Textbooks on the Kindle?
Posted on Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Usability guru Jakob Nielsen has written a review of the new Kindle from a usability perspective. His summary:
Amazon's new e-book reader offers print-level readability and shines for reading fiction, but it has awkward interaction design and poor support for non-linear content.
So what’s good for reading novels is not so great for, say, reading textbooks. As an academic, I see great promise in the Kindle (and similar devices): imagine doing away with expensive, heavy textbooks and giving each student a Kindle, loaded up with the reading material they need for all their courses. In one small device.
However, my actual experience is consistent with what Nielsen argues, so I’m not sure how this would actually work in practice. I’ve tried online textbooks and there are big trade-offs: in many ways, textbooks are still superior in paper form. In my case, I’ve not used academic textbooks in my own field but technical books about computer programming, using Safari Books Online compared to the printed O'Reilly counterparts.
When you’re looking for something very specific, the electronic textbooks are great because you can search easily. However, for actually working your way through a book with lots of tables, graphics and examples—things where you need to flip back and forth a lot, or browse around in a relatively non-linear way—the e-book can be pretty frustrating. And that’s in a web browser: I can’t imagine trying to do this on a page-by-page device like the Kindle. Is it possible to design a product like the Kindle more geared towards this kind of reading? (Or is the answer really obvious: the boring old desktop computer or laptop!)
Personally, I haven’t used a Kindle, but I have actually read a few books now on my iPod Touch using Stanza. (I haven’t tried the new Kindle for iPhone app because I have so much free stuff queued up inside Stanza!) I’ve found for reading in short bursts of time, mostly for 30 minutes or so at night, it’s actually pretty nice. Plus, I can read in bed with the lights off so as to not disturb my sleeping wife. Turning down the brightness helps the eyes a bit as well, which is one of the biggest difference between an iPhone and the Kindle: the Kindle’s screen is not your typical battery-eating LCD screen that blasts colors as bright as possible at your eyes, but rather a black and white display built for long-term reading and great battery life. They look nice, but at $360, I won’t be buying one anytime soon.