Keitai

According to the Washington Post (would love to read the article BTW but this is one of those subscription only ones,) Google has now resumed the scanning of books. Looks like (for now) they’re going to focus on books that are out of copyright.

I used Google Print for the first time a few days back. I looked up the term Creative Commons then spent about half an hour browsing a variety of books; from legal texts, to a bunch of OReilly books on RSS and Open Source. It was surprisingly fun and I really liked the fact that the books (for the moment?) simply show up in their scanned (i.e. JPG) format. I had been expecting plain vanilla ASCII or HTML and it was a pleasant surprise. There was something very “book-like” about the experience that you just don’t get when reading a blog post or even a PDF. I’m really starting to think that we need to rethink how certain types of information are displayed on-screen. I used to like PDFs because they offered the flexibility to create a great layout that would look the same for everyone. They also offered the ability to print consistently which is always a good thing.

The strange thing with PDFs though, is that most people choose an 8.5 x 11 paper size and proceed to lay the page our very much as one would in a word document. Sure, this is great for printing, but you end up with this incredibly long line length that’s uncomfortable to read. In the book world, most documents that are printed on such large paper make use of columns or vary the layout to account for this. This is too often ignored with PDFs and I think it’s a mistake.

That said, reading on screen is different in other ways that can’t necessarily be ignored. Whether you’re reading a paperback or a coffee table book, the entire page is usually visible to you. Scanning the page simply requires eye movement. Not so on most a devices where you’re limited to a horizontal window/monitor format. In this case, the use of columns requires scrolling.

So I’m not suggesting columns are definitely the way to go. I do think we need to explore document layouts and usability a bit further when it comes to the legibility of larger documents “formatted” documents on computers and devices. There are millions of PDFs out there but how useful are they if they’re a pain to read? (Just yesterday I downloaded two really interesting reports that combined are over 100 pages of reading. I really want to read them but am also dreading the experience:-)

A few links of interest…

E-books vs paper books: Watch paragraph and sentence lengths

ted nelson & the ideologies of documents (a sympathetic critique of some of his views)

http://www.openlibrary.org/ (interesting example of how books can be represented online. From the folks at the Internet Archive and the OpenContent Alliance)