From Scroll to Screen

[wiccanhot]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/books/review/the-mechanic-muse-from-scroll-to-screen.html?ref=technology

Interesting article.

[Me and My Kindle]

I think he makes one really good point:

We usually associate digital technology with nonlinearity, the forking paths that Web surfers beat through the Internet’s underbrush as they click from link to link. But e-books and nonlinearity don’t turn out to be very compatible. Trying to jump from place to place in a long document like a novel is painfully awkward on an e-reader, like trying to play the piano with numb fingers. You either creep through the book incrementally, page by page, or leap wildly from point to point and search term to search term.

Hopefully Amazon will improve the navigation on the Kindle soon. It'd be great if one of your menu choices was "Table of Contents" -- and if more books actually offered an interactive table of contents that you could use to skip from one chapter to the next!

[Ann in Arlington]

I think that a codex is absolutely the best format for something that you have to be able to flip through.  Certainly an improvement on the scroll. (Though if the info is on line you can have multiple open tabs/windows which does nearly the same thing).

But for reading most fiction, where the point is to start at the beginning and go on the the end, an ebook is perfectly satisfactory.  Of course, with the ebook, you can book mark favorite passages to go back to with reasonable efficiency, and if it's indexed it is possible to find specific information.  But I agree that 'flipping through' just to find a 'good bit' doesn't work well.

As to a menu choice for ToC. . .there is currently a menu choice for 'go to' and one of the options IS ToC if the book has one.  Of course, as you note, not all do.

[Tara Maya]

  But I agree that 'flipping through' just to find a 'good bit' doesn't work well.

I do miss flipping. It's no good to have bookmarks if you haven't read the book yet, or if you were foolish and forgot to bookmark.

[caracara]

The Kindle format is wonderful for novels in my opinion.
But I do not want any of my textbooks on it!  It would be a nightmare trying to do math on the Kindle.
Like the article said, it's about trade offs.
I for one believe that eventually navigation will improve, and then there will be almost no advantage to paper except it never has to be charged!