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Kindle: No Memex
Jul. 10th, 2009 11:43 amOur dean bought a Kindle and passed it to various people in the library to look at and play with and report back....
I'm the sort of person who shouldn't be allowed expensive electronic devices because short of having some sort of "Clapper"/RFID technology embedded in my body and my belongings, I misplace most everything. Nevertheless, I've still been interested in the "electronic reader" concept. Normally, I prefer my fiction in paper format, where I can dog-ear (yes, yes I do) it, drop it, and read it in the bath, though admittedly I lose paperbacks too. [The Kindle's small size and compact silhouette makes it easy to carry, easy to read, and disconcertingly easy to put down and set something on top of, making it invisible. I predict an after-market innovation of Kindle-specific electronic locator fob.]
However, the electronic book reader has the potential, in my mind, to be the ultimate repository for the Memex concept. Back in 1940, Vannevar Bush, in an article called "As We May Think" in The Atlantic, postulated the Memex, using microfilm technology. The idea was that this memex, a "scholar's workstation" the size of a desk, would store microfilm reels of all the research material one might use, and allow mechanical cross-indexing and annotation. The memex concept inspired Hypertext, and later the technology behind the World Wide Web. But the Web is big, and full of many things, and impersonal; hard to keep track of.
In my reading and research, I'm primarily interested in medieval studies, with all kinds of offshoots into material and food culture, modern and historical. Like most researchers, I'm continually having to annotate what information I found in what book. I'm also a quotation fiend who reads many fiction series, so I find myself turning to online resources to find the quotes I know I remember when the volume is out of reach. If I could just get all my resources, modern and historical, in one place and have them be interconnectable and searchable, that would be a dream. Being able to annotate would be even better.
So, when handed the Kindle, I spent a few minutes cruising the resources already downloaded to it, then tackled historical resources. Many historical documents that I might want to read through thoroughly are available for free on the web, but my roommate suggested "Alice in Wonderland" which is available in many formats.
Oh, my. What a tangled web! We had to go through a number of different steps and try things several times. What should have been a simple project-- we were aiming to download Alice from Project Gutenberg-- was confusing and involved several trips to the manual. Well, I can't blame the developers: the Kindle is designed, like the IPOD, primarily to make it easy for the user to buy and use proprietary purchased items. The fact that it was possible at all was encouraging.
Once we downloaded Alice (in .MOBI format), it was easy to get to it from the main menu, browse, and read page by page. I felt I could happily sit down and read right through it. Next and Previous page buttons worked easily, and the font change and read aloud functions were relatively easy to use. The screen view was lovely, though Juergen commented that he would have liked a booklight function (not backlit, just shining on the screen) for reading in low light. Still, even in low light it was very easy to read and page through.
For those who decry the non-linearity of modern reading (like Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic), the Kindle will be comforting. It's an almost exclusively linear model. The kind of skipping around one does in a favorite book (I'm thinking of, in particular, my treasured Douglas Adams series, favorite children's books, and the works of mid-20th century slight essayist Gladys Taber) would be harder in a Kindle book. It's really designed for paging through, one page at a time, with search as a secondary function. For Tom Clancy or other similarly gripping work, as well as journalistic nonfiction such as 1491 or In Defense of Food, this is great.
Even reading the New York Times was disconcerting; one lost the feeling of flipping through the paper and seeing similar articles on the same page that you get with both the paper newspaper and the web version. But the linearity was also curiously freeing; there was no struggling to find page A4 before the brain-eye love for Words In A Row distracted you into a different article.
The wireless function was beautifully seamless; I turned it on and it connected through our home wireless (I assume) with nary a hitch. With the ease of downloading and reading, this could definitely be the solution to a book-addict's years of carting around enough books to get through a trip. Load up what you want before you leave home, and if you run out, duck into a restaurant's wireless hotspot and grab a new book immediately!
I'm afraid I found both the keyboard and the menu click button difficult to use. However, the keyboard problem seemed to be a function of being a touch-typist; Juergen, a programmer and two-finger typist with larger fingers than mine, had no problem. I realize that the designers probably expect the user to be clicking a lot less than paging. Still I found that the square menu clicker was awkward to the touch and not as responsive as I wanted it to be. (I am reminded of my struggles with laptop 'trackpoints'-- little red nubs on the keyboard of older laptops-- that were supposed to substitute for the mouse.)
I did try the annotation feature, and it worked rather well; so did bookmarking. But the Kindle is really a linear reading device, designed primarily to let you read items available for purchase. That's ok. Many of my friends say they'd rather read fun stuff on a ebook reader than their serious research materials. Juergen loved the Kindle. Probably the Memex-seekers like me are in a very small majority!
