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How the Kindle Prevents eContent from Evolving
October 12, 2009 | 7:54 am
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By Joe Wikert
Perhaps I shouldn’t single out the Kindle on this one. What I’m about to say is true for the entire current generation of dedicated e-reader devices, not just the Kindle. But the Kindle leads the way, so it gets the headline.
The problem with these devices is that they encourage quick print-to-e content conversion and nothing more. In fact, they even discourage some of the simplest ways of enhancing print-to-e conversions. Embedded links are a great example. If you’re a Kindle owner how often do you click on those links? More specifically, how often do you groan as you click on those links, knowing that the browsing experience ahead is painful at best? The irony is that although the Kindle was the first to include wireless functionality, that feature is really only good for one thing: buying content from Amazon. Every other time I’ve used the “experimental” browser I’ve been disappointed. That’s because, at its heart, the Kindle is a reader and it doesn’t encourage any other use.
If you love your Kindle you’d probably say, “so what?…it does what I need it to do.” My point is that as long as we’re willing to accept this extremely limited functionality, and not ask for more, there’s no incentive for Amazon to enhance it and there’s no incentive for publishers to build richer content.
Are you really thrilled with the content that’s available on today’s dedicated e-readers? I’m not. And it’s not just color and video that I crave. I want to see a major leap forward, like when entertainment went from radio to TV, for example.
Transportation is another great analogy. Years ago, trains were not only a great way to travel, they often represented the only way to get from point A to point B. Then cars came along and totally changed the transportation industry. It didn’t happen overnight, but think about how much you take for granted now that you’re not limited by train schedules, tracks that only go certain places, etc.
Trains still exist today, of course, and they serve an important need. One-trick dedicated e-readers will probably exist for a long time too, but we desperately need the flexibility of something more than dedicated devices. Smart phones and netbooks are nice too, but the form factors aren’t perfect and battery life is often an issue.
The consumer experience could be greatly improved by a multi-function device with rich content options. If you’re a publisher and you’re worried about the race to lower prices for quick print-to-e conversions you too should want more powerful devices since they’ll allow you to charge more for the additional functionality of your content.
Editor’s Note: The above is from Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 Blog and is reprinted with permission. Paul Biba
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Comments:
Joe, as you pointed out, there are netbooks and smart phones, etc. No, their form factor may not be perfect… but then, neither is the form factor of many dedicated devices for a lot of readers.
You may simply be expecting too much from what is “supposed” to be a dedicated reading device (because we know most of them are not actually “dedicated” just to reading). In fact, it sounds like you want more than an e-book: You want multimedia content. So instead of bothering with dedicated reading devices, check out the netbooks, laptops and tablets out there, and keep looking until you find a device that better suits you.
There’s nothing wrong with reading. But multimedia isn’t reading, and that arena has barely been scratched. Expecting devices like the Kindle to cater to something like that is the wrong way to go… they are too limited, and probably always will be. You’re looking for a device dedicated to multimedia, and that animal hasn’t been invented yet.
I guess I don’t understand your gripe, Joe. Want to watch a video, read a book, access your e-mail, peruse the web simultaneously? Use a laptop or your iPhone if you wnat portability, your desktop if you don’t care about portability. Why does the Kindle (or any other dedicated reading device) have to evolve to include all these things that I, for one, am trying to get away from? You already have options available. There is nothing you can do on your Kindle that you can’t do your laptop right now.
Does content have to evolve, too, to, as you put, make the same kind of leap as occurred from rradio to TV? No, it doesn’t. In fact, TV hasn’t been such a wonderful leap. I’m old enough to remember listening to radio programs that actually required me to imagine what a character was doing, or looked like, or was capable of. How many more devices do we need that take away or reduce the need for us to use our imagination and minds. Reading is pleasurable because, among other things, it allows us to use our imagination to envision a person, place, or thing; TV, OTOH, removes any need to exercise our minds because it displays everything for us (and with HD TV you can even see the pimples on your favorite sports figure’s face — how stimulating is that!).
TV was a technology with great promise that has let that promise pass by the way side as it sought the lowest common denominator in a mass audience. Books, although sometimes also guilty of the same thing, tend to be less focused on the most common denominator and at least try to reach a more discerning audience.
