Continuing my response to Professor Volokh’s series on ebooks, his third post briefly raises some interesting technological issues for hardware manufacturers, and actually highlights the problems with widespread adoption of the platform.
1. Readability. I disagree with the Prof. on readability. I think one of the great advantages to eInk is the fact that you can read it without eye strain. It’s actually quite good. But really only if you’re into long-form reading, which for law students is important, but perhaps less so for lawyers on the go who just want a portable library for the court, etc. I think OLED screens running eReader software like the Kindle that allows you to switch fonts, different colored text and backgrounds (e.g., black on sepia is a nice combo for reading), and screen brightness make for some good short-form reading. One important point to make here is that reading reading off an eReader can get somewhat tedious and boring; grey can be depressing.
2. Charts, illustrations, and the like. Yes, yes, and yes. eReaders are terrible, horrible, at rendering charts and illustrations. Each new iteration has gotten better, but they are no where near online. And they never will be as long as they are using eInk.
3. Annotating, highlighting, sharing. Do we need to even talk about this? Have you tried using the Kindle DX keyboard? How about Sony’s? Oops. What a disaster. I have seen no implementation of annotating or highlighting (communal sharing is not supported at this time, which for law student study groups would be hugely beneficial) that I think is worthwhile. So Prof. Volokh’s call to manufacturers to make it better is a good one. I’m not sure about the stylus based input, but I think I see where he’s going with it. Maybe we’d be better talking about how the Courier tablet concept could work in this space. I would love to show up to a deposition with one of those things in hand. Holy cow.
4. Page numbers. I’m a bit confused about the page number argument. I think there’s some issue that what you see on an eReader should match a printed text (because some students are using print), but I thought the whole point to migrating was not to have printed texts. So why would it matter? Also, the whole benefit to eBooks, whether on a dedicated eReader or through an app on a tablet or on the web, is dynamic re-flow. Need to adjust the font size? No problem, the text reflows. As long as the reader knows where they are in a document (which is more about the book’s structure), page references are irrelevant. And I’m pretty sure no one working in XML is going to take the time to manually insert page numbers; one of the reasons for moving to XML was so we could stop worrying about manual page layout. (Can I hear a shout out for XPP? Woot!)
5. Search. As long as there are eReaders, search will never be anything more than character string searches. That’s it. Don’t get your hopes up for anything more than that. Wait for the weblets. Hardware manufacturers are not going to pay a lot of money for a robust search engine on their devices. Nope. Not gonna happen. Just keep moving along folks, nothing to see here.
