When kindle came out, I enthusiastically bought one and
start to read it almost any book I can have an electric version. I tried to read technical books such as math,
CS books but found it was painful to do so, mainly because the screen was
small. I later on bought a kindle DX,
which greatly improved my reading experience, but I still could not finish a
technical book. Why? After painfully
experience, I conclude ebook readers are not suitable for nonlinear structure
books. I refer a book as “linear
structure” when there isn’t much cross references in it and “nonlinear” when
there are lots of them. When I read a nonlinear structure book, I need
to jump to the reference and jump back, more importantly; I would like to
compare contents between the reference and the referee page. It is painful to find the reference with
kindle if the book itself doesn’t have a build-in link; even it has one, it is
impossible to display contents from different pages together. Imagine the pain when you are reading chapter
6 and it reads “please refer to figure 4.3”! I have
no such problems with a paperback book. Making notes is painful for ebook readers
too. I cannot insert arbitrary contents
in arbitrary position as I can do to a paperback book. In
another sense, ebook readers are content consuming devices while paperback
books are content consuming and creating devices. I’ll use kindle to read novels but definitely
not a math book. I hope one day ebook readers are as easy as a real paperback
book, not just its look.
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