
Why the Smart Reading Device of the Future May Be Paper - relampago
http://www.wired.com/2014/05/reading-on-screen-versus-paper/
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blutoot
Physical books give me the third dimension which is necessary for the ability
to flip back and forth between sections or even pages very fast. This process,
at least for me, is very critical to reading that is focused on knowledge-
gaining rather than fun. Forget books; I find it uncomfortable and very little
productive while reading academic papers on my iPad. These papers in my field
are usually 15-30 pages long and often have double columns (so now I have to
even zoom in).

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joeclark77
Am I the only one here who highlights, underlines, and writes furiously in the
margins? I don't know how you can process a text or technical book without
being able to touch it.

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Jtsummers
I did in language courses, but not in others. For math/CS courses I've found
old books with dozens of pages of engineering paper stuffed in them, however.
Probably the same sort of content you write in the margins. Paperbacks also
lended themselves better to making notes within the text for me, but that was
a psychological block (expensive hardback? keep it pristine! cheap paperback?
meh, who cares?). I'm mostly over that now.

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droob
For years, before Instapaper and Readability, I used a little script that
copied the text out of the current page and pasted it in plaintext, then
printed it from TextMate monospaced and 4-up. I'd shove the pages in a pocket
or the backseat and read them in my free time.

It's a great way to take notes, circle interesting bits, and compare them
later. I haven't been able to replicate that system digitally.

