Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
It'll be a while before ebooks are useful in an academic setting as more than an adjunct to traditional books. Right now, none of the ebook readers allow the habits that work best for study.
You can't open three books at once and flip between them. Annotations are limited, nonexistent in some readers and some filetypes. The tiny screens are not good for anything with pictures. Ebook purchasing & loaning is still troublesome--a school can't buy multiple copies of an ebook to loan out to students. Bookmarking within ebooks is limited, and there's no way to match the usefulness of multiple colored flags on multiple books.
Ebook readers, right now, are great for linear reading. They're *excellent* for "start this book at page 1, and keep going until you're finished." They're mediocre for poetry (the formatting limitations come into play), and awful for research that involves switching back and forth between pages, chapters or books.
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I so agree with this position. Having recently tried a couple of references I used for business on my K2i I can say the software/firmware is not even close to making these devices useful as a study/research tool. I often need several books open at once and no way any device, even my laptops and other systems work well either. while OneNote or even EverNote are essential tools for me when researching online, the reading software out there just does not work yet, well for me anyway.
But eventually someone will develop a solid study management app that adds reader software, not management and taking software, HWR, and dictation software to voice notes as well as transcription of those notes. But it's gonna be a number of years yet. I for one am surprised at this, but younger developers all seem to just want to code up new multi-media player front ends...oh joy, just what is needed to go with the 9999999999x10^99999999999 other multi-media players out there already. So these apps are going to come from someone who is already in the game like MS, whoever wrote EverNote and, I forget the other couple similar apps...a true lock-in app for Apple would be exactly such a bit of software for the iPads along with a 12" or even 14" iPad and Wacom. It would even seduce non-Apple users if it worked for study and researching. And definitely a math/science module would be a must have...I am sure Wolfram or PTC (the current MathCad folks) could really sell a lot of devices if they only had a device with a Wacom and some light weight version of their math-wordprocessor software was on the device...so maybe the bits and pieces are out there just not in a way to pull them together.