Analytical reading on ereaders ?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by rollei

This colour e-ink reader is cool too.

I'm interested to hear you say that. The general consensus of opinion is that the Trident eInk screen is pretty appalling, with weak, unsaturated colour. As you know, it's not really a colour screen at all: it's just a colour mask over a normal black and white screen, and the mask halves the linear resolution.

Did you really find it satisfactory to use? I've not used one for real, but I have seen one, and was seriously unimpressed by it.

[HarryHutton]

The issue is the clunkiness of the software used to make notes, annotations etc. There are several e-readers equipped with styluses for note-taking, but the design decisions the manufacturers have chosen have typically been quite frustrating for users

Example: The Boox M92. When you pull the stylus out and attempt to hand write a note on the document, it won't actually write (instead will recognise your swipe as a next or previous page action). The user must open an options menu, choose the annotations tab, then select line thickness - THEN can annotate the page.

Singling out the Boox in particular here - but the general issue is that when a manufacturer makes the design decisions for software features, the likelihood is that you're going to end up with something clunky.

This is why tablets - with the Android or Apple App stores, have well designed features. There is not one single entity making design decisions - there are thousands of app designers. If the app is badly designed, it doesn't mean people get a different tablet - they just get a different app.

This an issue with e-readers. They've only got one shot at a time to get the software right. Not saying that they won't get decent annotation in there at some point - but the better development model is probably app based in terms of features and obsolescence.
Could e-readers develop an app store? Probably not unless the screen tech improves.


Which brings up colour - e-ink triton is slow, has a poor colour range, low saturation and the colour filter makes both the white and black pixels appear greyer than they should. Nope.
Liquavista - maybe. My bet is on an electrowetting tablet in the next 5 years - app based so there is decent software for whatever features the user might be after - annotation, reference management, notetaking, book discussion etc.

[pwalker8]

Over the years, I have never, ever written in a book that I was reading. Way back when I was in school, I simply wrote notes in a spiral notebook. More recently, I had note cards and wrote the notes with a book and page notation.

These days, many e-readers allow you to anoint and copy those notes up to your computer. For example, with Kindle on the iPad you can highlight a passage and create an associated note, or bookmark a page. You can then access the annotations via your browser and cut and paste to which ever program you wish. On my mac, I use Yojimbo to hold various bits of info like that. On a windows device I use OneNote (I have an older copy that doesn't upload to the cloud). You could also use evernote.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Over the years, I have never, ever written in a book that I was reading. Way back when I was in school, I simply wrote notes in a spiral notebook. More recently, I had note cards and wrote the notes with a book and page notation.

I have, but I found that writing in a spiral notebook is better. (Although I would sometimes highlight in the book).

The advantage of writing in a notebook is that you have all of the notes for a particular book in one place, and it's easier to look over your notes as a whole than to flip to various dog-eared places in the book.

Notebooks also give you more space to write than writing in the margin. Particularly the margin of a paperback.

A notebook also makes it easier to compare several books.

One of the issues with Adler's approach is that it works best when you are re-reading a book and thus have some specific idea about what you want to pay attention to. (Not doing that leads to the used books most people have encountered in college, where the previous reader highlighted every sentence).


In the example of "Persuasion," - unless you start off with the idea that you are just going to underline every instance of the word because it's in the title - you won't notice anything unusual until you are most of the way through the book and it occurs to you that there might be something interesting going on with the word. With an e-reader, you can quickly search for all instances...which can lead to some really interesting results.

The only real advantage I could see to writing in the book itself is that if you reread it 20 years later, you can see what you thought of it 20 years ago. Which is not always an advantage.

[KevinBurke]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

I have, but I found that writing in a spiral notebook is better. (Although I would sometimes highlight in the book).

The advantage of writing in a notebook is that you have all of the notes for a particular book in one place, and it's easier to look over your notes as a whole than to flip to various dog-eared places in the book.

Notebooks also give you more space to write than writing in the margin. Particularly the margin of a paperback.

A notebook also makes it easier to compare several books.

One of the issues with Adler's approach is that it works best when you are re-reading a book and thus have some specific idea about what you want to pay attention to. (Not doing that leads to the used books most people have encountered in college, where the previous reader highlighted every sentence).

....

The only real advantage I could see to writing in the book itself is that if you reread it 20 years later, you can see what you thought of it 20 years ago. Which is not always an advantage.

