Gruber reports on a Newsweek article about Amazon Kindle, a new e-book device. The article was thorough, and it reminded me again of a bunch of ideas I’ve been having with regards to e-books.
First of all, I think that the only good notion about e-books today is that they work roughly right (it’s hard to buy an e-book today that plainly sucks). There’s a movement trying to make them as book-like as possible, but I don’t buy it. You can slap hard covers on left and right, but you’re still not going to turn physical pages. It’s good for one thing and that is to establish a mood; people hope that this will suddenly unlock massive e-book device sales by everyone since it still looks, vaguely, like a book.
I think this is a hard sell. If you’re going to have qualms about reading off of a screen, paying $10 more for having that screen covered by a leather cover isn’t going to convince or fool you. The way to make the sell is instead to fill in functionality. The article touches upon this a lot: what has the e-book got that your ordinary book hasn’t?
I think the e-book has a great potential. I can see a number of things I’d incorporate in my ideal e-book. Multi-touch pinching to make the text larger and smaller. High-resolution displays (200 dpi minimum) with sensible fonts and awesome typography that you can override at your leisure. Selecting a range of text with an on-screen sharpie, or dragging it to some sort of interesting-part bin which you can then retrieve stuff out of. Tapping on a word to see its dictionary definition inline. Collapsing and expanding chapters or sections inline. Inline viewing of footnotes, and links to chapter references. Color (or typeface) coded character dialogues. Searching for literary characters or keywords, even across your entire library. A way, perhaps, to sync the device to your feed reader and give full-article feeds the same treatment (offline or not). Easily rating chapters and selecting good passages and allowing for this feedback to be sent to a place like Amazon or to the publisher. Auto-scrolling at an adjustable rate with movement detection for automatic pausing when you put down the book.
The correct hardware would be a deal-breaker. 200+ dpi displays with a reasonable grasp of colors (maybe 256 colors would do, but certainly high color), multi-touch and a 30+ hour battery life. Add to this a charging pad — perfect for your nightstand, coffee table or recliner — that charges the book wirelessly via induction or evanescent wave coupling. But also a well-implemented and solid user interface, perfect backward-compatibility with plain text files and PDFs and a knowledge of the world around it, allowing you to transfer books to it from your computer, notes back from it and wirelessly streaming text over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth in libraries.
This may be a few years out. But really - if the Amazon Kindle (which is still the most alluring deal I’ve heard of) and binary “color” is the best we can do, let it be known that I’m cringing. And you might have seen this coming, but I do know about a certain, unnamed company that’s got the hots for thin products, a design tradition for great user interfaces, real world experience with small high-resolution multi-touch screens, a major profitable product line already containing the name ‘book’, the technical capability to implement all this, an ongoing trend towards expanding into entertainment and media and a rare penchant for “just walking in”.
Wouldn’t it be great?
A geek’s dream but quite likely impossible. If the typography is awesome, overriding it at your leisure, will most likely ruin it. Both thanks to software quality and your (the reader’s) lack of skill (and taste). :P
By http://supersnowman.livejournal.com/ · 2007.11.19 10:10
That’s not at all what I meant, and I think it’s readily apparent from the section you quoted, even. Awesome typography is one given; the option to override it with your own choice is another - I never even implied that the awesomeness would magically transfer to your choice, just that the awesome typography would be standard in all books but that there’d be an option to override it with your own stylesheet.
And this isn’t new. Overriding sets of fonts have been around forever. As has awesome typography. As has the intersection of them. I’d just posit it as a requirement for my e-book.
By Jesper · 2007.11.19 18:26