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arjie
Is there a reason you chose a monospace font? I recall reading that they have
lower legibility for prose.

~~~
droob
I remember it being a mix of tinyness, printer quality, and TextMate's
limitations. It had the side effect of lending everything a particularly
neutral tone.

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TillE
> The most influential factor, he found, was whether they could see pages in
> their entirety. When they had to scroll, their performance suffered.

There are still no good electronic devices for large format, color books.
Which includes most textbooks. If a larger iPad is released, that will
presumably be the primary target market.

I'm looking forward to such a device myself, as a nerd with a large collection
of tabletop RPG PDFs.

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Jtsummers
What I'd like is a folding tablet similar in concept to [1]or Microsoft's
Courier [2] with two iPad sized screens. Given how thin the current iPad Air
is, or the MacBook Air for that matter, and still possessing decent
horsepower, this seems particularly feasible these days. Give it a stylus
input device for note taking. You can turn it over laptop style and get custom
input layouts for different applications. Balance the thickness/weight of each
side by balancing battery on one half, processing power on the other. I've
been imagining a device like this for 20 years, maybe one day it'll happen or
I'll try my hand at hardware hacking.

[1] [http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/16/toshibas-dual-screen-
libr...](http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/16/toshibas-dual-screen-
libretto-w100-laptop-on-sale-in-america-fo/)

[2] [http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/05/microsofts-courier-
digita...](http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/05/microsofts-courier-digital-
journal-exclusive-pictures-and-de/)

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dredmorbius
Paper: among characteristics not mentioned, _where a passage occurs in a page_
(or how far within a book or article) is part of the context, and I suspect
that human's spatial memory comes into play with this. Online infinite-
scrolling content lacks this particular clue, and even PDFs only offer the
"where on the page" vs. "how far into the book" aspect. I can also often
remember my place in a book simply by staring at the page number and
committing it to memory -- at least for a few hours or overnight. Though
bookmarks are useful.

Electronic: Over half a century into the digital age and I think a significant
problem is that we still haven't settled on the "right" format for real
information consumption. There are plain-text documents, simple HTML, word-
processing formats, postscript and PDF documents, and now eBook formats.
Absent its lack of text search, ghostview -- 'gv' on Linux -- is still one of
the best reading clients I know of, particularly in how it advances through
the text. The Internet Archive's online book reader is the best I've seen bar
none, in particular its light-weight feel and auto-cropping of text so that
the actual _content_ of the book is centered on the page. I've submitted a
request to evince (the GNOME PDF reader) that it do similarly. Still, I find
myself constantly fighting with even the best PDF readers at finding the right
balance between text sized large enough to read and fiddling with positioning
the page onscreen.

Electronic formats may not be as good for first encounter and deep studying,
but they are _immensely_ useful for quick reference: the ability to 1) carry
around a library of thousands of volumes and 2) instantly search to or open to
a particular page or phrase is hugely useful. The ability to create an
_external_ reference that will find the relevant passage _in whatever form of
the work you have handy_ (similar to a URL, but not specific to a given
instance) would be magical.

Some limitations of electronic formats can be mitigated somewhat: there are
bookmarks, annotations, and other forms of marking up documents, though none
match the immediacy of a penciled margin note, underlined passage, or dog-
eared page.

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j2kun
> And research finds that kids these days consistently prefer their textbooks
> in print rather than pixels.

My students only look at their textbook for the assigned exercises. I'm sure
they'd prefer not to have one at all.

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crayola
What are they studying?

I find that scientific textbooks (machine learning, etc) are _much_ more
usable as books than as pdf, as I need to often jump from one chapter to
another and it needs to be the matter of a split second (or I won't bother to
look for the information).

But perhaps mileage varies.

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noobermin
I still don't see how a book with text's "realness" helps. I don't see how
flat paper with ink printings is "tactile" enough and not in fact just as
abstract as any method of digesting information second or third hand (at a
computer terminal, reading a newspaper, attending a lecture, etc.) vs. our
evolution's first method of information gathering: experience; you know, going
outside, feeling a rock, finding your way through town and mapping it out in
your head... I'm 24, but I still remember before the internet became what it
is today and even then, reading was considered "boring" by everyone other than
nerds because, surprise! it was a pretty abstract activity.

I think the real factor is the preference for paper and the learned habits
with reading on it. People simply have learned first to "deep read" with
books, so they read/learn easier since they can tap those already familiar
(perhaps subconcious) habits without having to figure out new ones.
Unfortunately, phone and tablet screens are associated with mindless or at
least light reading and aversion, not deep cognition, so perhaps that's why
there is some observed deficit in reading on them.

Still, I'm going to accept the "science is not quite settled" part of the
article. Obviously there is some deficit ninnsome cases but we don't know why.

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scrabble
I love my Kobo eReader, but I think it's important to note that 90% of the use
it gets is reading fiction. When it comes to tech books or anything I hope to
be learning and referencing, I go straight to paper.

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artumi-richard
To add my anecdote of others, I feel magazines don't do as good a job with
deep understanding as more 'academic' layouts. Is this a font & design issue
hiding as a device issue?

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fduran
Asimov wrote an essay in 1973 "The Ancient and the Ultimate" about a portable
reading device that didn't need power etc; it turned out it was the book.

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tzs
That was an excellent essay. It started off speculating about the future of
the video cassette. He speculated that they would eventually be mobile with a
self-contained power source, and that they would be able to present their
images to you without disturbing those around you. Controls would become
almost automatic. They would stop when you looked away and resume when you
looked back, and you could skip around or repeat sections at will, and play
the cassette at your own pace. He finishes:

    
    
       You'll have to admit that such a cassette would
       be a perfect futuristic dream: self-contained,
       mobile, non-energy-consuming, perfectly private,
       and largely under the control of the will.
    
       Ah, but dreams are cheap so let's get practical.
       Can such a cassette possibly exist? To this, my
       answer is Yes, of course. The next question is:
       How many years will we have to wait for such a
       deliriously perfect cassette?
    
       I have an aster for that, too, and a quite
       definite one. We will have it in minus five
       thousand years--because what I have been
       describing...is a book!

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ivan_ah
Print is particularly important for learning and "deep" reading. I find my IQ
is at least a few points higher when reading in print rather than on screen.
eInk devices are kind of good, but made awkward by the 0.5 sec screen refresh
delay...

There is something to be said about the versatility of hypertext, but I think
we lose something in concentration, attention span, etc. because of the links.

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mrjatx
I agree with everything except the screen refresh delay making things awkward.
That has absolutely no effect on my reading and is barely noticeable in the
last few Kindle generations (I've owned three).

What does bug me about ereaders is the software. I have 50 or so books on my
Kindle and instead of just quickly grabbing a book off of my bookshelf and
reading it until I want to grab another I have to scroll through and find the
book- where the screen refresh DOES become noticeably annoying. Not to mention
I own a ton of books on my Kindle that I've forgotten about simply due to the
fact that they're hidden on page 10 of the library list.

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arjie
While this is certainly possible, I'm surprised to hear it. I thought my
reading was progressing at the same pace but then noticed that I took a week
to finish a book that I'd otherwise finish in a few days.

Perhaps your eyesight is better than mine and you are able to use a smaller
font (which permits more content per 'page'). The problem for me is that
legibility suffers at lower font sizes.

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gdubs
Anecdotally, I find this to be true. Also for note-taking. During projects
where I used pen and paper for jotting down thoughts and ideas, the
information tends to be stickier. There seems to be a direct connection
between tactile senses and the thoughts and memories in the brain (and from
what I recall from psychology, there's some truth to this.)

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pingburg
I'd be very curious to see if it's age dependent.

I agree that I absorb more with the printed page, but I wonder if this is
habit or conditioning. I didn't grow up reading material on a device.

Disclaimer: I'm old :).

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ewzimm
I think the article can be summarized by this sentence: "When students
preferred screen reading, they learned less when required to read from paper,
and vice versa."

I'm pretty sure this is all just a matter of personal preference.

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hmgibson23
I think I'll probably be the last person alive still buying paper books!

