Why I will never own an electronic book

By Clay Breshears (Intel) (124 posts) on September 4, 2008 at 8:43 am

It's not the form factor that I loathe.  I prefer hardback books for their size and heft, but something smaller is convenient for many situations.

It's not that I wouldn't be able to physically turn pages.  I'm a tactile kinda guy, but I can use the touchpad on my laptop rather than a mouse if I need to.

It's not the price.  Devices can only come down in price as the technolgoy gets better and more mainstream.

It's not the paucity of e-book offerings to download.  Actually, I expect that there are quite a few books offered and that number can only increase (think back to when DVDs first came out and what we have today), especailly with memory sizes increasing with technology improvements.

No, I can get around all of these things and a few more differences between a paper and ink book and it's digital equivalent and reader device.

What really burns my biscuits is the "state-of-the-art" in search capablity that is so gosh darn literal.  If you don't know the exact term you want to find, you're surely outta luck.  For example (and this comes from a search engine since I don't have an e-book reader), I was trying to find the online article "The 'Anti-Java' Professor and the Jobless Programmers," which I had read about a month prior.  Since I didn't know the exact title, I tried "java unemployed programmer" as a search term.  After hundreds of hits for out-of-work Java programmers looking for jobs, I gave up.  I searched through my email archives with the same terms and came up blank.  Only after poring over my email by hand did I find the URL I was looking for.

Perhaps a more relevant example would be looking for a quote by a character in a novel I had just read.  I knew about where this was in the book and what was going on when the quote was given, so I could open up the pages and look forward and backward, skimming text looking for the exact quote.  Since I only had an idea about the content of the quote and not the exact words I needed to identify what I wanted to find, I can only imagine wasting tens of minutes doing an electronic search with variations of the key words trying to locate what I wanted.

(As a third example, have you ever tried to get some online help topic from a piece of software, but you don't know the exact term used by the software development company to refer to the thing you need help about?  Even if you know "kerning" is the proportional distance between characters, if you don't know what the software publisher calls that doodad that pops up when you want to insert something, you're hosed.)

We need better natural language processing and recognition in our search technology.  Better algorithms along with parallel processing is going to be the key.  Larger memory space will also be needed in these devices to hold thesaurus entries that can find the link between "unemployed" and "jobless" when the search is asked to find the former but only sees the latter.  Maybe, just maybe, when we get to something like that level of sophistication in e-book devices, then I might be interested in getting one.  I'd need to get a new table, though.

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Comments (14)

September 4, 2008 10:26 AM PDT

Josh Bancroft (Intel)
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 You make a very good point, but it seem to be aimed at the effectiveness of search in general, rather than just on ebook readers (though they suffer in the same way). Just like prices can only come down, I hope that natural language search can only get better.

That said, as a rabid Kindle fan, the situation there might not be as bad as you fear. ;-)

When you search on a Kindle, it searches across all the books you have on the device (it indexes them during idle time while you're reading, and new books show up in the index quickly). And here's what the search results page looks like:

http://flickr.com/photos/rmohns/2476553099/sizes/o/

<img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2071/2476553099_1815dd548b_o.gif">

It shows you how many results were found in each book, and by selecting that book, you can quickly skip back and forth between the hits.

Notice that there are also options to find results from the web, Wikipedia, the Kindle Store, and the built-in dictionary on the Kindle, if what you're looking for isn't in one of your books.

Search DOES need to get better, but I'm pretty happy with how well it works on the Kindle today. Come by next time you're in the neighborhood, and I'll give you a demo! :-)
September 4, 2008 10:40 AM PDT


Chris Meadows		 If you're going to rant against search technology, rant against search technology. Don't transfer the aggression to e-books just because they're one thing you might search. You might just as well rant against the web itself, or against library card catalogs.

Text searching a book may not be as simple as flipping through the pages—but turn your example around. Say I <i>do</i> know the word I'm looking for (for instance, "hippopotamus") but I don't know where in the book (or in which book) it is mentioned—or which of multiple mentions will be the one I want. A text search on the exact word is a lot faster than skimming one or more whole novels looking for it.
September 4, 2008 11:08 AM PDT

Clay Breshears (Intel)
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 Chris, you're right. I didn't mean to imply that only ebooks have the real problem over which I am frustrated. And you pinpoint that correctly as search technology.

However, this would seem to me to be the next best place that search technology needs to be imporved. It would seem like a great selling point for ebook technology to have easy synonym searches installed. This might be in the device itself, as I postulate, but it could also be a feature of the text. Inclusion of a synonym lookup for important topics or common misinterpretations of terms within the digital data would be very helpful to make less than perfect search terms more able to get hits within the text. Assuming that the hardware knows about this extra mapping dictionary and can make use of it, too. (Sure, some of this can be done and stored in the device's memory when the book is resident, but why not have it included already as part of the book?)

I do concede that given a good search term, electronic search (on the web and, I suspect, within ebooks) is quite superior to flipping pages. The first hit looking for "java jobless programmer" came back as the reference I wanted. And as Josh illustrates, if you can do this search over several books (say to find out how many times Blofeld was the featured villain James Bond tangled with), then you've really got something really quite useful.
September 4, 2008 11:16 AM PDT


Tim		 What an annoyingly gimmicky headline. You'll never own one. Except maybe you will.
September 4, 2008 11:35 AM PDT

Josh Bancroft (Intel)
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 @Tim - but it got you to read the post, didn't it? ;-)
September 4, 2008 4:26 PM PDT


bj		 I'm a little confused, in the article you write, "Since I didn't know the exact title, I tried "java unemployed programmer" as a search term. After hundreds of hits for out-of-work Java programmers looking for jobs, I gave up."

