15 Jan 2011 Book review

Pros

I must say, it did feel nice to be hold­ing a tan­gible item while read­ing. At first, it was some­what com­pel­ling to the touch. The cov­er was a bit stiffer, while the pages them­selves were very flex­ible. I could de­tect a very faint smell of wood pulp and glue, adding a subtle sense of ana­chron­ism to the ex­per­i­ence. Un­like what you might have heard, it wasn’t too heavy.

I could write notes in the mar­gins of the pages - plenty of room. (Al­though I had to find a pen… not trivi­al… but by a stroke of luck I had one in my bag.)

The words were al­ways the same place on every page. They didn’t move be­cause – think about it – they couldn’t. This is non-act­ive ink on non-act­ive pa­per. I think there was an in­ter­est­ing up­side to this that I hadn’t an­ti­cip­ated: in a few cases, I could re­mem­ber some­thing I read based a bit on where it was on the page. As in, “that great quote was prob­ably on the left page to­wards the bot­tom”. That may have helped with the learn­ing and re­flec­tion pro­cess a bit.

I en­joyed the unique­ness of the ex­per­i­ence. My guess is that this would wear off after two or three books.

It was a great con­ver­sa­tion device. People saw me read­ing it and wanted to know what I thought of the con­tent… usu­ally there’s no way to tell what I’m read­ing on my pad, but with a cov­er this ob­vi­ous, people could see. (Hmm. Per­haps there’s some down­side to that.)

I real­ized after com­plet­ing it that since it was an ac­tu­al phys­ic­al device with no par­tic­u­lar own­er­ship or li­cens­ing re­stric­tions, I could very eas­ily give it to someone else to read. I thought about leav­ing it on the plane for the next pas­sen­ger or for the clean­ing crew, but my guess is they wouldn’t know what to do with it and might not have been in­ter­ested in the sub­ject mat­ter (with no way to change it!) so I didn’t do that. I thought about hand­ing it to someone else wait­ing for their bag, but didn’t want to seem like a weirdo. So I held on to it. Now it’s sit­ting on my shelf, un­used, gath­er­ing dust next to my old power­book bat­ter­ies. Maybe I can find someone to give it to.

Ima­gine if I bought a phys­ic­al book for every book that I read - these things would be sit­ting all over my house, mostly un­touched, tak­ing up a HUGE amount of space.

That’s about it for the pros. I was a bit dis­ap­poin­ted… I’d really been ex­pect­ing more.

Cons

After a while of read­ing, my hands star­ted to get tired of con­tinu­ally hold­ing the book open. Some­times I had to use two hands, or stretch the book open between my thumb and pinky. It was a bit wear­ing. The weight didn’t help.

It wouldn’t stay open by it­self, mak­ing it hard to read while eat­ing or while sit­ting in cer­tain po­s­i­tions.

These things take up space. And weight. Like a LOT of it. You’d prob­ably need to lim­it your­self to two or three for a trip… can you ima­gine? What if you brought two books and real­ized you really wanted to be read­ing a dif­fer­ent one that you’d left sit­ting at home?

I put the book down sev­er­al times to go do some­thing else, and when I came back, it was closed. I had to find where I had stopped read­ing. That turned out to be really hard… page for­ward, page back, page around… all the pages look pretty sim­il­ar. It took a bit of time to do this, and a few times I ba­sic­ally ended up re-read­ing some of the sec­tions while I searched for my last-read spot. I had heard I should use a phys­ic­al book­mark for this, but one wasn’t provided with the book. I tried a candy wrap­per, but that fell out.

Even­tu­ally I just star­ted turn­ing down the corner of the pages, but that seemed sort of wrong. I think this is go­ing to turn out to be a big design de­fi­ciency. (As a side note: this de­fi­ciency may res­ult in the cre­ation of a sec­ond­ary mar­ket of book­mark pro­viders.

I sus­pect some in­vestors may think there’s a lot of op­por­tun­ity there, but hon­estly it seems some­what like a niche mar­ket, per­haps most suit­able for the high-end craft genre.)

There was no op­tion­al back­light, so I had to find an ex­tern­al light source to use and get it poin­ted just right.

A few times I dropped the book. When I picked it up, I had to hold it with the right ori­ent­a­tion… the pages didn’t auto­mat­ic­ally ro­tate like you might be used to, so I had to spend a bit of en­ergy fig­ur­ing out where the front of the book was and so on. I don’t think this is a big deal, but it was a bit of a sur­prise.

Like­wise, there was no way to ad­just the size of the fonts, the de­tails of the dia­grams, the con­trast on the page. That turned out to be fine in this par­tic­u­lar case as the au­thor and pub­lish­er es­tim­ated my read­ing com­fort range cor­rectly, but I could see that be­ing an is­sue with some books if they are not well-ex­ecuted.

