by Daniel D. Stuhlman
June 2006Reading Electronic Books
Recently I read my first full length e-book. While I am no
stranger to reading articles and student work on the computer screen, reading a
full book is some new. The concept of an electronic book is not new. Project Gutenberg
[1]
was started in 1971. Michael Hart had a $100 million worth of computer time of
what was then a huge computer, the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research
Lab at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. Hart must have been a Star
Trek fan because he based his idea on what he called, "Replicator Technology.”
That is once words are typed into a computer’s memory it could be searched and
reproduced indefinitely. Anyone, anywhere with computer
access could read a copy of the work.
Remember this was 1971 before the Apple computers, before the Elf,
IBM PC, S-100 and any other personal computer. Modems in those days were strictly
for dumb terminals to connect to main frames with dial up service. If you were
lucky you could dial up at the rate of 300 bits per second, which translates to
30 characters. These modems were acoustically coupled to the phone hand piece by
placing the hand piece into cups. In 1972 the company Videc shipped the first
1200 bits / second modem. 300/1200 speeds were the standard until the mid 1980’s.
At one time the industry told us the theoretical limit for modems attached to personal
computer was 1200 bps. Eventually modems had speeds of 2400 then 9600, 14,400 and
faster. At 9600 they were as fast as some terminals connected to in house mainframes.
Compare this rate with home DSL and cable speeds. Sending graphics over a modem was never even
considered until the mid-1990 with the rise of the Internet.
Michael Hart wanted texts of books and other literary works to be
in a format that anyone could read without concern for hardware and software
requirements. He choose to type in, not scan, the text with “plain vanilla ASCII,”
which allows regular print, bold, italics and underlines on a
computer screen or printed page. It does not allow choices in fonts or size. His
first text was the Declaration of Independence All works in Project Gutenberg
are in the public domain; that means the copyright had expired or never existed.
In the early years floppy disks could hold 360K of information. This was hardly enough
for a whole books. The Declaration of Independence required only 5K. Using zip
compression they could store about 3 megs on a 3.5 inch disk. Eventually they were
able to add illustrations. An early example was Alice in Wonderland
with John Tenniel’s illustrations. In 1991
Project Gutenberg’s text could fit in a 0.5 gigabyte section of a hard drive.
Currently they claim to have 18,000 books in their catalog. They have
more than 1.7 million downloads per month.
Today
e-books are offered by public, school and academic libraries as a way of making
materials available without taking up shelf space. A library patron also does not
have to physically visit the library in order to check out the book. There are two
models for checking out e-books-- a defined check-out period or an indefinite check-out.
Books can be browsed or read entirely on line without checking them out. Companies
also sell e-books to consumers.
[2] There are also some collections of Judaica e-books and e-books sold individually
by publishers. These e-books are in a variety of formats including PDF and other
formats that require a download of reader software. On the screen the
visual graphic image is the same or almost the same as if the book was in front
of you. With reference software such as Bar Ilan Judaic Library the text is stored
and can be displayed in formats selected by the reader.
My
real topic is how we read e-books [3] . About 10 years ago I bought a CD with 1700
electronic works, called Library of the Future. The idea was to have a large
library of materials that I could check electronically and read when needed. I
used the CD a few times to look for references to works I didn’t have hard copies.
It is a great way to save shelf space for little used materials. I mean I rarely
used it. First the texts were not authoritative and well documented. I could use
them for casual reading, but not as a research source.
Why
did it take me so long to read my first e-book?
First it is ironic that the book was, The Book Publishing Industry,
by Albert N. Greco. Mahwah, NJ Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Incorporated, 2004. [4] To
paraphrase a business principle, one will read a book on line when reading is less
painful than not knowing.
[5] I
read it because I wanted to learn more about the book industry and the book was
not available in hard copy. The Chicago Public Library has no e-books but
it does offer downloadable audio books. Some public libraries offer popular titles using
NetLibrary or eBrary.
According
to Josephine Bowden in an article published in 1911
[6], adults do no think about the process
of reading. She compares it to the automatic skill needed for walking. The adult
can not describe the process of learning to read. Bowden and many later researchers have
studied eye movements during reading. At first children learn to decode letters
by focusing on them individually. They learn to associate a letter with a sound,
then letter form words. Since the child is already fluent in spoken language, the
child eventually makes the leap to connect the visual graphic to the word in his
mind. This idea is reinforced by Eleanor, J Gibson [7] in
“Learning to Read.” This is the basis of the theory that foreign language
should be taught to speak (oral) and listen (aural) before learning to read and
write. An adult reader is not aware of how his eyes move on the page. Eventually
the learner can read whole wording without the decoding of each letter. The
next process is the seeing of phrases.
Before
anyone could teach speed reading, natural speed readers were studied. It was
discovered they learned on their own how to move their eyes across the page to grasp
larger groups of words, than slower readers. In teaching speed reading, the student
learns to read longer phrases. A tachiscope which flashes groups of words on a
screen is used to increase the speed one reads. Students are taught to let the
words move from the page to their brain without sounding out the words. Speed reading
required the maturing reader to undo the oral skills learned in the elementary grades.
