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E-Readers and Tablets: Why Not Ask for More?

  

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Advertising is powerfully seductive when showing people all the things they can have, and its pervasiveness makes it extremely difficult for those people to consider what a product does not offer and why?

I believe that the new assortment of e-readers, iPads, and tablet PCs now on the market will soon change the way most people read—and perhaps even think about—books, and ultimately make life easier and more pleasurable. I've had many years to witness—and struggle to stay current with—game-changing technological advances, and by now I'm pretty sure that Make Life Easier is always trumped by Maximize Profit. But advertising is really good at helping me forget my skepticism.

Perhaps the sole perq that comes with middle age is perspective. I can remember the novelty, excitement, and status conferred by working on the Apple Macintosh in 1984. It, too, signaled a major shift in design and technology and was for me the starting point in a long line of advancements much bigger, much better than I could ever have imagined. So I also remember that little Apple when I think about this early phase of Kindles and iPads, which allows me to ask questions like these: 

• Why does reading text displayed in Monotype Caecilia on a Kindle remind me of reading text on that tiny debut-Macintosh screen?

• The market for e-readers consists of book readers, who gamely and reasonably adjust to the very different experiences of reading print and reading online. Why presume they will be satisfied with the discomforts and disadvantages of online reading just because the text-delivery system has been shrunk to the dimensions of a book? Specifically, could it have been that hard to incorporate the experience provided by printed pages by using working page numbers and contents pages as a reward for doing all that scrolling?

• Why presume that those same reasonable people will gamely ignore the massive markup they are asked to fork over for a typical e-book compared to a similarly priced paperback?

While I realize these questions will not affect bottom lines or cut into profit margins, I think it's important to get them out into the blogosphere as often as possible. Therefore, in the next few weeks I intend to post more admiring discussions of e-books and include my suggestions for improving their text presentation.