I think 20 years later might be a bit of hyperbole don't you ? One might want to look through the book, again, as soon as a week or a year later. Also, notebooks tend to be more transitory than books and ebooks and they take up more space than books and ebooks (not depth wise per se but in other aspects). So one might want to retype, the notes, in digital format which is a pain in the ass. Also, another advantage of having them in the book or ebook is that the notes won't become seperated and lost. Adler had this to say on the subject :

Originally Posted by Mortimer J. Adler

...

But, you may ask, why is writing necessary? Well, the physical act of writing, with your own hand, brings words and sentences more sharply before your mind and preserves them better in your memory. To set down your reaction to important words and sentences you have read, and the questions they have raised in your mind, is to preserve those reactions and sharpen those questions.

Even if you wrote on a scratch pad, and threw the paper away when you had finished writing, your grasp of the book would be surer. But you don't have to throw the paper away. The margins (top as bottom, and well as side), the end-papers, the very space between the lines, are all available. They aren't sacred. And, best of all, your marks and notes become an integral part of the book and stay there forever. You can pick up the book the following week or year, and there are all your points of agreement, disagreement, doubt, and inquiry. It's like resuming an interrupted conversation with the advantage of being able to pick up where you left off.

...

http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/adler.html

Oh, well, *sigh* looks like I'm stuck using the notebook solution as proposed here.

[Penforhire]

If I had to do such analytical reading on an e-book I'd use my iPad. Different color marks or annotations are useful and technical sources often use color images/graphs. I prefer reading E-ink displays for plain text but the recent generation of tablet displays is sufficient while gaining superior annotation tools.

PDF document handling is much faster and more agile in iOS GoodReader than in any E-ink e-reader I owned so far.

[leebase]

I'm sure there was a "best practices for making the most of stone tablets" or "papyrus" too.

There are a myriad of ways and tools to take advantage of an iPad that I wouldn't trade for writing in the pages of a book. Not least of which is that I can actually have my entire library with me all the time, and backups to boot.

Take the bible. I have had numerous, fine leather bibles over the years. Underlines, highlights. And then I lose them. And start over with the next. Now when I highlight a scripture it gets sync'd to the cloud and all my other bibles. I can open any translation and my highlighted scriptures are still highlight. I can type in notes right along with the scriptures and these too are backed up and synced. My notes aren't limited to the space I have between the lines or in the margins. And while I wouldn't want to type a thesis on my iPad, I have no problem thumb typing quick notes of the type I'd be writing by hand in the margins of a book. When I buy a new iPad, I get all of these reloaded. When I switch to my phone, I still have all of my highlights and notes available.

But wait, there's more. I can search and find anything by word or phrase. I can touch a word and have a definition pop up and/or a link to a web article for more information.

Not done yet. My bible software company has LOTS of other books that I can buy. Dictionaries, commentaries, histories, maps. All of the books sync up with the bible so as I go from passage to passage, I have an incredible amount of relevant resources ready at my fingertips.

If I REALLY want to hand write notes, I certainly can. I can have a paper notebook out next to me on my desk. Then I can snap a picture of the notes and have that right there in the text of the book I'm reading too.

I can copy the text out of my book easily as well. Many of my book apps actually include the source info after the text when I copy. And while, as I said, I'm not going to thumb type a term paper, I can cut/paste these snippets into Evernote or OneNote and have them instantly sync'd to my PC or Mac versions of these apps where I DO write long documents.

I'll take annotation on my iPad over a paper book any day.

[Lin2412]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Over the years, I have never, ever written in a book that I was reading. Way back when I was in school, I simply wrote notes in a spiral notebook. More recently, I had note cards and wrote the notes with a book and page notation.

These days, many e-readers allow you to anoint and copy those notes up to your computer. For example, with Kindle on the iPad you can highlight a passage and create an associated note, or bookmark a page. You can then access the annotations via your browser and cut and paste to which ever program you wish. On my mac, I use Yojimbo to hold various bits of info like that. On a windows device I use OneNote (I have an older copy that doesn't upload to the cloud). You could also use evernote.

That is pretty different from what I'm used to, because I have always scribbled books in either pencil marks and underlines while I would also use colored highlighters. I always believed it will be stored easily in my brain if I do so. Nowadays I use Evernote because I always liked its sleek design.

