Why can’t an e-book be more like a book?  People have tried to make it look like a book, sound like a book , autograph like a book and even smell like a book (See Aerosol Makes Your Nook Smell Like Crunchy Bacon). Now someone has come up with a way to make e-books feel like books.

KAIST Institute of Information Technology Convergence has applied for a patent for its Smart E-Book Interface. “The interface uses the private Apple API for the page flip,” writes Kelly Hodgkins on tuaw.com, “and turns it upside down and inside out. Not only do you get a beautiful page flip like the one in iBooks, you also get page flipping that lets you scan 20 or 30 pages at a time, multiple page flips that are controlled by the speed of your finger swipe, and a way to hold your thumb on one page and flip through the book with your fingers. You can see it in action in the video below to marvel at how the interface mimics the way most people flip the pages of a softcover book.”  Below is a cool demo of the interface.

What the interface seems perfectly suited for is boring books that you just want flip through in big chunks.

Is there any e-book that incorporates all the book-like sensory experiences in a single device?  The only one we can think of is the Flopatronic Fleeber. Check it out.

Richard Curtis

They say you shouldn’t look to closely at how laws and sausages are made. To that short list we have to add many modern conveniences and appliances. Among these are tablets and e-book readers. Evidence is mounting that beneath their glossy screens are disturbing tales of labor abuse, exploitation of the poor, and dumping of toxic waste on helpless communities far from our shores. People are getting hurt and sick and some of them are dying  just so that we can read conveniently on a digital device. “We’re all so dazzled by our new digital toys.” we wrote last fall, “that we’d rather not think about these tragedies.”

A number of recent exposés have penetrated the slick surface of electronic appliances and the revelations are pretty sickening. The New York Times‘s David Barboza reported on environmental abuses perpetrated by e-book and tablet manufacturers, and in particular Apple.

We have cited what happens to your Kindle, Nook, or iPad when the next generation of e-readers replaced them. “If what’s happening in Europe is any guideline,” we wrote “it will end up in a toxic e-waste landfill in Asia and Africa where the destitute, many of them children, will scavenge it for scrap. These scavengers incur horrifying and often fatal skin, lung, intestinal and reproductive organ ailments from the plastics, metals and gases that go into discarded cell phones, televisions, computers, keyboards, monitors, cables and similar e-scrap.” (See Getting Rid of E-Trash? Dump it on Asia’s Poor)

Just as we think more greenly about energy, it’s time to Think Green about our e-books.  Under pressure from investigative journalists, the secretive Apple corporation has for the first time made available its records concerning its suppliers, and the revelations confirm concerns about the company’s labor practices.  Apple audits, as Nick Winfield and Charles Duhigg reported in the New York Times, “revealed that 93 supplier facilities had records indicating that over half of workers exceeded a 60-hour weekly working limit. Apple said 108 facilities did not pay proper overtime as required by law. In 15 facilities, Apple found foreign contract workers who had paid excessive recruitment fees to labor agencies.And though Apple said it mandated changes at those suppliers, and some showed improvements, in aggregate, many types of lapses remained at general levels that have persisted for years.”

Though this was a good start, labor industry critics didn’t feel Apple’s “supplier responsibility progress report” went far enough, as some of the suppliers,  particularly subcontractors, were not easy to trace, and inadequate measures had been taken to regulate the either contractors or subcontractors. “In the last two years at companies supplying services to Apple, “the Times reporters state, “137 employees were seriously injured after cleaning iPad screens with n-hexane, a toxic chemical that can cause nerve damage and paralysis; numerous workers have committed suicide, or fallen or jumped from buildings in a manner suggesting suicide attempts; and in two separate explosions caused by dust from polishing iPad cases, four were killed and 77 injured.”

To its credit, Apple conducted many more audits in 2011 than previously, resulting in fewer violations, and joined the Fair Labor Association in an initiative to improve conditions for its workers.

Though Apple has taken the brunt of criticism, it is by no means the only manufacturer whose labor practices and environmental controls need to be examined. If similar problems are discovered at the factories where Kindles, Nooks, Sonys and other reading and computing devices are manufactured or where superannuated models are disposed of, the industry must take care of them and include the costs in their price structures even if it means that we have to pay more for our e-book readers.

Read Apple Lists Its Suppliers for 1st Time by Nick Winfield and Charles Duhigg.

Richard Curtis

“Amazon, Gmail, I’ve seen all sorts of shopping, I’ve seen eBay. You name it, I’ve seen it,” says Dr. Stephen Luczycki.

