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RE: Unsurprising
By Some1ne on 5/4/2011 8:04:45 AM , Rating: 2
Yep, the Kindle is nothing like an academic textbook. Hell, I barely touched my textbooks in college, yet I read novels on my Kindle DX all the time. The two are not at all comparable.

Interesting point about the jumping around, as well. The thing is, when you poke around with your finger to find some specific section that you are interested in you are performing an approximation of a binary search, which is a very efficient way of finding things. You are using what you know about the order and structure of the book to take an approximate guess about where the desired section is, examining the guess, and using that to quickly make new guesses and zero in on the correct section.

The problem is that no comparable interface exists on an e-reader (or even on the PC). You can either scroll through linearly or jump around by manually entering page numbers, which is tedious. But the interesting thing is that implementing a comparable binary-search-like algorithm on an e-reader should be trivial, so it's conceivable that we could see truly useful "flip to the desired section" functionality as soon as someone works out a quick and intuitive interface for the feature. Even something like dedicated "flip forward/back 50%" buttons could work, if people could be made to understand the basic algorithm for using them to quickly jump to any desired position in the text.