Eventually students should be able to grasp a full line at a time. Natural speed
readers learned this on their own.
[8]
To make this grasping of entire lines easier, magazines put the text into columns.
This process of grouping words is what psychologists would call chunking. We have
a limitation of about seven of the items we can catch at one time without help.
The item could be a name, a word or a concept. By increasing the size of the “chunk” we can
assimilate more information.
By
the time a person first reads a sentence on the computer screen, they are
already familiar with the printed word. The printed word is the standard rather
than the handwritten or electronic word. E-books mimic what appears in a printed
book. This is a problem. For example few people own screens big enough to read
an entire page on the screen. Examine the ratios. A typical printed page is (centimeters
are used for easy in calculations) 23 cm x 15 cm with the print appearing in an 18
x 11 area. The ratio of height to width is 1.53 and 1.7 respectively. A regular
21.6 cm x 28 cm. (8.5 x 11 inch) piece of paper has a ration of 1.13. A computer
screen of 24 x 33 cm (16 inch diameter) has a ratio of 0.72. (A square would have
the ration of 1.0.) This means the screen gives a totally different view of the
page than the printed word. When the print information originally appeared in columns,
reading on the screen is a challenge. Since the whole page will not fit on the
screen and still be big enough to read, one must scroll down the first column,
then scroll up to the top of the page, move the focus to the next column and repeat
for each column. The process needs to be repeated for each page. While the
reader gets the same intellectual content as the reader of the print edition,
the process is more tedious. One never notices the delay in switching page in the
printed work. This scrolling for each column and page defeats most attempts to speed
read with the skills learned for use on the printed word. Jstor and other data
base systems for journal articles store images of journal pages rather than editable
text. Other systems such as Wilson store the text. This makes it possible to reformat
the text on the screen for easier reading.
While
many articles have been written on the science of reading and how eyes view the
page, I could find none about the science of reading from a computer screen. I
asked several people (a non-scientific query) how they read from the screen. Some
people say they can’t read articles or books from the screen and therefore they
print out what they want to read. One reading teacher said that students looking at
video games learn how to read only short phrases or single words. My high school
aged son prints many pages from on line sources so that he can read and review them
more than once.
What was learned about the science or process of reading has not been
applied to the computer screen. To read faster from the computer screen we need to
be able group the images of the word efficiently. The white space between words
and paragraphs needs to be comfortable for quick reading. For me that means a blank
line between paragraphs and no full justification. Much research needs to be done
on the perception of words on the screen and then apply that research to the storing
and displaying of e-texts before reading e-text will be as natural as reading a printed page.
After the process is better understood e-books and journal articles will be more
accepted.
[1]
See Hart, Michael S. History and Philosophy of Project Gutenberg. © August 1992
Found at: http://www.gutenberg.org/about/history.
[2] It is beyond the scope of this article to list all the options for e-books. Companies such as and eBrary have collections that are marketed to libraries so that libraries can expand their collections. Since I am involved in distance education, the option to find materials without a physical visit to the library is very important. This is a different theory of distribution from companies that offer the ability to search works that are not meant to be read in their entirety.
[3] The price of e-books is high. For example, The Case for Israel, by Alan
Dershowitz costs $19.95. The paperback version lists for $12.95 new and can be bought on
Amazon for $9.97. The used price is about $4.00.
[4]
Found at:
http://site.ebrary.com.ezproxy.library.drexel.edu/lib/drexel/Doc?id=10103829&ppg=4.
Drexel University’s library has 32 e-book collections. Not all the collections list
the number of volumes, but just counting the ones listed means there are more than
60,000 titles. It is a great resource for those of us who can’t visit the library
in person. While some of these titles also exist in print and on the regular shelves,
estimating with very conservative numbers this saves the library about 7500 linear
feet of shelving.
[5] Based on the statement by Pip Coburn, “The problem has to be more painful than the perceived pain of adopting the new technology.”
[6]
Bowden, Josephine Horton. “Learning to Read” from The Elementary School
Teacher. V. 12:1, Sept. 1911. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1545-5858%28191109%2912%3A1%3C21%3ALTR%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23.
Retrieved on
[7] Gibson, Eleanor, J. “Learning to Read” Science,
New Series, v. 148:3673. May 21,1965, p. 1066-1072.
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0036-8075%2819650521%293%3A148%3A3673%3C1066%3ALTR%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G
Retrieved on
[8] Another aspect of speed reading is the ability to use semantic anticipation. That means the mature reader will supply letters, phonemes, or morphemes before seeing the letter on the page. See “Semantic, Syntactic, and Spatial Anticipation in Reading” by Daniel M. Wildman and Martin Kling found in Reading Research Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 2. (1978 - 1979) for more information. Retrieved from Jstor on June 20, 2006.