As I admitted in our recent Thanksgiving article, I love next-generation display technologies like E Ink. And I hate it when specialists get up in arms over a popular misappropriation/redefinition of one of their pet technical terms (e.g., "well actually, you ignorant rube, the Mahler symphony that's currently playing is a piece of late romantic—not 'classical'—music"). But these feelings notwithstanding, I firmly believe that the term "e-book" is an unfortunate misnomer and that the newly launched Kindle's pretentious positioning as a modern reinvention of the book is just hype and hyperbole. It's also indicative of a general ignorance that most of us who live in the electronic age have about the elaborate, collaboratively developed information architecture of the technology that we often refer to as "dead tree."

In short, electronic "books" are nothing of the sort, and if Kindle aims to be an electronic substitute (replacement?) for the "book," then it has missed the mark by a mile. The basic problem with the current e-book + reader combination is twofold: the single-page format, and the lack of ready markup and annotation features.

Format: books versus documents

From the very beginning of bookmaking down to the modern era, calligraphers and typographers have designed books to be read in facing-page format. The density of the type, the size of the margins, the arrangement of diagrams and captions and headings—all of the visual elements of the printed page are put together by a bookmaker into a composition that's designed to be taken in as a complete, two-page whole. To display a book like Gutenberg's first Bible by offering the viewer only one page at a time is like displaying the Mona Lisa by showing the top half first, then the bottom half. In other words, e-book readers that show one page at a time are presenting to the reader a piece of functional art that has been mutilated and crippled.

The solution to this problem is obvious and straightforward: design all e-book readers to display pairs of pages in the traditional, facing-page format in which books were designed to be read. Sure, it would cost more money, but there are those of us who would pay more to read books using new technology as opposed to flipping back and forth through mere multipage documents.



Neither a real book, nor a real book replacement, all Gutenberg pretensions aside.

This may seem like the nitpick of an aesthetic purist, but spend some time with a well-laid-out book, especially one with illustrations, like Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style, and you'll begin to get a feel for what I mean. And if you take some time to compare and contrast a work like this with a typographic trainwreck like D.C. Greetham's Textual Scholarship: an Introduction, then you'll come to appreciate the difference between a "book" and "a stack of printed documents bound together on one side."

The contrast between Greetham's book, which is marred from cover to cover by the stifling economics of the low-volume academic market, and Bringhurst's masterpiece brings me to another reason why the current crop of single-page e-book readers is so bad: single-page e-books have thus far been a wasted opportunity to liberate page design from the economic constraints of the book market so that the page's visual composition can again be dictated by artistic concerns. By giving us the full expanse of the facing-page format in an easily portable, low-power, electronic medium like E Ink, companies like Amazon and Sony could help bring about a renaissance of typography. Books could afford to be beautiful again (or, at least considerably less ugly), instead of just being low-margin, disposable objects of textual consumption.

Books are interactive

The other place where the e-book + reader combination falls woefully short of a traditional book is in its fundamental lack of interactivity. Yes, you read that right—electronic documents are typically less interactive than their paper counterparts. Why? Because you can't easily mark them up with underlining, highlighting, and marginal notes.

Now, many readers don't care to ever make marks in their books. This is because for most of us in the modern world, a book is a commodity to be consumed and then discarded after one reading. But there are some books that we go back to again and again, especially those of us who are scholars by trade and who find ourselves butting up against the same classics throughout our careers. For instance, my dog-eared copy of Hans Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method has six years' worth of markings in it, markings that are valuable traces of an ongoing, interactive relationship. On the day that I finally come across a suitable hardcover copy of this book, I'll have to go through my old trade paperback page by page and look for notes and markings to transfer over.



Possibly one half of a real book replacement, if by "real book" you mean "small paperback."

Right now, the iRex Iliad 2 is the only e-book reader that I'm aware of that gives readers the ability to mark up electronic books via a touchscreen and a stylus. Any e-book reader that aims to replace the book for that subset of readers who actually use their books as tools by marking and annotating them will have to offer such functionality.

To sum up, future e-book readers will have to offer both an expansive facing-page format and a stylus-based annotation feature before they can evolve from being mere document viewers aimed at consumers of texts and become something approximating a genuine electronic "book" that those of us who use and re-use our books can finally adopt.

Note: If you want to see more of my ramblings on the history of technologies of the written and printed word, a topic that I'm working on right now in my other life as a scholar, this page has a link to a video of a talk on the topic that I recently gave at an ACM conference.