I’m grateful to Peter Brantley for pointing out to me that over at engadget, a student design competition gives insight into how to usefully combine multitouch into a reader. Which leads me to wonder whether the advent of the Kindle is stimulating an upsurge in the development of eBook readers. This one looks closer to a useful, attractive device than the Kindle ever will in its current form. The touch surface is reminiscent of the iPhone, iPod Touch etc. But I’m sure we still have a way to go before the best combination of look, functionality, convenience and price point comes together and captures the imagination of more than a small minority of book readers.
Will the Kindle spark an eBook device surge?
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What this, and to an extent the Sony PRS-505, seem to recognise is the importance of tactile quality in an e-book reader. Anecdotally at least, most serious book lovers appreciate the touch and feel of books — when I was in the US recently, I ended up buying Fagles’ translation of the Odyssey, a book which I own in at least two other editions, simply because of the beautiful cover, quality stock and rough-cut pages. Widening the argument a little, why do any (all) of us end up paying nearly a tenner for Moleskine notebooks when we could get the same functionality for a tenth of the price? The Kindle is impressive in all sorts of ways, but I don’t think it has the ‘wow’ factor in terms of design.
What interests me about the iPhone is the way that people who are initially uninterested (and there are some) suddenly draw closer the first time they see you zooming into a web page by spreading your fingers over the screen. The intimacy felt when navigating directly via the content itself is in marked contrast to the essential clunkiness of turning pages using buttons, edges, levers etc. that existing eBook reading devices use.
This one certainly looks attractive. I wonder if it has a search function, which I consider essential, even for fiction.
There seems to be plenty of research and development in this area – i.e. into simulating the physical experience of reading a printed book, whether it’s page turning, tactile navigation or even the scent of the pages. My view is that this misguided pandering to page-sniffing bibliophiles. It risks leaving publishers, once more, lagging behind consumers.
We have the potential to do something more ambitious and interactive with electronic content. An e-book is still – by current thinking – a static book, and not really that radical or different. We have to get away from this idea of an electronic version of the familiar book. After all, we don’t think of an iTunes track as an electronic version of a record. It’s a new way of accessing music using today’s technology: it doesn’t involve the tactile experience of opening a CD case or the smell of vinyl.
What we need is a new way of accessing text. It’s great that many publishers have done or are doing the ground work by digitising content. We have some way to go in deciding what to do with it – or in having a killer device that we can use it on.
Viva la revolution, Jon! If only we had more such gung-ho attitudes in the publishing industry