My Dream App

While it’s beautiful and would certainly be a nice interface, I can’t imagine reading a book on a screen. Maybe when 400dpi displays come out…

Cabel said, “nobody wants to read books on an electronic device.” While it pains me deeply to disagree with the otherwise sage and virtuous Sasser, this statement cannot go unchallenged.

I had the same dim view of eBooks a few years ago. Then I actually tried reading one. Today, I can hardly bring myself to buy printed versions of novels, and sorely wish there was a portable device with a screen that could do justice to technical books. I’m not going to go into the many benefits of eBooks, but suffice it to say that there are a hell of a lot of “somebodys” out there who want eBooks so bad they’ll pay hardcover prices for them.

Bookroom faces several problems when it comes to finding that audience, however. People like me don’t just want an eBook application; we want an eBook platform. That means a desktop reader application like Bookroom, but also a portable reader application that runs on one or more desirable, affordable portable devices, plus a library of titles available for purchase in a format that is not screwed seven ways to Sunday by some insane DRM scheme.

In that wish list, guess which item is the least important. Don’t get me wrong, I’m rooting for Bookroom, if only because I’m glad to see someone actually recognize the long-neglected eBook market. But without a truckload of things that are way beyond the control of a few Mac developers, its chance for break-out success is slim.

(It’s also ripe for the Eaten By Apple fate. iTunes eBook store anyone?)

The mock-up of Bookroom looks cool. eBook, digital paper, and digital ink have their revival every few years but no one really seems to care. I hate reading long texts on computer screens. The additional ideas regarding note-taking, adding snippets, and voice-over are making the whole thing more interesting. But I still don’t like reading lots of text on the screen.

Where are all these e-books you’d be reading? I have a few PDF “books”, but certainly not enough to justify a special screenreading program. The big problem is that real audio books feature talented vocal artists; even Leopard’s text-to-speech is terribly lame compared to even a mediocre professional (human) reader. Text-to-speech might be bearable for articles (especially with the forthcoming improvements in Leopard), but not for books.

Bookroom is an idea that will probably be another must have. At least at Georgia Tech, most of my classes supply readings in PDF format and sometimes even give us PDF-only textbooks. After a short time, juggling a few hundred PDFs with nothing more than an archaic set of folders becomes unproductive and exceedingly annoying. Bookroom has the power to tame my PDFs and I especially like the snippets feature. I can’t say that I would ever use the text-to-speech feature though. I can read faster than I listen and if I was listening and doing something else, it would be hard for me to take notes and make snippets. Another thing is that most of my PDFs are simply scanned books and don’t have the OCR capability. All in all Bookroom might not woo the others as much, but I see some great potential.

The idea and the mockup are interesting, but some of the proposed feature set might be difficult to do well. In particular, it would be challenging to adjust the font or size of arbitrary input (lots of existing text doesn’t reformat well), and for the text-to-speech feature it might be difficult to determine which text is meant to be read.

I love that people are excited about eBooks, ePaper, and the like. Technology is awesome. But I’m going to give it to you straight, and hope this over-dramatic call doesn’t bite me on the ass later: nobody wants to read books on an electronic device, and all of these ideas will fail. Wow! I totally sound like notable e-curmudgeon John Dvorak now! Sorry. I just don’t think anyone in the world is sitting around saying, “Man, I really love this romance novel, I just wish it was on a computer screen!” Now, there are some good points here. You can’t search books instantly, and that’s a major strike against them — technical volumes are great electronically. And for people with disabilities, or otherwise have trouble reading, reading books on the computer makes perfect sense. But for everyone else? I’m genuinely impressed with the work Dillon has put into thinking about this idea, and directly addressing head-on why Bookroom might be better than a good old fashioned book. And he had me more convinced than I’ve ever been. But at the end of the day, I just can’t see it happening, except in very special situations, and my argument can be boiled down to one ultimate point: you can read a book at the beach. No glare, perfect crisp text, infinite battery life, safely storable in sand, and you look like a jackass reading it. So, I encourage Dillon to try to solve Sasser’s eBook Beach Conundrum. Many many scientists and medical researchers have tried and, sadly, all have failed.

I really like the interface potentials for this and I’m sure it could have some really cool features… but who wants to read a book on a computer screen?

I *so* want to love this idea. Me, I’m a reader, first and foremost. I think it could work well for web text (PDFs, HTML text files, and so on). Features like snippets, searching, text-to-speech, and annotation are definitely cool.

My only concern is with longer-form text — actual books, I mean. Laptops are too bulky and hot, and the screen doesn’t have near the resolution needed to make that kind of reading comfortable. And part of the beauty of books is that there is no eye candy — it’s just black print on white pages, since that’s actually a great user interface for reading.

That said, if the app concentrated on shorter text, stuff found on the web, then I think it has a good shot at being something I’d use.

Text-to-speech is a great unexplored area, but one problem with it is that most of us can read faster than we can listen. Also, web pages and (especially) PDF documents tend to not always have their layouts in a logical way, and have lots of extraneous text. Try opening up some random PDF document in Preview and hitting “select all” and then pasting it into TextEdit. You’ll likely find it a complete mishmash. If the computer tried to read this to you it’d be unintelligible.