Details from the Brown Daily Herald. Excerpt: “Davila herself has not bought any electronic textbooks, nor does she know anybody else who has. ‘I’m a little old-fashioned,’ she said, referring to her enjoyment of the feel of a book in her hands. She said she imagines it would be annoying to have to scroll up and down pages on a computer rather than being able to immediately turn to a section in a book.” And remember, this is a young person speaking. At OpenReader we’ll be working to address some of the issues raised here. Today’s e-books have very real usability problems for many nongeeks–many, not all–and no amount of industry hype will alter this.
E-books meeting resistance at Brown University
AMAZON
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I’ll provide a counterexample by highlighting Zinio, the digital magazine reader application. My attention was recently drawn to this by someone who mentioned that there were some free sample magazines available. I was initially somewhat dubious (I’d never heard of Zinio before, and was concerned that their software might have spyware or adware in – a subsequent scan of my computer didn’t show anything up though) but figured I’d give it a go.
Having downloaded my first issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly, I loaded it up in the reader application. The “scrolling up and down pages on a computer rather than being able to immediately turn to a section” mentioned above is basically nonexistent. There is a button provided to go instantly to the magazine’s contents page, and the contents page is hyperlinked – if there’s something that takes your interest, you click on it and you’re there, no scrolling required. There’s nothing stopping you from flipping through the pages if you want to, though – and it even has a nice page-turning animation to accompany the action. Another feature which you can’t get in a print magazine without a magnifying glass is the ability to zoom in.
Of course, it does have its down sides – the reader app is only available for Windows, Mac and Tablet PC, and the files are DRMed and in a proprietary format, but unusually it does actually allow printing, so it’s possible to use a “PDF Printer”-style application to get a DRM-free version of your magazine should you wish it – or even a hard copy to read offline.
It seems to me that magazines are better suited to being read on a normal-sized computer screen than ebooks are, probably because the text is often broken up into columns or with pictures and so doesn’t seem so densely packed.
zinio is indeed a very nice viewer-application,
when you run it on relatively newish machine.
of course, a hyperlinked table of contents is
something _every_ e-book app should have.
and almost all of ’em do. this young woman
was just ignorant of the reality of e-books…
-bowerbird