Your experience of e-books

[binkie]

Hello again, cateau1. Please don't feel the need to apologise. I'm glad you thought this was worth coming back to

(13-03-2011 01:28 AM)cateau1 Wrote:  I felt I needed to be sitting at my computer to type this rather than in relaxed, feet up, one finger iPad mode, which is usually how I read SF.

This makes me feel as though I should be standing over you, telling you to sit up straight and stop chewing gum! Is there a schoolmarm smiley? I may have to design one for myself

(13-03-2011 01:28 AM)cateau1 Wrote:  I don't really think twice about reading pdfs for work (funny, I hadn't thought of that before) but I don't want to be aware of the context or form factor when reading for leisure.

I have meetings with a couple of e-book vendors this week. I will definitely be raising the question of formatting-for-leisure in the context of technical documents. I'm not certain, but I have a distinct feeling that a fair number of our users would be reluctant to make use of online content that was so bound to its legacy design (I do indeed love that expression). I have set up a Yammer group at work to encourage discussion of integrated working. I will be interested to see how significant context and form are felt to be by our users. I suspect they will agree with you:

(13-03-2011 01:28 AM)cateau1 Wrote:  I hadn't yet expected this functionality in reference or technical documents to the same extent, but of course it has just as much reason to be there.

Something else which is astoundingly difficult to impress upon the providers of technical content is that

(13-03-2011 01:28 AM)cateau1 Wrote:  ...intuitive functionality is very important, whether it's searchability or navigation.

There seems to be an enduring attitude that users of technical content know what they are looking for, and will be happy to carry on looking for it until they have found it. Rather than cultivating an attitude that users of technical content should be enabled by the functionality of the content to retrieve what it is that they are looking for, suppliers of this type of content appear to have concluded that looking for something equates exactly with finding it. This is terrible logic under the best circumstances, and is the kind of logic that causes my little librarian heart to shudder

(13-03-2011 01:28 AM)cateau1 Wrote:  I don't know what the Wayback Machine term means

The Wayback Machine is an archive of web pages (a sort of collection of all the material implied when you see the word 'cached' in the descriptor links at the bottom of your online search results) which allows you to, more or less, retrieve in any of their historical iterations pages which have been removed, deleted, moved or edited. It's part of the Internet Archive project, which is well worth a minute of anyone's time

Wayback Machine here: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

Internet Archive here: http://www.archive.org/