me, is very critical to reading that is focused on knowledge-gaining rather than fun. Forget books; I find it uncomfortable and very little productive while reading academic papers on my iPad. These papers in my field are usually 15-30 pages long and often have double columns (so now I have to even zoom in).

Am I the only one here who highlights, underlines, and writes furiously in the margins? I don't know how you can process a text or technical book without being able to touch it.

For years, before Instapaper and Readability, I used a little script that copied the text out of the current page and pasted it in plaintext, then printed it from TextMate monospaced and 4-up. I&#x27;d shove the pages in a pocket or the backseat and read them in my free time.<p>It&#x27;s a great way to take notes, circle interesting bits, and compare them later. I haven&#x27;t been able to replicate that system digitally.

&gt; The most influential factor, he found, was whether they could see pages in their entirety. When they had to scroll, their performance suffered.<p>There are still no good electronic devices for large format, color books. Which includes most textbooks. If a larger iPad is released, that will presumably be the primary target market.<p>I&#x27;m looking forward to such a device myself, as a nerd with a large collection of tabletop RPG PDFs.

Paper: among characteristics not mentioned, <i>where a passage occurs in a page</i> (or how far within a book or article) is part of the context, and I suspect that human&#x27;s spatial memory comes into play with this. Online infinite-scrolling content lacks this particular clue, and even PDFs only offer the &quot;where on the page&quot; vs. &quot;how far into the book&quot; aspect. I can also often remember my place in a book simply by staring at the page number and committing it to memory -- at least for a few hours or overnight. Though bookmarks are useful.<p>Electronic: Over half a century into the digital age and I think a significant problem is that we still haven&#x27;t settled on the &quot;right&quot; format for real information consumption. There are plain-text documents, simple HTML, word-processing formats, postscript and PDF documents, and now eBook formats. Absent its lack of text search, ghostview -- &#x27;gv&#x27; on Linux -- is still one of the best reading clients I know of, particularly in how it advances through the text. The Internet Archive&#x27;s online book reader is the best I&#x27;ve seen bar none, in particular its light-weight feel and auto-cropping of text so that the actual <i>content</i> of the book is centered on the page. I&#x27;ve submitted a request to evince (the GNOME PDF reader) that it do similarly. Still, I find myself constantly fighting with even the best PDF readers at finding the right balance between text sized large enough to read and fiddling with positioning the page onscreen.<p>Electronic formats may not be as good for first encounter and deep studying, but they are <i>immensely</i> useful for quick reference: the ability to 1) carry around a library of thousands of volumes and 2) instantly search to or open to a particular page or phrase is hugely useful. The ability to create an <i>external</i> reference that will find the relevant passage <i>in whatever form of the work you have handy</i> (similar to a URL, but not specific to a given instance) would be magical.<p>Some limitations of electronic formats can be mitigated somewhat: there are bookmarks, annotations, and other forms of marking up documents, though none match the immediacy of a penciled margin note, underlined passage, or dog-eared page.

&gt; And research finds that kids these days consistently prefer their textbooks in print rather than pixels.<p>My students only look at their textbook for the assigned exercises. I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;d prefer not to have one at all.

I love my Kobo eReader, but I think it&#x27;s important to note that 90% of the use it gets is reading fiction. When it comes to tech books or anything I hope to be learning and referencing, I go straight to paper.

To add my anecdote of others, I feel magazines don&#x27;t do as good a job with deep understanding as more &#x27;academic&#x27; layouts. Is this a font &amp; design issue hiding as a device issue?

Asimov wrote an essay in 1973 &quot;The Ancient and the Ultimate&quot; about a portable reading device that didn&#x27;t need power etc; it turned out it was the book.

Print is particularly important for learning and &quot;deep&quot; reading. I find my IQ is at least a few points higher when reading in print rather than on screen. eInk devices are kind of good, but made awkward by the 0.5 sec screen refresh delay...<p>There is something to be said about the versatility of hypertext, but I think we lose something in concentration, attention span, etc. because of the links.

Anecdotally, I find this to be true. Also for note-taking. During projects where I used pen and paper for jotting down thoughts and ideas, the information tends to be stickier. There seems to be a direct connection between tactile senses and the thoughts and memories in the brain (and from what I recall from psychology, there&#x27;s some truth to this.)

I&#x27;d be very curious to see if it&#x27;s age dependent.<p>I agree that I absorb more with the printed page, but I wonder if this is habit or conditioning. I didn&#x27;t grow up reading material on a device.<p>Disclaimer: I&#x27;m old :).

I think I&#x27;ll probably be the last person alive still buying paper books!