[KevinBurke]

Originally Posted by forbes.com

Review of the kobo Aura HD

...

After Iris Has Free Time, I downloaded Heidegger’s Country Path Conversations and Ian Bogost’s Persuasive Games. I wanted to see how this eReader would handle my middle of the night scholarly reading. Unfortunately, the Aura HD still isn’t ready for academia. The selection tool for highlighting and annotating is slow and difficult to manipulate. Of course, this is a problem with all eReading devices. They are still not built for the interactive pen-in-the-margins reading that academia requires. I’m not sure how to fix this problem. Perhaps we need to change how we think about reading.

Still, if I could make one suggestion (developers and manufacturers take note!), it would be an export-to-Evernote feature. I’d be willing to suffer through the clumsy process of selecting text if I knew it would expedite the process of moving quotes and citations in and out of academic articles, powerpoint presentations, and papers. Until this, or some other real scholarly features are built into eReaders, I’ll continue to use them almost exclusively for pleasure reading.

...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jordansh...o-read-in-bed/

Originally Posted by chronicle.com

Students Prefer Print for Serious Academic Reading

E-reader use is on the rise, and the textbook market is shifting toward customizable digital products. Are students ditching print in favor of electronic alternatives for their academic reading? A forthcoming small study from the City University of New York asked that question and found that, like previous generations, at least some Millennials still prefer reading long texts and academic selections in print.

The study, “Student Reading Practices in Print and Electronic Media,” to be published in September 2014 in the journal College & Research Libraries, tracked the reading habits of 17 CUNY students through diary entries, interviews, and discussion groups over the course of two weeks. The students were mostly juniors, seniors, and graduate students, and most were younger than 25.

The research found that they almost always used e-book readers, mobile devices, and tablet computers for nonacademic reading but relied on paper printouts for academic reading.

The study’s author, Nancy M. Foasberg, a humanities librarian at CUNY’s Queens College, acknowledged the difficulties in generalizing from such a small sample. But the takeaway is that “the students in the study really wanted to use print to read for serious academic purposes,” Ms. Foasberg said. They reported that computers and e-books were “fine for less serious work,” but when they “really wanted to get work done, they gravitated to print.”

Having studied e-book adoption in the past, Ms. Foasberg said, she was curious about the reading habits of today’s college students. There are “a lot of misconceptions about Millennials” as a digital generation, she said.

Several students in Ms. Foasberg’s study expressed a distaste for digital textbooks. Some who had used e-books said they would not use them again because they found the embedded links distracting and because they could not interact with the content as they could with print texts—highlighting or taking notes in the margins, for instance. And since the students found themselves printing out digital texts, whatever money they had saved by not buying printed copies was largely lost to printing costs.

Perhaps most notably, many of the study participants said they saw themselves as belonging to the generation before the first truly digital generation. When she was in high school, one 21-year-old student said, “everybody was still using textbooks, and it was only when I got to college that it started to change more and more.” Another participant said that perhaps later generations would be more comfortable using digital textbooks and e-readers.

Ms. Foasberg suggested that the next wave of college students might be more drawn to digital texts simply because they had been educated more through digital learning and online exercises. According to a Pew Research study published on Tuesday, a majority of secondary-school teachers now say technology use benefits students in middle and high schools, with 40 percent saying they have students contribute to a classroom wiki or Web site.

Ultimately, though, it seems that if a student wants to read, she will use whatever medium is available. One participant in the CUNY study told Ms. Foasberg that she had read an entire book on her phone while on vacation because she simply didn’t have anything else to read.

http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/wired...-reading/44871

[KevinBurke]

I guess I bought the wrong ereader since my Kobo can't export to evernote.

[jscarbo]

In addition to the awkwardness of marking up ebooks, the other big problem for me in critical and analytical reading and serious study is that it's much more difficult to navigate back and forth to review and re-read important material.

I'm a retired attorney and attended law school back in the 1970's. I did very well as a law student and graduated cum laude near the top of my class. During my last year of law school was asked to teach seminars to first year students about how to study such massive amounts of material, often thousands of pages of text and casebooks each semester. I developed a system partially based on Adler's system which I taught law students and over the following years to many other university students and those preparing to enter universities.

