U of Washington Study: Kindle DX not quite there as a replacement for textbooks

[simplyparticular]

Originally Posted by RockdaMan

The digital text also disrupted a technique called cognitive mapping, in which readers used physical cues, such as the location on the page and the position in the book to find a section of text or even to help retain and recall the information they had read.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...ents_uw_s.html

Nice to know that has a name! I've tried explaining it to people how I can find something by where I read it on the page, even years later. They just attributed it to having some kind of photographic memory, but I don't have photographic memory for stuff, just words on a page.

I have e-read faithfully for 8 years now, but certain books just haven't lent themselves to flowable e-reading. With the iPad, PDFs are replicas of the printed page, so I can still using cognitive mapping.

But no app or device has perfected the annotation part of reading.

I can see why the OSU study found the iPad to be useful - there are more useful work-arounds for note-taking. When I'm highly motivated to highlight or take notes on a e-book, I can flip between Notepad and the e-book App and copy/paste, or type my own notes.

However, I think switching to e-textbooks would vary a lot based on the major. I would have found my iPad very useful as a English and History major, but I probably would have still purchased general college course textbooks.

[charleski]

The key here is the importance of contextual cues in the formation of episodic memories. Our memories depend on tying up with the actual data we want to remember with huge amounts of seemingly-irrelevant information, which act as 'hooks' to integrate the data with everything else.

When you have a physical object, it's easier to provide the context needed to create a map. As mentioned, the place within a book is a very powerful cue, which is not surprising as our episodic memory is primarily evolved to remember places. But there are ways of translating this into a form usable for ebooks.

The first requirement is a rich and varied design - there's a reason good textbooks have large page sizes, lots of figures, sidebars, and various bits of typographic dressing, and these need to be retained in an ebook instead of squashing them down to create a linear flow. The second is good, and fast, spatially-directed, navigation within the book. This is the primary reason current low-power devices suck for textbooks - the CPUs take too long to render the page, and even the faster eInk displays take too long to refresh. Page turns need to happen in milliseconds in order to facilitate the formation of a broad overview of a particular chapter.

Navigational aids need to be rich and contain a variety of dressing and cues. This is where ebooks can improve on the physical - a table of contents is always important, but in physical books it's stuck away at the front and isolated from the material. eBooks can integrate the ToC with the material itself to aid mapping and should also allow the formation of flexible links. The devices also need to be high-resolution - every time you have to enlarge a picture or figure to see it clearly you're removing it from the context in which it was placed and you're destroying a vital part of its function.

eInk devices excel for fiction, which the narrative flow within the text itself creates a journey which doesn't need additional reinforcement. But technical works and especially textbooks have greater demands. I'm not surprised that the Kindle DX didn't meet requirements - it's just too slow. The iPad has a better chance, but it's still too low-res and a bit too small. Obviously a good device for textbooks needs to support rich annotations and marginalia, and needs to allow the user to create links within the text on-the-fly. We just aren't there yet, either in terms of hardware or the software framework - ePub 3.0 still lacks a proper page model, but it's still miles ahead of .mobi.

[Filark]

Would be interesting to see a similar study done using the enTourage eDGe, which was designed for students/academics. It didn't catch on, but with the two screens it comes closest to providing the interactive/apps needs and the annotatable e-ink reader in one. It even allows for attachments to epub and pdf texts. I find having the table of contents on the LCD side while I read chapters on the e-ink side is almost like the "pre-reading" experience. And it helps me "map" where I find the info I want to refer to later.

The eDGe isn't perfect, but I'm surprised it isn't being considered when it clearly addresses many of the issues raised.

P.S. Thank you, Dumas, for pointing this out in the enTourage forum here.

[Caleb666]

I think that the main reason that inhibited the adoption of the Kindle DX was its poor PDF support (not TOC, no annotations), and the slow speed of page turning.

I also think that they need to add the ability to open a few books simultaneously (in tabs), which might help research (if you want to compare two or more books at the same time).

As long as you have decent navigation (real page numbers, fixed page sizes, linkable TOC) I think that we can easily get by without parts of congnitive mapping.
So maybe you won't be able to remember where some page was in a book, but you'd still remember after (or before) which page it is located, and where a particular sentence or word was on the page.