bomphiologia
Exaggeration done in a self-aggrandizing manner, as a braggart.
I love it when I have data to back up my vague feelings. As I mentioned in the last post, I find e-book readers to be fascinating and believe that they could someday be a viable future form for texts. That said, we are still in the “Mr. Watson, come here, I need you” era of e-book hardware development. That seems to be the conclusion reached by Northwest Missouri State. I think the key paragraph is:
Students were initially fascinated with their readers, said Dean L. Hubbard, the university’s president, but they soon became frustrated with the devices’ limited interactivity capabilities — which made it impossible to highlight passages, cut and paste text, or participate in interactive quizzes.
Text on E-Ink tools like the Kindle and the Sony Reader looks super-sharp, but that readability comes at a price for students. These problems are both hardware- and software-related.
Hardware
As I noted before, you can’t write back to the text on most e-Books. You can write notes on a handy nearby computer or note by hand, but that means that the text and the notes live in two different places. That’s basically a perfect prescription for lost notes. True, the iLiad includes a Wacom-like screen that allows for annotations, but from what I’ve read,1) the brush size is kind of large, and 2) the annotations don’t always transfer over to the desktop backup.*
The other hardware issue is the screen. While there’s supposed to be a 9.8-incher coming out sometime this year, most are too small to display an 8.5×11 pdf (the typical format for e-reserves). Thanks to my Eee, I’ve gotten used to constant scrolling around, but it still irritates me to not be able to see a full spread at full size.
Software
None of the e-book readers I’ve played with have very good indexing or searching abilities. Without full-text search, much less Yep! or DevonThink, I don’t know how I’d be able to manage all the data. The other important lack is, as the NW Missouri students noted, a quiz tool. I think most of my fellow English comp folks wouldn’t see this as a major loss, but the German class I’m taking to knock out my foreign-language requirement has taught me the value of a workbook. A good quiz tool would be a godsend.
* I, like most Americans, have never seen an iLiad up close; the only person I know who owns one is a former college buddy living in northern France. He’s been using it to plow through the greatest hits of Project Gutenberg.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.