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PDA owner poll: Do you autoscroll when reading e-books?
October 19, 2006 | 8:33 am
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By David Rothman
[poll=17]
In the Low Country of South Carolina, a favorite locale for novelist Pat Conroy, the tides set the pace of aquatic life.
Conroy even wrote a best-seller called The Prince of Tides.
This week, however, I’m reading Conroy on my Palm TX while letting something else set my pace at times—autoscroll.
For newbies, autoscroll is what you’d guess. It keeps a book moving constantly on your screen as if the words were movie credits. Many and perhaps most of the popular e-reading programs have it. One of the best examples is Plucker (screenshot).
Plucker’s autoscroll feature
See the horizontal “1″ between the minus (-) and the plus (+) signs? Touch that area of the screen with your stylus, and autoscroll will start or stop.
The minus will slow down the scroll, while the plus will increase the speed. I can also use myTX’s up and down controls.
So what are the pros and cons of autoscroll?
PROS
1. Autoscroll is one remedy for the small screen challenge. You don’t have to keep punching your PDA’s scroll button constantly. I actually may have worn out the button on my old Sony Clie.
2. You can use autoscroll to help wend your way through the less exciting parts of the book you’re reading. It’s kind of like the auto-throttle on a train or car.
3. Perhaps—this is just unscientific speculation—you can use autoscroll to train yourself to read faster. I’d welcome more thoughts from people on this topic, especially in a K-12 context. Could careful use of autoscrolling—without stepping up the pace too quickly—turn kids into more fluent readers?
CONS
1. Does one speed fit an entire book or even an entire chapter? You may have to keep fiddling with autoscroll, and that can be a bit distracting, just like the manual kind of scrolling. Be careful of scrolling too fast. You may lose a full appreciation or understanding of an author’s work.
2. Will autoscroll make us lazy readers—dependent on machines to get the most of books? Is it possible, too, that autoscrolling will harm young readers using it?
3. Careful with that auto-throttle for reading when tired. As in the case of the automobile kind, you might just fall asleep. Of course, maybe that’s what you want to do.
If you like the idea of autoscroll, try if possible to use a program where you can control it from the usual screen you use while reading. PalmFiction, a new favorite of mine, may not have that capability, alas, at least with the skin I’m using. I need to delve into the options. Perhaps Ludo will have an answer.
Suggestion: If you’ve never tried autoscroll, try it and share your thoughts? Does it help? Will it help with practice? Or is the entire idea useless?
Detail: No, I can’t read Conroy’s books in Plucker. They’re all copyrighted and and are legally available only in such DRM-capable formats as Mobipocket, which, luckily, also has a better autoscroll funtion than most e-reading programs do. As with Plucker, up and down can control the speed.
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Comments:
I used to be an autoscroll-guy, but I discovered exactly what you said: One speed does not fit the entire book. I think autoscroll is great if you want to finish books faster, but it is not the perfect tool for reading carefully, tasting the words. In adition, after hours of reading with the autoscroll on, you probably feel dizzy. But the most important: If you autoscroll, you drain the battery of your mobile device two times faster. The battery of my iPaq rx3715 lasts for about 12 to 14 hours, but the autoscroll function downs this time to 6 hours.
If you have a relatively big rectangular screen as on the Palm TX, it helps to keep it in the normal “portrait mode” (buttons below text) when you autoscroll. If you switch to landscape mode (buttons to one side), the text column becomes too wide for most people to read if they are autoscrolling.
I don’t like the standard autoscroll, but with palm fiction autoscroll is another experience, just try “smooth rotation” or “page rotation”.
Thanks for the autoscroll-related thoughts, and I hope they continue. Meanwhile I’ve had a chance to try out the toolbar-modification feature of dotReader and now have the autoscroll-toggle visible at all times—ready for the stylus. I’ve also found a toolbar addition to show me the scroll setting, which of course I can change with the up or down controls. – David
If you have a Clie, why would you use anything other than the scrollwheel? I can hold my Clie in one hand and scroll with my thumb. I love the scrollwheel so much that when my old Clie died, I bought a remaindered one (they’re no longer made, alas) on eBay just so that I could keep my scrollwheel.
Hi, Karen. The old Clie is an SJ122/U. I also have a newer, eBay-bought Clie with a scrollwheel (an NX60/U) and agree with you. But I’ve also used the button at the bottom, not just the 22′s scrollwheel, and, yes, the scrollwheel should have worn out first.
By the way, I hope you try PalmFiction yourself and will come back with a report. I can’t say enough good things about that program—I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten more attention in the e-book world, at least here in the States.
Thanks,
David
Auto scroll on a very small screen (2.9″) makes me goggle-eyed.
I read using ubook on my ppc phone, my solution to flipping pages is to use a separate mini bluetooth keyboard with one of the keys set to mimic the buttons assigned on my phone. This is especially good in bed or at the gym as I can prop my phone up and not have to keep reaching over to turn the pages.
cheers
Mark
I voted ‘never’, but that’s not quite true. Or rather, I do use autoscroll, just not while reading. I use autoscroll when I need to make an annotation; I flip the page to above the line where the annotation needs to go, then autoscroll to that position. Weasel does a pretty good job storing positions with annotations.
There’s an e-book reader out there that I wanted to try, where the top of the page is being rewritten while you read the bottom; just haven’t had the time yet.
I experimented with autoscroll, but I did not like the loss of control. I felt forced to keep up with the autoscroll feature, rather than changing the pacing to my liking. I guess if a device came with a sort of jog/shuttle IO device, so that I could change the scroll speed …
The great thing of paging, after all, is that you get to set the pace, not the device or the author. As writer of comic strips, I know how hard this can be on authors. A film writer can allow him- or herself small continuity errors, because the viewer is generally forced past them at breakneck speeds. But the reader can pause and view a single panel for minutes. If something’s wrong with the panel (or the paragraph, or the page) it will be noticed.
“There’s an e-book reader out there that I wanted to try, where the top of the page is being rewritten while you read the bottom; just haven’t had the time yet.”
Hmm. I wonder if there’s a way that E Eink machines could use that concept. Probably not or it would be done. But I’m curious.
David