Such as:

1. [ON ] ___ – Hyperlinks
2. [ON ] ___ – Audio
3. [OFF] ___ – Animation
4. [OFF] ___ – Comments from other readers
5. [ON ] ___ – Block my email notifications
6. [ON ] ___ – Play cell phone “concerts” in crowds
7. [OFF] ___ – Highlight passages
8. [OFF] ___ – Send to Face-Twit
9. [OFF] ___ – Buy a paper copy of this book
10.[OFF] ___ – Read aloud, computer voice # 21
11.[OFF] ___ – Read aloud, voice of Tina Fey
12.[ON] ___ – Novel mode (no-distraction reading)

… and dozens more.

Michael Pastore
50 Benefits of Ebooks

I’ve been online long enough to remember a college friend complaining about images on the web (they were distracting, they choked the connection, interfered with finding information…). My recommendation was that he leave them turned off via his browser settings and let the rest of us enjoy the “new” visual nature of the web.

Just because your car has cruise control doesn’t mean you have to use it – some new features you’ll like, others you won’t. Not taking advantages of better technology is a mistake.

There currently are Kindle titles that do have hyperlinks within a book.

I have titles that have linked TOC and footnotes. I don’t recall having a title with a linked index but then with the search ability of ebooks I don’t really see the need for a traditional index.

I’ve seen this with chapters, which for fiction isn’t so important. But for non-fiction type of reference books, it would be great to have a hyperlinked table of contents, hyperlinks to footnotes (which eReaders could make endnotes because there are no “pages” per se), and hyperlinks within an index at the end.

These would be pretty basic but great. They would require publishers spend time creating the hyperlinks and hyper indices. I’ve purchased several non-fiction books and they don’t have anything approaching this, which would only be using what the Kindle has available today.

The Kindle, though, does have a few hyper features already — the dictionary for looking up words (not just for definitions, but for additional nuance), wikipedia available online (it actually looks and works at an excellent level but isn’t great in its feel yet), and searching for text within a book.

Even while reading fiction, I find this amazingly useful — sometimes I like to look backwards to when a character was first mentioned to see if the foreshadowing earlier was something I mentally flagged as unusual or noteworthy before.

Text navigation and crunching will come to the Kindle much sooner than multi-media. Thanks to many web sites becoming more and more mobile friendly, the Kindle is getting better at reading web sites.

A major problem for the mobile web, though, is that many sites have a mobile version of their own pages, but all of their hyper links are not mobile friendly, which results in people like me reading on Kindles and BlackBerry phones dreading all the hyperlinked content to pages with Flash and extensive Java applets.

Oh, and what about power requirements of a paper book? Paper books work for centuries and display for free. All electronic communications are pretty dead without current. Oh, and what about application of digital technologies? Paper book production including on-the-fly Amazon fulfillment is fully digitized. The revolution has advanced paper books more than screen books.

Screen books are the real dead end. And their fatal error, all along, has been to try and mimic paper books.

And those books made out of dead trees? Why, you can’t even put links in them. If you try to tap on a URL in a book, all you get is a smudged page. And if you want video, you have to draw it on the edges of the pages yourself and then flip through them really fast.

These dead tree books are preventing content from evolving. Something ought to be done.

I guess I have another question about this. Let’s say that we do end up with total multimedia devices. It could happen; if it were the only option, I’d probably accept it, as long as the device were e-ink. But what about, you know, ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’? Or ‘The Brothers Karamazov’? It sounds a bit like you and a couple of the commenters are suggesting a new art form, and that serious readers of texts should maybe just stick to printed books for actual reading? ??

As we shift our reading from paper books to ebooks, we gain some things and lose some things. Every computer-related interaction is filled with countless opportunities for distraction. It might be nice to offer a “distraction free” reading option in our ebooks — similar to the various software programs that give you “distraction free” writing, by putting a big white page onto a black background, without all the buttons and menu options — and without a lifeline to the outside world of the Intenet.

I would like that “distraction free” reading option as an option only. In order to enjoy all the benefits and advantages of reading ebooks, I want my ebook reading device to do everything — everything except make coffee and remove my already-purchased files.

Michael Pastore
50 Benefits of Ebooks

1. Improve contrast – give me a black on white screen
2. Make the GUI customizable – let me change the fonts and boldness (other than hacking it)

3. Make the device more responsive – decrease the refresh rate.

There is a reason that the delete key is first required in a context of screen reading. Distraction and interruption, unwanted pop-ups and too many search results damage what scholars regard as the “performative space” of the traditional book.

I’m waiting for a multi-purpose device — such as a Netbook or an Apple iTablet — that can do many things, connect to the entire Internet (not to the Amazon book store only), and is smartly designed for reading and working with ebooks in all the major formats, especially PDF and EPUB.

Spring 2010 would be a good time for the debut of the next generation of ebook reading devices.

Michael Pastore
50 Benefits of Ebooks

I can see times when links are good. Take, for example, _The Informant! A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald. He has extensive references for all the facts, comprising 10% of the book. I’d like to have seen “mouse-over” buttons (like the annotations we can make on the Kindle) for that info, rather than link to the appendix, then go back to the page. That would be a good use of the technology. Linking out to the court documents might be possible, and even interesting, but it would detract from the book (a lot for me, already prone to distractrions) and dilute the narrative.

My answer to Joe: because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should do something.

Having said that, I do think we are still on the very cusp of exploring the potential of e-books. Your transportation analogy is apt. The advance is going to have be something as-yet unimagined. For now, the Kindle and like devices are just readers. Which, for now, is fine with me.