Quote:
Originally Posted by Kumabjorn
From a teacher's view point I get it, what about from a student's? Reading isn't done in the class room, but the ability to take notes inside the textbook and index those are, in my experience, a real boon to academic efficiency. Things like taking pictures of the white board and recording voice notes should be an added bonus.
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I am not sure I understand your question. The ability to take notes and index those is independent from screen-size... so I don't see how it relates to the 8" vs 10" discussion.
As a side note, the ability to take notes is a huge problem. While many applications exist that allow annotation of textbooks on e-readers, many of the large publishers are now distributing electronic versions of textbooks through their own apps. I have tested some of those and found them terribly clunky. For example, CourseSmart, which is a platform used by multiple publishers to distribute textbooks is, for lack of a better technical term, utter garbage. I have used it on multiple operating systems - and it crashes, it is slow, it does not allow easy browsing of books or fast jumping to specific pages/sectors, no handwritten annotations on any platform, no syncing of annotations across devices. Yet, it is the only (legal) way to access textbooks by some publishers.
I have students buying e-textbooks on Amazon. The Kindle apps are a bit better - but still clunky. The biggest drawback is still the lack of handwritten annotations.
Those are just two examples. But the point is, as long as publishers are locking users into outdated software, no screen size will matter. We are still not smoothly converging to a world of electronic reading of textbooks.
Academic articles (journals) are different. Because they have embraced PDF (which, for how despised, is a format accessible across platforms and through countless software).