Unexploited design opportunities: Ebooks still suck for studying

Turning paper books into digital ones not only didn’t improve the experience of studying, but it impoverished it.

Digital systems have now entered the world of education for a few years, and it is clear they are here to stay: because they are ubiquitous in our daily lives, we cannot escape them as tools nor we should as opportunities. They can open up new learning methods that better suit our needs, or the way our brain works. They can help us study.

To roughly simplify the matter for the sake of the argument, let’s say that there are two kinds of reading:

passive reading , in which you passively absorb the content of a text, without interacting with it and without the aim of using it for something. You just read the text.

, in which you passively absorb the content of a text, without interacting with it and without the aim of using it for something. You just read the text. Active reading, in which you do interact with the text and bend it to suit your needs. You use the text.

Here I want to talk about active reading.

To simplify even further, I am talking about a now-classic debate around reading for studying: reading from a paper book, as opposed to reading from a screen. And here’s why it is a problem, that sounds almost like a paradox: we have these amazing new technologies that make everything seem possible, reachable, and yet turning paper books into digital ones not only didn’t improve the experience of studying, but it impoverished it.

Forget about our romantic, endangered memories of “old book smell”. Most of my university books and manuals smelled of plastic, but that’s beyond the point. There are many ways in which the physicality of the support helps us handle knowledge: understanding and memorizing concepts, making connections, keeping references, aiding visual memory. There are as many, if not more ways in which a digital tool could do just the same, with the added benefit of being always with you(something a few 500-pages manuals cannot boost to be). And yet, it doesn’t.

On my iPad, I tried the most popular readers on the iOS App Store, and they all share the same, basic functions: you can organize multiple books, you can highlight text in different colors, you can add notes, you can switch to night view (white text on black background), you can increase or reduce the text size, you can leave bookmarks. All your highlights and notes end up in the same “notes” section, that can be shared with others or exported. Nice, right? Great if you are reading a novel while relaxing on the beach, not as much if you actually need to do something with your reading.

Yet, if we talk about active reading, many features are missing across all these apps. They concern the way we study, and the many tricks we use to understand, assimilate, and memorize written text. I tried to analyze how we approach the texts we use to study, how we use them, then listed some of the features I think are most needed.

1. Merge two highlighted sentences into a single note

Right now any reader allows you to highlight portions of the text, that stay highlighted on the page and gets copied in the “notes” section related to the book.