What has Dr. Luczycki, a medical director in a surgical intensive care unit, seen?  He’s seen doctors, nurses and technicians in operating rooms using their smartphones and computers to text their friends, check their emails, and bid on eBay while a surgery was in progress. “This phenomenon has set off an intensifying discussion at hospitals and medical schools about a problem perhaps best described as ‘distracted doctoring’,” writes Matt Richtel in the New York Times.  “My gut feeling is lives are in danger,” says another doctor who wrote a recent article about “electronic distraction” in a medical journal.

A few days after writing about electronic distraction in the operating room, Richtel turned his attention to the growing national debate over phone addiction in automobiles, a growing cause of death, maiming and mayhem on the road. At any give moment, a study discloses,  660,000 drivers are holding phones to their ears.

These are but a few symptoms of a troubling decline in the attention span of our populace. We have become a distracted society, and what should be of deep concern to parents and educators is the effect that this collective malaise is having on our children. If adults cannot handle their media addiction, why would anyone think that children can? There is evidence that they can’t.

One significant manifestation is the glorification of computer screens as an educational tool. Gloria Mark, a University of California professor who studies human-computer interaction, notes that “people are continually distracted when working with digital information. They switch simple activities an average of every three minutes (e.g. reading email or IM) and switch projects about every 10 and a half minutes. It’s just not possible to engage in deep thought about a topic when we’re switching so rapidly.” 

Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, points out that “No one really knows the ultimate effects of an immersion in a digital medium on the young developing brain….My greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now, perhaps, videos (in the new vooks).

“The child’s imagination and children’s nascent sense of probity and introspection,” Professor Wolf writes, “are no match for a medium that creates a sense of urgency to get to the next piece of stimulating information. The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it.“

“Techno-addiction is creating a generation of students with hypertrophied thumbs and atrophied intellects,” we wrote not long ago (Digital Distractions Producing a Generation of Morons?). The Times‘s Richtel has been hammering on this theme for  some time (in particular read his cogent article Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction) As our homes and schools become more and more committed to the romance the computer screen we need to pay attention to the warnings Richtel has been marshaling.

Can our addiction to media be cured? In a Sunday New York Times editorial, “The Joy of of Quiet“, Pico Iyer writes, “The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.Maybe that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or tai chi; these aren’t New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two journalist friends of mine observe an ‘Internet sabbath’ every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation.”

Immersion into beauty, meaning and tranquility. It’s a start.

Richard Curtis

The jury is still out on the academic benefits of e-books, “There is very little evidence that kids learn more, faster or better by using these machines,” says Larry Cuban, professor emeritus of education at Stanford University.

Researchers and psychologists report that screens create distractions for students. (See The Medium is The Screen. The Message is Distraction). And even students are far from convinced that they learn better and faster or retain as much (See Students Give E-Textbooks a Failing Grade)

These would appear to be the reasons why many parents have reservations about schools that rely on high-tech educational tools.

You would imagine that the one class of parents that embrace “screen learning” would be denizens of Silicon Valley. Yet, as the New York Times‘s Matt Richtel reports, “the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don’t mix.” In fact, in the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, “the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.”

The school, one of a chain, is not an experiment but one of a chain of institutions founded on the belief that “computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans.” The parents are the likes of a Google communications executive and a former employee of Intel and Microsoft who is currently working at a high-tech start-up. “The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that’s ridiculous,” says one father.

But there is one category of youngster that seems to be thriving on screen learning: autistic children. “The iPad might be the difference between communicating with the outside world and being locked into a closed state,” writes John Brandon on FoxNews.com. Autistic kids respond to the devices in ways that are absolutely thrilling to parents and educators and promise breakthroughs in understanding the mysterious condition.

One three-year-old could not articulate even the most basic of needs.  Yet an iPad helped to bring him out of his mental cage. “The iPad has given us our family back,” his mother rejoiced. “It’s unlocked a new part of our son that we hadn’t seen before, and given us insight into the way he connects with his world.”

Richard Curtis

Watching Books

For some time we’ve been wringing our hands about the potentially deleterious effect of e-books on children. Our concerns were provoked by studies that the distracting nature of screen devices have a negative impact on kids’ ability to concentrate and retain information.  And the jury is still out on e-textbooks.  (See Digital Distractions Producing a Nation of Morons?)

However, there’s some promising news that as a vehicle for pure pleasure-reading, e-books are becoming a big hit with children.  We have the New York Times‘s publishing-beat reporter Julie Bosman to thank for this ray of sunshine in an otherwise cloudy forecast.

