Numinous Nonsense

Based on my most recent research of the digital book industry, it looks like we’re posed for a paradigm shift in the area of reading. Up until now, paper books have been the leading technology in terms of reading, with the advent of printing press by Johannes Gutenberg being one of the more recent major advances in terms of replicating full works and making them available to a larger audience. There have been incremental advances ever since, but nothing which I would call ground-breaking. Until now…

And that is in the area of digital books. Almost every other multimedia format has turned digital and has done so with marvelous success. Audio is one striking example, with the wide adoption of the iPod and the iTunes distribution infrastructure, which has recently sold over 1 billion songs, with video following in its smaller brother’s footsteps. Why then, hasn’t text information, in the form of e-books already become widespread?

According to Ray Kurzweil, there are various reasons, the primary one being that e-books are missing the “superb visual characteristics of paper and ink.” This mainly has to do with the flicker of most computer screen displays…

We are able to see only a very small portion of the visual field with high resolution. This portion, imaged by the fovea in the retina, is focused on an area about the size of a single word at twenty-two inches away. Outside of the fovea, we have very little resolution but exquisite sensitivity to changes in brightness, an ability that allowed our primitive forebears to quickly detect a predator that might be attacking. The constant flicker of a video graphics array (VGA) computer screen is detected by our eyes as motion and causes constant movement of the fovea. This substantially slows down reading speeds, which is one reason that reading on a screen is less pleasant than reading a printed book. – The Singularity is Near, p 55

Some of the other reasons have to do with issues of contrast, the weight of the device, lack of digital scanned books in contrast to printed books, and the issues that come up with illegal file sharing. And, according to Kurzweil most of these issues are being solved (or already have been solved). He says that, “new, inexpensive display technologies have contrast, resolution, lack of flicker, and viewing angle comparable to high-quality paper documents.” One of these new display technologies, which is being reviewed across the web, is called E Ink. It provides a flicker and ambient free display that is comparable in viewing quality to paper. And, this technology is being released with a new digital reader system called the Sony Reader, which ships this Spring. On top of that Google, as well as many other publishers, and converting thousands of books a day to the digital format, so the information and the infrastructure will exist in the coming years (if not months). What all of this means together, is that the first wave of early adopters will get to begin converting to a technology that will have massive benefit over the previous model (paper back book libraries).

What are some of the benefits of this new technology you might ask? Well, first of all, digital books will be able to be downloaded and saved all in one place (your HD or the reader itself). This will make your big bookshelf practically obsolete, and will save you a bit of space as well. The next advantage is that you can carry many hundreds of books with you, in a small device the size of a book. You’ll have at your fingertips any written resource you need, anytime you need. And the cool thing is that all of this information is easily searchable, cross reference-able, and tag-able. One’s ability to relate multiple streams of information will increase by a sizeable degree.

Another advantage, which has already been built into the Sony Reader, is the capability of downloading RSS Feeds and other web resources off of the web and onto the Reader. So you can have access to all of your favorite books and blog feeds all in one place, and it won’t be long until these readers have wireless capabilities, so that whenever you walk by or connect to an unencrypted wireless network, an automatic download will occur.

And if anybody in the digital book industry is listening, here are some capabilities I’d like to see built into future reading devices:

1. Ability to highlight text, and create a searchable database of this highlighted information.
2. The capacity to then take this highlighted text and automatically insert it into a word processing document (copy and paste), with the appropriate citations.
3. A way to tag different highlighted sections (or chapters or pages), to make retro-active searching easier.

This may yet take a couple years, especially for people and distributors to catch on (not to mention the security issues of illegal replication), but all in all it seems inevitable. For an avid reader, and for someone who wants to streamline the process of research, digital reading technology will be a huge leap.

Along with that leap, let us not forget though, that there is still an obligation (for those of us with this commitment) to use what we know, and what we communicate for the benefit of all beings. Even more so, since there are many people who don’t know how to read aren’t in a position to take advantage of these technologies. It’s up to use to diminish those gaps, to use our abilities (intellectual and otherwise) to find novel solutions to the problems of today’s ever-evolving and complexifying world.

ebooks, digital books, singularity, kurzweil, technology, books