Sorry iBooks, Paper Books Still Win on Specs
January 22nd, 2012Apple’s vision for ebooks is to make them like webpages, complete with embedded music, videos, lectures, 3D models, etc; the more distracting, the better.
One of the most irritating experiences that I can think of is being interrupted as I’m trying to concentrate. When I sit down to read a book, I don’t want my focus shattered every few seconds or minutes by dazzling whizbangery. Apple, though, wants to turn reading into an experience akin to watching an episode of The Three Stooges. BONK! BANG! Slap! Nuck. Nuck. Nuck.
This is how we need to engage kids today, Apple tells us.
I’m only able to use the web because I’ve learned how to employ browser extensions to make webpages quiet and still by default. As I read about Apple’s iBooks technologies, I mainly thought about how I’d block elements to prevent them from distracting me as I tried to read! Of course, that’s not possible.
Since this nonsense is being mandated in schools, what will be the long term consequences of children spending even more time looking at screens? Apple doesn’t have any options for reading its locked-down content on anything other than conventional computer screens. At least with E-ink and other electronic paper displays, one gets an experience that’s more similar to reading text on regular paper.
What will be the long term consequences of children reading ebooks with stuff spinning and blinking right next to the text that they are supposed to be comprehending:
Mayer and Moreno have studied the phenomenon of cognitive load in multimedia learning extensively and have concluded that it is difficult, and possibly impossible to learn new information while engaging in multitasking. Junco and Cotten examined how multitasking affects academic success and found that students who engaged in more multitasking reported more problems with their academic work. (Wikipedia: Human multitasking)
But that dazzling, distracting iCrackPad vending machine is the future of learning? It’s the answer to decades of disastrous, lobotomizing sKo0l?
Like the author of the piece below, I also think that ebooks are inevitable. This shift to video game style learning is well underway. But if something like the Kindle is disturbing, this iBooks thing is an order of magnitude more so. It’s not some sci-fi dystopic concern that’s always 20 years out.
They’re gunning for your children’s minds with this right now.
Via: The Verge:
In the wake of Apple’s announcement of iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and the latest version of iTunes U, I’d like to take a moment to step back and look at the technology they all look to replace: paper.
…
So while much of the coverage of yesterday’s announcement focuses on the exciting new ways that e-readers enable students to interact with texts, we should also be sure to give paper books their due. This isn’t a Luddite rant about how gadgets are destroying our inherent humanity and it’s not an ode to the wonderful smell and feel of an old book: it’s a clear-eyed look at how well paper technology has served us for millennia and how we need to be careful in our headlong rush to replace it.
Related: Some Parents Who Work for Elite Silicon Valley Firms Send Their Children to School with No Computers
I have my complaints about the electronic age of documents.
The first, which has been well discussed over the years on places like Slashdot, is longevity. Sure, you and I can read a web page today. As formats are improved, and older unwanted methods deprecated, we end up with electronic files that simply cannot be read in the future.
My mom had a good example of this. She had written up quite a few documents, including geneology information, on our Apple ][e when that was one of the better computers available. She still had a box full of 5.25″ floppy disks with mountains of data.
The first problem, how do you read an Apple ][e formatted 5.25″ disk? I worked my way around that, resurrecting some old equipment in the garage.
How does she read them? They weren’t just text files. I believe they were written with Appleworks “classic”, and as I recall, not much wanted to read them. It took some black magic and a few virgin sacrifices to get it going.
When we finally got the point where she could try to get something useful out of it, it became abundantly clear that it wasn’t going to be very useful. She went back to the file cabinets, pulled out the stacks of papers, and started re-entering all of her data in more modern software.
So what about the ebook format? I figured that was a piece of cake. It’s a format, right? Wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_formats
Over the last year or so, we ended up with a Kindle, Nook, and a few fire-sale HP Touchpads. The books have come in all kinds of different formats, that we’ve standardized here for ourselves. Some formats aren’t supported on any of the devices, but we found PC and Mac software to convert them. But what happens when these formats are useless? Well, the “book” that we had becomes a scattering of electrons on an old device in the closet.
Hardware fails. Anyone who wants to disagree with that, I can ship you a pile of scrap equipment. Even those who are dedicated to maintaining old electronic information lose some. It took a long time for Google to recover ancient newsgroup postings, and even then, large parts of it are missing. What happens when companies who thought it was a good idea to archive that data decide it’s not worth keeping?
Most of my real library of books is technological literature. Since I started in IT over a decade ago, I’ve been a collector of the O’Reilly series, buying whatever books I needed more information on a topic. The books are there. I can see them. I can touch them. I can read them; sell them; or give them away.
My girlfriend’s collection is an extensive set of primarily science fiction. That’s thousands of books, filling a couple rooms, collected over 30 years or so. Some are signed first editions. It’s hard to get an e-book signed by the author.
There is also the issue that came up in 2009, where Amazon recalled purchased copies of 1984 (ironically enough). What’s legal today could be illegal tomorrow, and that electronic format book you have may become blacklisted, or automatically censored.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10289983-56.html
It’s hard for any company to “recall” a good old paper version, especially if it was purchased second hand, or received as a gift. The “paper trail” (as it were) would stop cold with the original purchaser. Such a recall would only be possible with house to house searches for illegal materials, as described in Fahrenheit 451, but observed in the “war on terrorism” and the “war on drugs”. Don’t believe for a second that questionable materials, electronic or physical, won’t be seized, used against you, and end up in evidence until it’s destroyed.
Ok, I get it. Brave new worlders have found common ground with chaos enforcing eugenicists : with mechanization we won’t need any large labor force anymore. So the movements fused to combine the best of both propositions : massively breed stupid people as long as they’re needed, engineered chaos will help in getting rid of them in due time with the added benefit of a culturally and genetically (the stupid) ultra-fit population remaining.
Of course those two movements are basically denials of and justifications for greed. Otherwise they’d be fucking playing rock n’ roll.
reminded me of this:
NICHOLAS CARR
Author, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
Cognitive Load
http://www.edge.org/q2011/q11_3.html#carrn