Personally, I see too many pixels on an average work day, thousands of lines in tens of millions of colours. I don’t wear glasses yet, but I figure it’s just a matter of time with the strain I put my eyes through.
As a result of pixel overexposure at work I sometimes try to limit my pixel exposure at home, keeping the television off and only using the computer to check e-mail and do a few minutes worth of surfing. Sometimes I give in and watch television, throw on a movie or play Xbox 360, but the idea is basically the same — less screen time, more time in the real world.
That applies to reading as well.
Although Amazon (www.amazon.com) did a pretty amazing job creating a screen that looks like paper with their Kindle (which is an average but expensive piece of hardware for the most part), and Sony (www.sonystyle.com) did a decent job with their Reader Digital Book device, reading ebooks is a concept that’s still very much on the fringes.
You can also download books and read them from most laptops and desktops, and there are ebook plug-ins for devices like the iPhone (www.apple.ca) and BlackBerry (www.blackberry.com), but I’ll bet that most people haven’t used the software.
Part of it is psychological — we all grew up with paper books, and we like the look and feel of black text on white stock. For most of us picking up a book is like taking a holiday, a welcome change of focus that allows us to block out the white noise of the world. Nobody curls up with a laptop on a rainy day, or reaches for their iPhone when they’re in pajamas and need a little help getting to sleep.
At least not yet.
The next generation of readers might not have our fondness for the hardcovers and paperbacks, our love of bookstores, our time spent in libraries researching school papers, or the need to collect our books and browse the book collections of others.
The next generation of ebook reader technology may also be better, with better screens, longer battery life, and more features that appeal to the reading public.
For ebooks to really take off I’d like to see the following features included:
Colour — The new Kindle screen may be the closest thing to paper, but seeing book covers and illustrations in colour would bring a lot of books, magazines, and other printed materials to life. Apparently they’re working on a colour screen as low impact as the Kindle but I’ll believe it when I see it.
Text adaptability — The ability to increase type size is a boon to our aging population, but I’d like to be able to use a variety of different fonts for different experiences. The publishing industry deliberately uses hundreds of different fonts, all of which should be available for ebook readers.
Touch screens — The ability to read a newspaper on an ebook would be enhanced by the ability to fill out the crossword or Sudoku. This also expands functionality, allowing people to use their ebooks as diaries or calendars.
Portability — Most ebook readers are very portable, but I’d need a model that’s water and scratch resistant before I’d consider tossing one into my book bag.
I’d also like to be able to make the contents of my ebook reader portable like my other electronic files. One of the big drawbacks of digital books is that they lack the tangible quality of paper books that can theoretically last forever, and are easy to trade. If my ebook reader was destroyed I’d want to be able to freely download my collection again from online storage, or a backup disk so I wouldn’t have to purchase books all over again. Books are forever, and ebooks should be as well.
I’d also like the ability to lend and borrow books, even if there is some kind of security software built into the file to cause it to expire in a month.
Research tools — Ebook readers allow you to mark passages without defacing the text with a highlighter, and I hope a tool will one day allow you to easily export all of your highlighted sections onto a separate document. I’d also like to see the ability to search books online for relevant passages the same way you’d search through books in the library when researching a project.
Wireless — One of the benefits of the Kindle is that you can easily download the next book in a series in minutes, if not seconds, without having to visit the bookstore, or browse the Amazon site to find similar books or books by the same author. I’d like to have the ability to link to other ebooks and share files, as well as to download books that are already available for free in the public domain.
Price — Right now the price of downloading books is almost the same as buying the hard copy. If I’m saving a publishing company the cost of printing and shipping a title, I should be rewarded with a lower price. I’d also like the ability to download digital copies of the books I already own without purchasing books a second time, although I don’t know how they’d manage this retroactively. It could easily be applied to future purchases by bundling file downloads with online sales, and giving customers vouchers at brick and mortar bookstores.
To give ebooks a try, the following websites offer free books online.
Online Books Page (onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/lists.html); Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org); Questia (www.questia.com); Classic Books (classicbook.info/); FullBooks.com (www.fullbooks.com); Internet Public Library (www.ipl.org); Classic Reader (www.classicreader.com); Authorama (www.authorama.com); International Children’s Digital Library (www.icdlbooks.org); Public Bookshelf (www.publicbookshelf.com); Archive.org (www.archive.org).
