Quote:
Originally Posted by sergiodongala
So 1 second per pqge turn is too much?
So if it was like LCD 60 turns per second would you be able to read a 60 pages
in 1 second?
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Yes one second is slow if you are not on the exact page you want to be on and don't have the precise page number to go by. If for example you are looking for a detail or unknown word that you could recognize by sight (leaf, paragraph, and syntax cues) while spanning across a series of 10-20 pages in the vicinity of the information, it can be easy to process upwards of 10 pages a second visually to assess location relevance. I do this by scrolling with my mouse scroll wheel while looking at a 2-page PDF view on a large-screen monitor on my PC (one pair of pages per mouse wheel stop, about 8 stops per finger scroll in 1-2 seconds), and I do it by flipping through book pages in paper books. Both methods are pretty effective; the advantage to the computer scanning approach is that it also allows keyword searches which can be very useful and pretty quick in some situations, along with useful multilingual dictionaries (like StarDict) and other reading support programs in the background, all with quick access and input. None of those advantages fully exist for e-ink devices; where the functionality exists, it is too slow to be really useful.
Fast scanning and skimming aren't exactly esoteric methods either. They're highly common in a lot of reading and research where data retrieval is more dynamic than just a link to a chart or a footnote (which, in my opinion, is still quite unbearably slow on e-ink). In my previous field of research, an easy or common example would be to find a certain narrative device, translation technique, or structural pattern within different parts of an anthology of, say, 200 poems and their translations. Lacking specific enough information for a keyword search, casual flip-scan methods allow me to look at perhaps 4 pages a second if I'm familiar with A) the device I'm looking for but not B) the overall content. That number further increases if both A and B are familiar from previous reading, as I only need passive recognition for bookmarking and setting references. That is just a personal example, and
far from the only situation that calls for and benefits from rapid global navigation.
Navigation does in fact mean a lot to some people in different reading modes. Don't read that as
elitism, but it's useful to understand that not everyone reads in a casual word-to-word, line-to-line method all the time. With novels, sure it is typical (narratives in general usually demand it), but novels and stories are not the only kind of reading out there, and yes some people do skip around a lot, especially the case in re-reading or cross-referencing unbookmarked segments, or even just browsing in a piece of literature. Even flipping around a magazine for something interesting (especially those with interesting pictures
) demands more content processing speed than any e-ink device can muster at the current state of technology.
It'd be nice to get a good portable form factor with pretty good battery life, daylight readability, and reasonable navigation speed and control in the same device. It's not that extreme a requirement actually, and it won't be surprising at all to see something approaching that released in 2010 or 2011, even if annotation and input remains limited/poor.