I'm the sort of person who shouldn't be allowed expensive electronic devices because short of having some sort of "Clapper"/RFID technology embedded in my body and my belongings, I misplace most everything. Nevertheless, I've still been interested in the "electronic reader" concept. Normally, I prefer my fiction in paper format, where I can dog-ear (yes, yes I do) it, drop it, and read it in the bath, though admittedly I lose paperbacks too. [The Kindle's small size and compact silhouette makes it easy to carry, easy to read, and disconcertingly easy to put down and set something on top of, making it invisible. I predict an after-market innovation of Kindle-specific electronic locator fob.]
However, the electronic book reader has the potential, in my mind, to be the ultimate repository for the Memex concept. Back in 1940, Vannevar Bush, in an article called "As We May Think" in The Atlantic, postulated the Memex, using microfilm technology. The idea was that this memex, a "scholar's workstation" the size of a desk, would store microfilm reels of all the research material one might use, and allow mechanical cross-indexing and annotation. The memex concept inspired Hypertext, and later the technology behind the World Wide Web. But the Web is big, and full of many things, and impersonal; hard to keep track of.
In my reading and research, I'm primarily interested in medieval studies, with all kinds of offshoots into material and food culture, modern and historical. Like most researchers, I'm continually having to annotate what information I found in what book. I'm also a quotation fiend who reads many fiction series, so I find myself turning to online resources to find the quotes I know I remember when the volume is out of reach. If I could just get all my resources, modern and historical, in one place and have them be interconnectable and searchable, that would be a dream. Being able to annotate would be even better.
So, when handed the Kindle, I spent a few minutes cruising the resources already downloaded to it, then tackled historical resources. Many historical documents that I might want to read through thoroughly are available for free on the web, but my roommate suggested "Alice in Wonderland" which is available in many formats.
Oh, my. What a tangled web! We had to go through a number of different steps and try things several times. What should have been a simple project-- we were aiming to download Alice from Project Gutenberg-- was confusing and involved several trips to the manual. Well, I can't blame the developers: the Kindle is designed, like the IPOD, primarily to make it easy for the user to buy and use proprietary purchased items. The fact that it was possible at all was encouraging.
Once we downloaded Alice (in .MOBI format), it was easy to get to it from the main menu, browse, and read page by page. I felt I could happily sit down and read right through it. Next and Previous page buttons worked easily, and the font change and read aloud functions were relatively easy to use. The screen view was lovely, though Juergen commented that he would have liked a booklight function (not backlit, just shining on the screen) for reading in low light. Still, even in low light it was very easy to read and page through.
For those who decry the non-linearity of modern reading (like Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic), the Kindle will be comforting. It's an almost exclusively linear model. The kind of skipping around one does in a favorite book (I'm thinking of, in particular, my treasured Douglas Adams series, favorite children's books, and the works of mid-20th century slight essayist Gladys Taber) would be harder in a Kindle book. It's really designed for paging through, one page at a time, with search as a secondary function. For Tom Clancy or other similarly gripping work, as well as journalistic nonfiction such as 1491 or In Defense of Food, this is great.
Even reading the New York Times was disconcerting; one lost the feeling of flipping through the paper and seeing similar articles on the same page that you get with both the paper newspaper and the web version. But the linearity was also curiously freeing; there was no struggling to find page A4 before the brain-eye love for Words In A Row distracted you into a different article.
The wireless function was beautifully seamless; I turned it on and it connected through our home wireless (I assume) with nary a hitch. With the ease of downloading and reading, this could definitely be the solution to a book-addict's years of carting around enough books to get through a trip. Load up what you want before you leave home, and if you run out, duck into a restaurant's wireless hotspot and grab a new book immediately!
I'm afraid I found both the keyboard and the menu click button difficult to use. However, the keyboard problem seemed to be a function of being a touch-typist; Juergen, a programmer and two-finger typist with larger fingers than mine, had no problem. I realize that the designers probably expect the user to be clicking a lot less than paging. Still I found that the square menu clicker was awkward to the touch and not as responsive as I wanted it to be. (I am reminded of my struggles with laptop 'trackpoints'-- little red nubs on the keyboard of older laptops-- that were supposed to substitute for the mouse.)
I did try the annotation feature, and it worked rather well; so did bookmarking. But the Kindle is really a linear reading device, designed primarily to let you read items available for purchase. That's ok. Many of my friends say they'd rather read fun stuff on a ebook reader than their serious research materials. Juergen loved the Kindle. Probably the Memex-seekers like me are in a very small majority!
