What's the Next Page for eBooks?

Justin McGuirk | guardian.co.uk:

... For all its quirks, the Kindle is a perfectly effective reading device – which is what it's intended to be. Amazon chose to forgo the touch screen and flashy multimedia connectivity of the iPad and other e-readers, first to keep their product cheap, and second to appeal to a more conservative audience. Yes, you can use the internet on it, but it's rather like using a Roman wax tablet with dial-up. It's only really good for buying more books from Amazon.

The Kindle is, in other words, what Marshall McLuhan referred to as a 'horseless carriage', the term first given to automobiles – in other words, an in-between stage on the way to a technological leap that we haven't quite grasped yet. The Kindle's one-dimensionality is strategic, but it is also short-sighted. Everything is pointing to the likelihood that the book will be absorbed into a multimedia world in which we switch from text to video to the internet in quick succession – some even believe all at the same time.

The design firm IDEO recently unveiled three possible futures for the book that re-imagine not the format, but the medium itself. In slightly patronising design-for-dummies style, they have cute names. "Nelson" allows you to read a text while simultaneously checking the sources and comparing other material on the same topic; "Coupland" links your reading tastes to a social network, so you can see what friends are reading and generally keep up with the Joneses; while "Alice", "an interactive reading experience", turns the book into a form of computer game.

The first two ideas sound potentially useful and plausible, depending on how well they're done. It's Alice that worries me. IDEO's designers are not the only ones predicting that the book is going to morph into some hybrid gaming experience, in which readers can interact with characters and even contribute to the story – like a multimedia version of those fantasy books I loved when I was 10, where you turned to a different page depending on which door you opened (do they still exist?). The "participation" rhetoric of the web 2.0 era insists that we all want to be involved in everything; that we cannot simply sit back and enjoy. I would much rather put myself in the hands of a master and be taken wherever they will rather than add my own jumped-up tuppenceworth. But that's me. ...

What the Next Kindle Might Look Like

Fully Equipped - CNET Reviews: "After Barnes & Noble unveiled its Nook Color e-reader recently, I got a few e-mails from folks asking me what I thought Amazon.com was up to and whether Jeff Bezos had some sort of color device up his sleeve. I'd written an article a few months back about a possible Amazon Android tablet and they wanted to know whether they should opt for the Nook Color or wait for an Amazon tablet. Did I know if a Kindle Color was coming soon? Well, for starters, I don't think we'll see a color e-reader from Amazon this year--or probably anytime soon. I think Amazon really sees the iPad as its color e-reader of the moment. A lot of people are using the Kindle app on the iPad (and iPhone), even though Apple has iBooks. ... "

The eReader Incompetence Checklist

Satellite — Craig Mod: "The bottom line is: most of our ereading experiences are pretty bad. And many of us don't realize it. iPad is still a baby — barely six months old! — so we're clearly still in a developmental and experimentation phase. But I feel like many readers, authors, editors and publishers simply don't know how to assess their digital reading experience. I always like to follow up schpeels with URLs, so consider this the followup URL to my ereader schpeel if we've ever met in person. In order to assess something we need a rubric. Criteria. Standards. Metrics. A baseline. So let's set one together. ..."

Ideo Video: The Future of Digital Publishing?

The people at Ideo offer an interesting and well-produced video summarizing their vision for the future of the book. Meet Nelson, Coupland and Alice.

News Flash: Statistically Insignificant Nielsen Norman Study Yields Suspect and Useless Data Re: eBook Read Times

There's been much blogging and tweeting over the last day or so about a recent "study" conducted by the Nielsen Norman Group. This study supposedly demonstrates, among other things, that eBooks take longer to read than traditional books. Now, I don't actually believe that the core headline question (note: the study also embraces several other issues of usability and readability across devices) is terribly important, but it still needs to be said that the problems with this research are two.

First, the study embraces only 24 users, which is nowhere near being statistically significant, even though TG Daily optimistically calls it "just about statistically significant," whatever that means.

Also, no data is given on how the 24 users were chosen or who they were from a demographic point of view. Young? Old? People completely new to eBooks, or folks experienced with the technology? College educated? Not? People carefully chosen to be representative of the broad market across devices?

Fact is, I don't see how that latter can be achieved with a study universe so small as 24. In fact, as someone with thirty years experience in both qualitative and quantitative market research, I know it can not be achieved with so small a universe of 24. Such details need to be attended to in any serious research.

Thus, at the end of the day what we have here is an unreliable answer to an irrelevant question, plus (more dangerously) unreliable answers to several other more cogent questions concerning device ergonomics. Reader beware.