Kindle is not good for textbooks
April 15, 2013Having attempted to read a few textbooks on my Kindle, I have solemnly concluded that the Kindle is in fact a terrible device for reading textbooks. The fundamental problem is that, due to technological limitations, the Kindle is optimized for sequential reading. This can be seen in many aspects:
- Flipping a page in the Kindle is not instantaneous (I don’t have a good setup to time how long the screen refresh takes, but there is definitely a perceptible lag before when you swipe, and when the Kindle successfully redraws the screen—and it’s even worse if you try to flip backwards).
- Rapidly flipping through pages in order to scan for a visual feature compounds the delay problem.
- There is no way to take the “finger” approach to random access (i.e. wedge your finger between two pages to rapidly switch between them); jumping between bookmarks requires four presses with the current Kindle interface!
- The screen size of the Kindle is dramatically smaller than that of an average textbook, which reduces the amount of information content that can be placed on one screen and further exacerbates slow page turns.
A textbook cannot be read as a light novel. So, while the Kindle offers the tantalizing possibility of carrying a stack of textbooks with you everywhere, in fact, you’re better off getting the actual dead tree version if you’re planning on doing some serious studying from it. That is not to say textbook ebooks are not useful; in fact, having a searchable textbook on your laptop is seriously awesome—but this is when you’re using the textbook as a reference material, and not when you’re trying to actually learn the material.
“If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed ….”
There are actually studies on how tablet media changes the way we read compared to traditional books. Only a matter of time before more /effective/ textbooks get written.
I was going to rant about how the software developers for ebooks aren’t making any effort but I see you have exactly the same points that I would make. Ebook software seems about as sophisticated as you’d expect from someone who had just had the idea of making ebooks and implemented the most obvious things on the list of most obvious features you’d expect. It’s weird how there are now millions of users but it’s not really driving ebook software. When Amazon developers spend a lazy afternoon implementing an estimate of the time to finish the chapter it’s something they think worthy as touting as a new feature.
I have an idea for how to implement sticking your finger into a book. Put a finger or thumb on the bottom left (swap for lefties) corner and hold it down. Now use your right hand to do whatever navigation you want. When you take your finger off the corner the reader state pops back to where you were before you put your thumb down. (Even better, it swaps the two states and you have a mechanism to switch between them.)
Since you compare a Kindle vs dead trees, I’ll use this to declare that Skim (on OS X) is better than dead trees. You can click on figures to open them in separate windows, so that you can have your PDF open at many pages. (Now, detecting the boundaries of a figure doesn’t work extremely well, and resizing it takes a couple of seconds, but if I’m actually reading a paper that’s all negligible; the bigger drawback is that without a big second screen it’s hard to place all those extra windows).
(I also often read papers on my Nexus 7 with EBookDroid — automatic cropping, and zooming on one column for two-column papers, make it rather nice).
Graham says (http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html):
> Live in the future, then build what’s missing.
This is his way to get startup ideas. Is this an instance? Not that you should build this missing piece, but maybe the right guy is in indeed in graduate school.
Hi Yang, would you like to give some screenshots/photos what the Kindle screen looks like when you read textbook?
Is it still readable if there are some equations/graphics on it? Thanks.