eLibrary
Welcome to the eLibrary team (part of Library & Learning Resources) blog at Birmingham City University
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Down the rabbit hole : from click, touch to drag
Posted on June 30th, 2010 4 comments
Recently the Wired Magazine ran a comparison on two portable e-book readers – the new Kindle from Amazon, and the Sony Touch. They came down slightly in favour of the Kindle – with its superior display and Whispernet Wireless connectivity.
But what struck me was that the smartphone users I showed these devices to, immediately touched the screen to load the book – functionality which you get on the Sony but not the Kindle which uses a joystick (see our ‘home’ videos that demonstrate the difference : Sony Touch, Amazon Kindle ).
We know that the sales of smart phones have rocketed – and as they become more and more widespread amongst students in the next few years, the disconnect between our traditional web and commerical mobile patforms will be become more and more obvious – one of the biggest is that of interaction : touching, dragging, moving the ’stuff ‘ on the screen that you are looking at.
The coming of the iPad only accelerates this drive, to react with, to converse with, annotate, share a text : so that in an academic context learning is no longer a solitary experience. (See how the page-turn works on an iPad here, using their iBooks app.)
Google (and other’s) answer to the iPad are on their way - so as the market for mobile reading expands this may prove interesting for established aggregators in the e-book field such as MyiLibrary, who are already moving away from their existing pdf reader because this form of delivery does not work well with mobile devices.
The race down the rabbit-hole is on ; not to replace the printed book but to make reading/teaching/discovering academic texts more tactile, and more interactive.
As Alice says, ‘what is the use of a book, without pictures or conversations’ ?
4 responses to “Down the rabbit hole : from click, touch to drag”
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I recently tried the Sony Touch and the iPad on my commute to and from work, I read the same ebook on both devices and I have to say I definately preferred the reading experience on the iPad. Althought the glare of the sun could be an issue at times, on the whole the size and excellent screen quality of the ipad was very impressive. As Mark mentioned, being a smart phone user the tactile nature of the iPad was much more appealing and the design of the bookshelf, integrated dictionary felt much more intuative.
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Paul Vincent June 30th, 2010 at 15:36
The resolution issue has clearly been resolved on these devices. This leaves, I believe, two issues: first, we really need a non-reflective screen – even paper books printed on glossy paper can be an irritation in brightly-lit conditions (especially overhead sunlight), and the shiny, shiny screen of the iPad is far, far worse in this respect. Second, we need passive displays (such as the “liquid paper” concept) which are not backlit. Though I cannot cite the research, I recall reading several articles concluding that prolonged reading on backlit displays resulted in far greater eye-fatigue than equivalent periods spent reading on passive displays. On a personal level, my view is that I would always prefer reading for pleasure on a paper/printed medium, but for reference books and academic texts, the search facilities of electronic texts alone makes it an invaluable medium – far, far better than ANY index. (Mind you, there needs to be a facility to “scribble in the margins”, as well as a flexible highlighting facility).
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[...] last point, I really missed having a touchscreen. As Mark from the BCU eLibrary team pointed out in his review, smartphone users are so used to using a touchscreen that it just seems like a backwards step to [...]
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[...] older model, but it’s still only about a year old and it just felt so clunky. I agree with Mark; being so used to a smartphone, I found it very strange to not have a touchscreen. I also [...]
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