In E-Readers Catch Younger Eyes and Go in Backpacks Bosman quotes editors like Susan Katz, president and publisher of HarperCollins Children’s Books: “Adult fiction is hot, hot, hot, in e-books, and now it seems that teen fiction is getting to be hot, hot, hot.” And Jon Anderson, publisher of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing: “Boy, a lot of kids got e-readers for Christmas…If it follows the same trend as adults, it’s the start of an upward curve.” And Matthew Shear, publisher of St. Martin’s Press: “The young adults and the teenagers are now the newest people who are beginning to experience e-readers.If they get hooked, it’s great stuff for the business.”

So, instead of asking sociologists and psychiatrists about the effects of e-books on young minds, maybe we should be asking…kids?

Richard Curtis
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Techno-addiction is creating a generation of students with hypertrophied thumbs and  atrophied intellects. That seems to be the gist of Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction by Matt Richtel of the New York Times.  They may be dazzling multi-taskers but many cannot read, write, or calculate.

This comes as no surprise here, where we’ve posted a number of articles warning about the potentially destructive allure of screens (see below). But as the first fully wired crop of youngsters comes on stream the harmful impact of digital technology on academic performance is manifesting itself with a vengeance.

“The risk,” Richtel reports, “is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.”  He quotes Michael Rich, executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston: “Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing… The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”

The article focuses on a California student described as one of his school’s brightest. His digital skills and passion for videos earned him an A in film critique.  But he also got a D+ in English and an F in Algebra II, netting him a grade point average of 2.3. It took him two months to read 43 pages of an assigned book last summer. Nor has he gotten much exercise. The senior says “I haven’t done exercise since my sophomore year.” Books? He prefers YouTube, where “you can get a whole story in six minutes. A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification.”  And just how well does he handle multitasking? In fact, even that’s a problem: “I’m doing Facebook, YouTube, having a conversation or two with a friend, listening to music at the same time. I’m doing a million things at once, like a lot of people my age. Sometimes I’ll say: I need to stop this and do my schoolwork, but I can’t.”

Another student, who exchanges 27,000 text messages every month (!!!), reflects the same inability to focus on task: “I’ll be reading a book for homework and I’ll get a text message and pause my reading and put down the book, pick up the phone to reply to the text message, and then 20 minutes later realize, ‘Oh, I forgot to do my homework.’ ”

Researchers confirm what these stories tell us: “Several recent studies,” Richtel writes, “show that young people tend to use home computers for entertainment, not learning, and that this can hurt school performance, particularly in low-income families.”

A teacher puts it more plainly: “It’s a catastrophe.”

Read Matt Richtel’s Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction. And for additional background about the negative  impact of screen technology see Watching Books, The Medium is Screens. The Message is Distraction and More Evidence that Screens=Distraction.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

When people talk about e-books in color, what exactly do they mean?  Is it that the device’s frame comes in rainbow colors (like the now-defunct Cool-er) while the screen remains black and white e-ink?  Or do they mean there is a color strip at the bottom of a black and white screen  – The Nook – displaying colorful thumbnails of book covers?

Or is it that the black print will be replaced by yellow or green or blue or red ink and the  background will be red or blue or green or yellow?

That question isn’t answered, or even really raised, in an article by Anne Eisenberg in the New York Times updating us on developments in color e-books  Is the question so big no one knows how to articulate it?  Or is it such a fundamental assumption that we don’t need to articulate it at all?

You would think that with some 11 million boringly monochromatic e-book readers sold this year and 15 million projected for 2011, the industry would feel that black and white ain’t broken and there’s no need to fix it. And we’re not aware of any plans afoot for major players like Amazon/Kindle and Barnes & Noble/Nook to introduce color. But “The popularity of the Apple iPad, on which people can read books, surf the Internet, watch videos and enjoy thousands of apps — all in full color — has shaken up the market,” writes Eisenberg.

Transforming e-readers from b&w to color is far from a mere wave of a wand.  The beauty of e-ink is its minimal power demands, and though Kindles, Sonys and Nooks can’t be read in the dark without a lamp, neither do they suck electric juice like backlit devices (the iPad) with LCD screens.  And there are other advantages to boring old e-ink. It reduces the weight of e-readers, and reduces blinding glare in strong sunlight.

But this still begs the question, which we repeat: do people want to read colored words on colored backgrounds?  Did you say no?  Are you sure?  Is it that long since you read a children’s book?