The pages were easy to bend to make marks, but they were also pretty easy to tear. Ima­gine - you could ac­ci­dent­ally rip out one page and then the en­tire thing be­comes ef­fect­ively use­less.

While I could take notes in the mar­gins, it was very hard for me to find all those notes again, or to gath­er them to­geth­er in­to a sum­mary of my re­flec­tions while read­ing. I ac­tu­ally had to re-page through the book to find my notes! I’m sure I missed some.

There was no way to find out what oth­er people had noted as par­tic­u­larly in­sight­ful, so I may have missed a few of the most im­port­ant points of the book. Like­wise, there really was no way to share my notes or an­nota­tions with my friends… al­though, if I do loan the unit to my wife, she’ll see the notes I made in the mar­gins. But upon re­flec­tion, I real­ized she won’t be able to dis­able these notes, so she won’t have the choice of ig­nor­ing my notes should they prove to be un­help­ful.

I ran in­to a few terms I didn’t un­der­stand, but there was no way to look up defin­i­tions or more in­form­a­tion, at least not with­in the con­fines of the book. I know I could have pulled out my pad and done it there, but it felt sort of like cheat­ing… that was not what the cre­at­ors of the book had in mind when they de­signed it.

No way to search. This was a prob­lem later. I tried to show my wife this one funny an­ec­dote and I just could not find it… I was sure it was around page 150 or so on the right side… but no luck.

I had to keep the ac­tu­al book with me - I could only read from that one device. It was bizarre. While sit­ting at lug­gage claim wait­ing for my bag, I had a few spare mo­ments, so I auto­mat­ic­ally pulled out my smart phone to get in a few more pages of read­ing in, but - whoops! - the con­tent wasn’t there! It was locked in to that single book. I didn’t want to pull that out of my bag be­cause it was a bit of a hassle (and I hadn’t used a book­mark) so I just sat there with noth­ing to do but talk to oth­er hu­man be­ings.

The con­tent in the book was very well re­searched, with ex­cel­lent foot­notes and an en­tire sec­tion of ref­er­ences to white pa­pers, oth­er con­tent, and links on the web. But this was all just sit­ting there stuck on the page - I couldn’t fol­low any of the links dir­ectly on to the web. I couldn’t auto­mat­ic­ally add the books to my wish list or my pur­chase queue. I felt sort of stuck… walled in to the con­tent that was put in between those pretty cov­ers.

When I was about 200 pages in­to the book, I real­ized that I might not be read­ing the most re­cent ver­sion of this book. Ima­gine this - you’ve spent all this time read­ing, but you might be miss­ing out on ad­di­tion­al ref­er­ences, fixes to mis­takes or ty­pos, re­vised links and pic­tures… amaz­ing, really. Al­though I must say that it gave me a sense of be­ing groun­ded in time, which per­haps may be some­thing we’re of­ten miss­ing in our now-now-now cul­ture.

Neg­at­ive en­vir­on­ment­al im­pact… think of all those trees.

The book con­tent it­self was spec­tac­u­lar. When I was fin­ished, I auto­mat­ic­ally went to the au­thor in­form­a­tion to find out what else he had writ­ten - but of course, it only re­ferred to books writ­ten BE­FORE this one. And, crit­ic­ally, I was not able to pur­chase them while us­ing this book. Nor could I find oth­er people’s re­com­mend­a­tions about which book to con­sider next, re­lated au­thors, or even com­ment­ary on the book that would ex­pand my un­der­stand­ing of it.

(It’s dif­fi­cult to ima­gine why the pub­lish­ers al­low this… there is such a huge mar­ket in selling se­quels, but with this phys­ic­al book thing the cus­tom­er really has to go out of his or her way to find that next book and might for­get or go to some oth­er pub­lish­er. Ima­gine the po­ten­tial rev­en­ue lost.)

I real­ized, as I looked at the book on my shelf, that if I lost it or dam­aged it - it was gone! There’s no way for me to go back to the store or the pub­lish­er to ask for a re­place­ment copy… no real way to prove I had owned it, un­less I took a pic­ture of it with me, and that seemed un­likely to be use­ful or to scale. This is a one-shot thing… screw it up and it’s all over. Kind of nerve-wrack­ing really… what if I had a large in­vest­ment in these things and some­thing happened?

Overall

In con­clu­sion, while I must say I really en­joyed the ex­per­i­ence of read­ing on pa­per in stat­ic form, the cons tre­mend­ously out­weighed the pros. Maybe this book thing will catch on, but I have my doubts.

On a re­lated note, I heard from a friend that he bought a device that plays these things called “re­cords” that are made from black vinyl. He says the ex­per­i­ence of listen­ing to mu­sic from one of these can­not be beat. I’m go­ing to drop by his house and try it out next week - maybe I’ll have a re­port from that as well.