My system involves reading through all the material three times. First, a very quick read to get an overall sense of where the material is going and what the major points are. Secondly, a very careful, analytical reading without marking up anything. Lastly, a third reading, marking up and highlighting the important points you need to remember, but only the bare minimum necessary to jog your memory or highlight absolutely essential material. If done properly, when preparing for an exam, all that is usually necessary is to review your highlights and mark-ups, which means that you can actually review and recall several thousand pages of course material within a reasonable period of exam preparation time.

It's a great system and works for most fields of study but would be almost impossible to do with ebooks. I still get an occasional opportunity to mentor aspiring higher education students or give advice about how to succeed in law school or college and I always point out these difficulties with ebooks. They're great for some things but are much more difficult to use for serious study and mastery of the material presented. I generally recommend that students only use ebooks for supplementary material and use print books for primary texts and important material.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by jscarbo

In addition to the awkwardness of marking up ebooks, the other big problem for me in critical and analytical reading and serious study is that it's much more difficult to navigate back and forth to review and re-read important material.

I have no difficulty with that using the Kindle's highlighting ability, Jo. When I'm working on essays for my Egyptology course I use very much the process that you describe: a quick read through the material, then a more detailed read, highlighting the passage that are going to be of use to me, and then a re-read of the passages I've highlighted to extract the pertinent facts from them. It works well for me. The Kindle makes it easy to go directly to any passage I've highlighted in a book.

[KevinBurke]

Originally Posted by jscarbo

.
..

I'm a retired attorney and attended law school back in the 1970's. I did very well as a law student and graduated cum laude near the top of my class. During my last year of law school was asked to teach seminars to first year students about how to study such massive amounts of material, often thousands of pages of text and casebooks each semester. I developed a system partially based on Adler's system which I taught law students and over the following years to many other university students and those preparing to enter universities.

My system involves reading through all the material three times. First, a very quick read to get an overall sense of where the material is going and what the major points are. Secondly, a very careful, analytical reading without marking up anything. Lastly, a third reading, marking up and highlighting the important points you need to remember, but only the bare minimum necessary to jog your memory or highlight absolutely essential material.

Your system isn't really original. Mortimer J. Adler in his famous book "How to Read a Book" recommends a fast/quick superficial reading, for difficult books, the first time you read it, and then on the second reading one is supposed to read it analytically and do all the markups at the sametime. I'll leave out what he said about syntopical reading, here , for the sake of brevity. I think he would think that reading the material a third time would be superfluous and unnecessary.

[howyoudoin]

Originally Posted by KevinBurke

Your system isn't really original. Mortimer J. Adler in his famous book "How to Read a Book" recommends a fast/quick superficial reading, for difficult books, the first time you read it, and then on the second reading one is supposed to read it analytically and do all the markups at the sametime. I'll leave out what he said about syntopical reading, here , for the sake of brevity. I think he would think that reading the material a third time would be superfluous and unnecessary.

You should have followed Adler's system of reading his post thrice yourself

Originally Posted by jscarbo

.......
I'm a retired attorney and attended law school back in the 1970's. I did very well as a law student and graduated cum laude near the top of my class. During my last year of law school was asked to teach seminars to first year students about how to study such massive amounts of material, often thousands of pages of text and casebooks each semester. I developed a system partially based on Adler's system which I taught law students and over the following years to many other university students and those preparing to enter universities........

[Soldim]

Originally Posted by KevinBurke

When reading non-fiction any reading above the elementary level such as analytical or syntopical is going to involve writing. For instance when performing analytical reading the writing part typically involves the following (note in the latter part these points are terse could be expanded to make more 'sense' but I don't feel like it is necessary) :


"What is the best way to get the most out of a book? In his essay "How to Mark a Book," American philosopher Mortimer J. Adler extolls the virtues of not only reading, but writing "between the lines." The man who wrote the primer on liberal education, "How to Read a Book," suggests that annotating books as you read makes for "the most efficient kind of reading." Adler distinguishes between three kinds of readers: those who own books and do not read them; those who own books and read them occasionally and those who own books, read them and mark them up.

I do a lot of analytical reading, and the process described is kind of what I used, in reverse, during my studies. When I started, I annotated, put stuff in the sidelines etc. -- by the time I finished my studies I had even stopped underlining. I still read a lot for work, and most these days in on electronic devices without note taking, highlighting etc.

I guess experience helps a lot in getting the essentials out of a text and remembering them, or at least the location in the text