Ereaders: What’s “Logical” from the CP Standpoint

Ereader Controversies Escalate
Whether you are an old-school addict intent upon preserving your leather-bound tomes, or a tech-savvy gadget guru loving your new iPhone, you will likely have heard about the launch of Amazon’s latest eReader, Kindle 2. Regardless of how you feel about this particular device, you will also most likely have formed some sort of opinion concerning eReaders in general.

Some people love them. “I’m convinced,” says Dean L. Hubbard, President of Northwest Missouri State University, “that students will read more and they will learn more, by using this medium.” (1) For the 2009 spring semester, Northwest Missouri purchased ebooks for 500 students in ten different courses, as it moved toward an all (or primarily) e-textbook campus. Meanwhile, activists at Andrews University promote using e-textbooks as opportunities to “go green.” Buying e-books eliminates the need for paper (which saves trees), packaging (which creates less waste), and shipping (which minimizes vehicular pollution), thus contributing to a happier, healthier environment. (2)

However, everyone’s not happy. For one thing, the publishing world may be starting to fear the Kindle. With Amazon’s massive, easily searchable store now instantly accessible at the fingertips of Kindle owners, what is to stop Amazon from grabbing a monopoly the world of books? Or even magazines, or newspapers, or . . . journals?

To try and assuage some of this fear and forboding, let us look at Current Protocols and see how this publication would fare in the eReader world. On the Kindle’s 6” diagonal screen, one 8 ½ x 11” CP page would look awfully shrunken. Now, the obvious argument is that all eReaders—the Kindle included—use reflowable text. This means that the amount of text doesn’t change; it is just displayed in different quantities (i.e. on different rows, on differing numbers of pages, etc.), depending how large the text size is. (This is very much like how a computer document works. If you change the font size, words get pushed to the next line, lines get pushed to the next page, etc.)

Reflowable text would solve everything if the contents of every book/magazine/newspaper/CP article were composed strictly of text. The problem arises when images, graphs, charts, and other “aesthetically pleasing” and organization-based images come into play. How can a 5×7” graph possibly be displayed on a screen that is not even 4” wide? Zooming and scrolling are two considerations, until we remember that the very purpose of charts and graphs is to make information as immediately and easily accessible as possible. With zooming and scrolling back and forth over an image, you are forcing the reader to overcome a digital obstacle course to find the very information you intended to be “available at a glance.” Honestly, as a reader, I would keep my paper copy and tell Amazon to take a hike.

This is not to say that all eReaders will remain in their 6” screen format. One company attempting to corner the “larger device” market is called Plastic Logic. Its device, with a 10.7” diagonal e-ink screen, is built to not only support products that rely on visual display (i.e. magazines, newspapers, and journals), but also to appeal to their more destructive users. (For example: You can smash your fist into the reader’s 22 x 28” screen and not even make a dent.) This is because it is made of pliable organic polymer rather than the more traditional, brittle silicon of standard eReaders such as the Kindle. (3) In essence, Plastic Logic is aiming its device at business professionals, whether they are office managers looking to consolidate stacks of paper to fit into their briefcases, or scientists hoping to reduce their bulky manuals to the size of a single sheet of paper. The company’s success with this device will be determined in 2010, as the device is scheduled to be released early next year. (4)

Meanwhile, you may want to grab your favorite book, magazine, newspaper, and journal article, stuff them into a time capsule, and bury it deep. EReaders are here to stay.