We grow up reading colored words on colored backgrounds.  We may feel we “graduate” to black and white when we grow up but how locked into b&w are we, really?  Modern readers are conditioned to read blue ink for Internet links, and red ink for editorial comments on manuscripts and legal documents.  Are we ready for a steady diet of colored words?

You may find out as the next generation of e-book screen technology slouches in your direction.  Read about it in Reading E-Books in All the Colors of the Rainbow.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting conducted by the New York Times.

Another study confirms our suspicions that reading books on computer or e-book screens compromises learning and retention. Experiments with children and college students have pointed to the conclusion that screen media are more distracting than their paper counterparts.

Now a study conducted by product development consultancy Nielsen Norman Group has quantified these conjectures. Participants were asked to read some stories by Ernest Hemingway in printed form and on a variety of e-reading devices: an iPad, a Kindle and a desktop PC.

The results, as reported by Lauren Indvik of Mashable, were eye-opening: reading speeds were 6.2% slower on the iPad and 10.7% on the Kindle. “Participants also complained about the weight of the iPad and the Kindle’s weak contrast,” Indvik writes.  Comprehension suffered, too, especially on the PC, where readers complained that it “reminded readers of work.”

The sampling was modest – 24 participants  (Indvik says that “10 is about average for a usability survey”) – and is far from conclusive. But the indications are ominous. “I can see universities and businesses taking less kindly to e-readers if further studies prove that they handicap reading speed,” says Indvik. This comes just as schools and governments consider switching from paper to e-textbooks. See Hasta La Vista, Textbooks.

For further reading see Watching Books, The Medium is Screens. The Message is Distraction, More Evidence that Screens=Distraction, and Students Give E-Textbooks Failing Grade).

Richard Curtis

Are you operating with Mind 2.0 or are you still slouching around with Yesterday’s Mind?

“Yesterday’s Mind” is actually a pithy phrase from a book called The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. Carr’s viewpoint, as reported by Steven Johnson in the New York Times, is that “the compulsive skimming, linking and multitasking of our screen reading is undermining the deep, immersive focus that has defined book culture for centuries.”

We’ve been saying the same thing in our postings (See Yet More Evidence that Screens=Distraction) but after reading Johnson’s article we’re not quite so cocksure.  Maybe we need to revisit shallow thinking, the kind we presumably do when we’re multitasking or reading a book onscreen, and learn if we’re missing something.

Johnson’s arguments are pretty convincing.  “I have no doubt that I am slightly less focused in these interactions,” he admits “but, frankly, most of what we do during the day doesn’t require our full powers of concentration. Even rocket scientists don’t do rocket science all day long.”

He’s right. Rocket science is not an individual activity but a social one. Though scientists may get their inspiration from solitary hikes in the hills or angling alone in a rowboat on a remote pond, the development of their ideas comes from interaction with colleagues. “Many great ideas that have advanced culture over the past centuries have emerged from a more connective space, in the collision of different worldviews and sensibilities, different metaphors and fields of expertise.”

Perhaps that’s why the old publishing business is stuck: its denizens are saddled with “linear, literary minds” (Carr’s phrase) that are wedded to solitary, immersive reading and learning and they have not noticed that a new generation is more comfortable being part of a group mind that performs a lot of tasks that used to be solitary, like reading books. A good example is a Kindle feature called “popular highlights”, which underlines phrases in a book that fellow readers have highlighted as being particularly meaningful. Now you can see, absorb, and be influenced by what others feel is inspiring. A kind of Zagat’s Guide for your brain.

Johnson’s conclusion? “Yes, we are a little less focused, thanks to the electric stimulus of the screen. Yes, we are reading slightly fewer long-form narratives and arguments than we did 50 years ago, though the Kindle and the iPad may well change that. Those are costs, to be sure. But what of the other side of the ledger? We are reading more text, writing far more often, than we were in the heyday of television. And the speed with which we can follow the trail of an idea, or discover new perspectives on a problem, has increased by several orders of magnitude. We are marginally less focused, and exponentially more connected. That’s a bargain all of us should be happy to make.”

The key word is “marginally”.  We’ll take “marginally” to avoid being ostracized for suffering from YMS – Yesterday’s Mind Syndrome. But if the tradeoff leaves us truly shallow, we’ll simply have to take our linear, literary brain and immerse it in a good, printed, book.

Here’s Johnson’s article in full: Yes, People Still Read, but Now It’s Social

Richard Curtis
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.