If publishers want to provide more of what you call content-rich options, they can, and if I care about those options, I can take advantage of them on my laptop. However, I prefer not to be spoon fed content and to actually have to use my mind for something more strenuous than keeping my eyes open to view another mind-numbing TV program.
I may have a neanderthal outlook in this regard, but I think it is tragic what the so-called 24-hour news channels on TV have done to our world. Now news has to be in 10-second soundbites (real indepth coverage there) to hold interest. In the old days, one got a snippet of a news story and then had to actually read a newspaper to get the details. Today, most people have no patience, time, interest, and perhaps even ability for reading newspapers when 10-seconds of Fox tells you all you need to know. Expanding dedicated reading devices to include these options will simply drive another nail into the coffin of reading to learn or for pleasure.
I tend to agree with the first 2 commenters. Multimedia is not reading. When I reviewed American Fever recently, I was sort of glad I couldn’t go down the linky rabbithole all the time. I wanted to read the book, you see, which is enough of an interactive experience for me. I note also that I read with my Kindle’s wireless capability turned off, for that very reason. (Also it really saves on battery life.)
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.
Joe leaves unaddressed _why_ you’d want all the links and media inside a book.
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.
I agree with Joe’s main points: the Kindle is limited; and consumers should ask for a reading experience that is more “open” and more versatile.
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 also agree with all the comments. To go a step further each disadvantage associated with the traditional book is an attribute in disguise. Are books limited, unconnected, finite and static? Maybe just such qualities provoke comprehension and learning. In all communication functions of legibility, navigation, persistence, authentication books are considered obsolete. But for critical learning, thinking and exercise of imagination books are actually more advanced than searchable, connected, continuously revised and hyperlinked multimedia.
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.
Technology is a long way from producing anything that the original poster wants. The best thing about dedicated e-readers is that you don’t have to worry about running out of power. You can go on a week long trip with multiple flights and you can read without plugs. Use your laptop, netbook, or smartphone and you won’t get much more than 4 or 5 hours of power. Anytime you start adding on extra multimedia or wireless features, that takes energy and if you can’t give the consumer a device that will power that stuff for longer than a day’s use, it really isn’t useful for people that use the device for reading. Personally, I want the simple things first and want the device makers to focus on other areas:
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 no avoiding the fact that with every “advance” in technology, we lose something along the way. When cars replaced trains, we gained convenience and independence. On the other hand, we filled our air with pollution, and defaced our landscape with miles of ugly highways. Unlike Europe, the USA does not now have a viable system of train transportation. We were able to advance into the new world, without preserving what was valuable in the old one.
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
I think Joe Wikert fails to understand that some readers, especially book readers, might not want a multimedia experience. I know I don’t. Devices like the Kindle do one thing very well: display text for reading. It is a single purpose tool like a hammer or a screwdriver, not a Swiss Army knife. If I want to hammer nails into a wall, I use a hammer, not the butt end of a screwdriver. Arguing that the Kindle needs more features for multimedia is liking complaining that the screwdriver should have a hammerhead too.
I need ‘distraction free’ reading. Believe it or not, there are still some things in this world that require a serious attention span. Some of our jobs, for example. Mine certainly does. I imagine that surgeons don’t do a lot of multitasking. Multitasking and *driving* frequently results in *death*. Having an attention span requires training to develop and to retain. The only distraction I *welcome* in the midst of my long-form reading, is looking up words in an integrated dictionary. Which in that setting is *less* distracting than in meatspace with a printed book, because it doesn’t require me to walk over to the shelf and grab the dictionary.
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? ??
Hey, yeah!
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.
Anyone into the dead trees critique should try bringing up a Rocket Book or Soft Book among the dead handheld readers. There is nothing more illegible than a black screen. There is also the zombie aspect. Try comparing two or more books without two or more Kindles. Or try direct navigation between a print source index and a screen location.
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.
In addition to what Joe thinks an ebook/ereader should do – until they make an ereader that can also do pop up books who cares!
There are a few things I’d like to see added to Kindle and eBook publishing — hyperlinks within a book.
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.
Gib,
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 think many of the commenters here are missing Joe’s point – that pushing the envelope opens us to new experiences. We shouldn’t be satisfied with devices that haven’t explored the opportunities that interactivity can give us.
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.
Ebooks in the future will have scores of features that you can turn on or off, whenever you like.
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