But in the comments you wrote, "The first hit looking for "java jobless programmer" came back as the reference I wanted."

So the search did work? Am I missing something? I'm not sure what you are then complaining about...
September 4, 2008 4:40 PM PDT

Clay Breshears (Intel)
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 My initial tries used "unemployed" for searches. After I'd found the title, I went back and tried the correct search terms including "jobless" and got the desired article in the first hit. My comment comment was in reference to the idea that when you have the right terms to search on, electronic search IS much better than flipping pages manually.
September 8, 2008 12:58 AM PDT


Woof Powers		 Dude, you just wrote your post on an e-book. Wtf are you talking about?

Meh. Let's look over that point for a moment.

So you say you'll never own a e-book because of a search bugaboo? That's wack. You're assuming either A), the technology will *never* improve to the point where you consider it usable, and/or B), you can foresee all the ways in which the technology will improve and they're all unacceptable.

You'll own an e-book device within 5 years. My prediction. They'll save trees, they'll save eyes, they'll get to be ridiculously awesome and the selection will be huge. Plus, publishers will simply change. No, regular books won't go away - but e-books will come on strong.

This, I prophesy. Mark me or merit your doom, mortal. MARK ME!
September 8, 2008 8:57 AM PDT

Clay Breshears (Intel)
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 Woof - I was slagging off on the current electronic search technology and used e-books as a palpable user of such technology.

You may be right about my owning one in the future, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it. I have no doubt that things will improve and e-books will become "ridicuously awesome." Even so, I don't see me getting one. Cell phones have come a long way in the last five years, yet I don't use one. (I do own one, but only take it out on trips for emergencies.)

I recall a friendly disagreement that came up between a colleague and a common manager. We had just been given PDAs for work and my friend was extolling the virtues of the technology. The manager was wed to his paper calendar and organizer. He pointed out that if both systems were dropped, the papers would merely need to be picked up while the PDA could need to be replaced, but all data would be lost. He would be inconvenienced for a few minutes while my friend would need to get back to his backup machine to restore his data (if he had been doing backups).

I can see a point where print books will not be published. (Anyone bought new music on a cassette tape lately or bought a VHS tape of a movie released earlier this year?) If that point is reached in my lifetime, I could be forced to get one (or rely on my stockpile of unread books or the local library for my literary entertainment).
September 10, 2008 12:43 PM PDT

Josh Bancroft (Intel)
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 An interesting, detailed, and LONG post on "the future of search" over at the Google blog - seems relevant.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/future-of-search.html
September 10, 2008 1:16 PM PDT

Clay Breshears (Intel)
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 Josh - Thanks for the link, but I'm thinking not so relevant, at least to my biggest gripe. There was nothing in the post about synonyms. There was language translation, which is cool, and the "input" of location being part of the search request. The closest item that I saw was when the author misspelled "Coumadin" as "cumitin". In my perfect world, there would have been a response from the search engine asking "Did you mean 'coumadin'?" when he gave the search string "aspirin cumitin how different" based on the closeness of spelling and the comparison word "different". Our author had to consult a real human (doctor) to realize and correct his error.

One scary aspect of the search predictions was to have a personal search being conducted all the time, keyed on words in conversations, and available whenever needed. This sounds really close to <i>Accelerando</i> and the personal devices everyone had in that book. The worst part, IMO, is that everyone would come to rely on these devices and not bother to learn anything anymore. I was surprised (and saddened) to realize that I knew the answer to almost all of the specific knowledge questions the Google blogger asked in his article. It was also disheartening to watch technical professionals turning to Google everytime a term or phrase they didn't understand (and really should have) was encountered as I was trying to work with them.

Still, some keen ideas put forth.
October 1, 2008 10:12 AM PDT

Thomas Craver (Intel)
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 Clay - To the extent that artificial intelligence is not available in search software, we humans need to apply a little bit of our own.

E.g. for the example you gave, once you realize you don't have the correct search term (and assuming you don't come up with "jobless" on your own, you might try doing a search on "synonyms unemployed" - to jog your memory and give you more search options.

October 3, 2008 9:08 AM PDT


Eileesh		 Ebooks are a godsend as far as I'm concerned.. I am a complete bookworm, and when I travel I like to read. On a single long-hauls flight I'll get through one book easily, and if I'm travelling for a week I'd need to bring 10-20 books with me to keep me going. Now I just need 1 ebook reader, or in my case a PDA with reader software and a plug-in card full of books. Or you can even use your regular laptop to read books if you don't want yet another electronic gizmo.
At least one publisher went down the route of producing some books from his back catalogue for free which in turn led to an uptick in sales of the hard-copies. I still buy hard copies of books, and it is still my preferred medium when not travelling. But when you're dealing with luggage allowance limits, an ebook reader stocked with your favourite reads is great. 1 little light device v's 10 hard-copies.. I know which I'd prefer to haul around.
January 26, 2009 1:33 PM PST


James Stripes		 I agree Clay, but there's more. There's something sensual about a printed book. That alone will keep me buying and storing them even when you computer folks get the search methodologies worked out to handle these "intuitive" searches. Moreover, when I've read something on a page (in a book) I often remember its physical location better than I can recall the exact text. I often find a dimly remembered passage quote in a novel by Faulkner by flipping pages than through electronic search. Just as I can add the golf score in my head faster than the math teacher with the calculator, I can find certain literary passages quicker than Kindle.

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