More Disgruntled, Freakish Reflections on ebooks and Readers

While I have some pet peeves with the Kindle, I’ve mostly found it to be a good experience. That being said, there are some things I’d love to see in the future. These aren’t really complaints, as some of this stuff isn’t yet available, but there are a few opportunities afforded by the electronic nature of eBooks that would make the whole process better.

  • The Display – The electronic ink display that the basic Kindles use is fantastic… for reading text. Once you get beyond simple text, things are a little less fantastic. Things like diagrams, artwork, and photography aren’t well represented in e-ink, and even in color readers (like the iPad or Kindle Fire), there are issues with resolution and formatting that often show up in eBooks. Much of this comes down to technology and cost, both of which are improving quickly. Once stuff like IMOD displays start to deliver on their promise (low power consumption, full color, readable in sunlight, easy on the eyes, capable of supporting video, etc…), we should see a new breed of reader.

    I’m not entirely sure how well this type of display will work, at least initially. For instance, how will it compare to the iPad 3’s display? What’s the resolution like? How much will it cost? And so on. Current implementations aren’t full color, and I suspect that future iterations will go through a phase where the tech isn’t quite there yet… but I think it will be good enough to move forward. I think Amazon will most certainly jump on this technology when it becomes feasible (both from a technical and cost perspective). I’m not sure if Apple would switch though. I feel like they’d want a much more robust and established display before they committed.

  • General Metrics and Metadata – While everyone would appreciate improvements in device displays, I’m not sure how important this would be. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d love to see a lot more in the way of metadata and flexibility, both about the book and about device usage. With respect to the book itself, this gets to the whole page number issue I was whinging about in my previous post, but it’s more than that. I’d love to see a statistical analysis of what I’m reading, on both individual and collective levels.

    I’m not entirely sure what this looks like, but it doesn’t need to be rocket science. Simple Flesch-Kincaid grades seems like an easy enough place to start, and it would be pretty simple to implement. Calculating such things for my entire library (or a subset of my library), or ranking my library by grade (or similar sorting methods) would be interesting. I don’t know that this would provide a huge amount of value, but I would personally find it very illuminating and fun to play around with… and it would be very easy to implement. Individual works wouldn’t even require any processing power on the reader, it could be part of the download. Doing calculations of your collective library might be a little more complicated, but even that could probably be done in the cloud.

    Other metadata would also be interesting to view. For example, Goodreads will graph your recently read books by year of publication – a lot of analysis could be done about your collection (or a sub-grouping of your collection) of books along those lines. Groupings by decade or genre or reading level, all would be very interesting to know.

  • Personal Metrics and Metadata – Basically, I’d like to have a way to track my reading speed. For whatever reason, this is something I’m always trying to figure out for myself. I’ve never gone through the process of actually recording my reading habits and speeds because it would be tedious and manual and maybe not even all that accurate. But now that I’m reading books in an electronic format, there’s no reason why the reader couldn’t keep track of what I’m reading, when I’m reading, and how fast I’m reading. My anecdotal experience suggests that I read anywhere from 20-50 pages an hour, depending mostly on the book. As mentioned in the previous post, a lot of this has to do with the arbitrary nature of page numbers, so perhaps standardizing to a better metric (words per minute or something like that) would normalize my reading speed.

    Knowing my reading speed and graphing changes over time could be illuminating. I’ve played around a bit with speed reading software, and the results are interesting, but not drastic. In any case, one thing that would be really interesting to know when reading a book would be how much time you have left before you finish. Instead of having 200 pages, maybe you have 8 hours of reading time left.

    Combining my personal data with the general data could also yield some interesting results. Maybe I read trashy SF written before 1970 much faster than more contemporary literary fiction. Maybe I read long books faster than short books. There are a lot of possibilities here.

    There are a few catches to this whole personal metrics thing though. You’d need a way to account for breaks and interruptions. I might spend three hours reading tonight, but I’m sure I’ll take a break to get a glass of water or answer a phone call, etc… There’s not really an easy way around this, though there could be mitigating factors like when the reader goes to sleep mode or something like that. Another problem is that one device can be used by multiple people, which would require some sort of profile system. That might be fine, but it also adds a layer of complexity to the interface that I’m sure most companies would like to avoid. The biggest and most concerning potential issue is that of privacy. I’d love to see this information about myself, but would I want Amazon to have access to it? On the other hand, being able to aggregate data from all Kindles might prove interesting in its own right. Things like average reading speed, number of books read in a year, and so on. All interesting and useful info.

    This would require an openness and flexibility that Amazon has not yet demonstrated. It’s encouraging that the Kindle Fire runs a flavor of Android (an open source OS), but on the other hand, it’s a forked version that I’m sure isn’t as free (as in speech) as I’d like (and from what I know, the Fire is partially limited by its hardware). Expecting comprehensive privacy controls from Amazon seems naive.

    I’d like to think that these metrics would be desirable to a large audience of readers, but I really have no inclination what the mass market appeal would be. It’s something I’d actually like to see in a lot of other places too. Video games, for instance, provide a lot of opportunity for statistics, and some games provide a huge amount of data on your gaming habits (be it online or in a single player mode). Heck, half the fun of sports games (or sports in general) is tracking the progress of your players (particularly prospects). Other games provide a lack of depth that is most baffling. People should be playing meta-games like Fantasy Baseball, but with MLB The Show providing the data instead of real life.

  • The Gamification of Reading – Much of the above wanking about metrics could probably be summarized as a way to make reading a game. The metrics mentioned above readily lend themselves to point scores, social-app-like badges, and leaderboards. I don’t know that this would necessarily be a good thing, but it could make for an intriguing system. There’s an interesting psychology at work in systems like this, and I’d be curious to see if someone like Amazon could make reading more addictive. Assuming most people don’t try to abuse the system (though there will always be a cohort that will attempt to exploit stuff like this), it could ultimately lead to beneficial effects for individuals who “play” the game competitively with their friends. Again, this isn’t necessarily a good thing. Perhaps the gamification of reading will lead to a sacrifice of comprehension in the name of speed, or other mitigating effects. Still, it would be nice to see the “gamification of everything” used for something other than a way for companies to trick customers into buying their products.

As previously mentioned, the need for improved displays is a given (and not just for ereaders). But assuming these nutty metrics (and the gamification of reading) are an appealing concept, I’d like to think that it would provide an opening for someone to challenge Amazon in the market. An open, flexible device using a non-DRMed format and tied to a common store would be very nice. Throw in some game elements, add a great display, and you’ve got something close to my ideal reader. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like we’re all that close just yet. Maybe in 5-10 years? Seems possible, but it’s probably more likely that Amazon will continue its dominance.