I write
Don DeLillo's Players, as marked up by David Foster Wallace.
Courtesy Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
I just sat down to air a complaint about reading on the iPad when I discovered that Sue Halpern had done much of my work for me:
For all its supposed interactivity, the iPad is a surprisingly static machine, especially for reading. ... One of the guilty pleasures of an actual, ink-on-paper book is the possibility of marking it up—underlining salient passages, making notes in the margins, dog-earing a page. While it’s true that some electronic book platforms for the iPad allow highlighting (it even looks like you’ve used a fat neon yellow or blue or orange marker), and a few—most notably Kindle and Barnes and Noble but not iBooks—allow you to type notes, they barely take advantage of being digital. It is not possible to “capture” your notes and highlights, to organize, compile, arrange, or to print them out. Until there is a seamless way to do this, marginalia will remain sequestered in the margins, and the promise of electronic books will be unrealized.
This plaint struck me a few weeks ago when — eating pasta in Palo Alto, as it happens — I was reading The Selfish Gene. I was enjoying both meal and book immensely, and, thinking fondly of my faithful readers here, wanted to share some of it with you, and to harvest salient passages for my own research as well. So I was pleased, exploring this new device, to find that the iPad's Kindle program offers a highlighting feature.
Later, however, when I wanted to share these passages, I found what Halpern complains about: My highlighted passages appeared to be as locked up in the book as they would be if I'd highlighted a print copy.
Halpern describes a workaround, and I discovered one myself,* so this is hardly an intractable problem. Yet these "solutions" require far more hassle than, say, pulling an excerpt from an online article to quote in a blog post, despite that all of this is digital. The book-reading (and book-based research) experience on the iPad thus fails to offers some huge advantages it could hold over print. The data is weightless — yet it takes all this heavy lifting to move it from one part of my desk to another. It's absurd. (The new IBooks program coming out soon will also highlight and annotate, but it's not clear how easy those highlights and notes will be to export.)
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Two passages from Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene that I highlighted in my iPad. Took quite some trouble to get them from there to here.
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... it’s a complicated choreography that requires a fair amount of concentration to avoid getting tripped up. Someday there may be an iPad app to get you there directly. Someday there may be a stylus and a way to physically write in the margins. Someday there may be optical character recognition software that turns those scribbles into manipulable text. Someday.
Let's hope it's sooner rather than later.
*The easiest I found is to make the highlights and then — either on iPad or PC/Mac — browse to kindle.amazon.com, sign in, burrow your way to the book in question, and then copy the highlights you want into whatever program you want them in. Hardly a fluid workflow.
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Comments
I can tell you right now that the limitations on copy and paste and are almost entirely set by the publishers. Nobody wold sign an agreement with an ebook distributor unless heavy DRM (digital rights management) was in place which would prevent any form of duplication - even c'n'p - without having to come up with awkward workarounds.
Posted by: epubman | June 10, 2010 7:44 AM
I *THINK* that, on a Kindle, you can send your notes to another Kindle, maybe just when you send the book to another person. It still is no substitute for what *could* be done. Epubman above has a good point about publisher rights, but the publisher has no claim to reader notes! A lot of people want to use books beyond just reading that was the conception of the marketing team. (It could be a marketing ploy to lock the reader to that particular ereader platform.) We need an open protocol for the transfer of notes, highlighting, and comments between ereaders, computers, etc.
Posted by: Sweetwater Tom | June 10, 2010 8:51 AM
What they're afraid of is not that someone will highlight a few sentences and copy it, but that someone will copy the entire book and suddenly it's available as a (royalty-)free download. Clearly they could have devised a better system (or even a system since none exists in some of these apps).
Posted by: IanW | June 10, 2010 8:53 AM
And if you allow a copy 'n paste with limit on the number of characters, someone will write an app that will systemically do this for an entire book and then assemble them.
I've see an app that does this for google's scanned books.
Posted by: David S | June 10, 2010 12:09 PM
That is why I am holding out for an Android tablet and Google Books.
Posted by: Arlanthe | June 10, 2010 2:20 PM
Fortunately, though they are few, there are some smart publishers out there who ignore DRM and remain successful. The two are O'Reilly Media and Pragmatic Programmers. In the case of O'Reilly they often even offer the PDF version of the book.
The DRM scheme also creates the nightmare situation where purchased DRM books are stuck in the app they were bought in. If it's Kindle you can't read it in any other app, likewise iBooks, etc. What a nightmare.
Posted by: Miguel Marcos | June 11, 2010 3:04 AM
Don't think that by making certain feature not accessible (highlighting and side notes) someone is going to prevent illegal distribution of pirate versions. We have seen many other types of security for DVDs and they did not help. The lack of such a feature can only influence those who really need it and use it, in a negative way unfortunately.
Posted by: Dave King | June 11, 2010 4:46 AM
Wonder if they could just provide an export that provides a short quote of the highlighted spot with appropriate citation details along with your note. That way you get your notes with the relevant text but without the potential for copying the entire book via the notes feature.
DRM and copyright issues need to be dealt with. The technology can do what we want, but media legal issues need to catch up with the technology first :/
Posted by: Sarah | June 11, 2010 6:48 PM
Steven Johnson has written an essay on this very question: http://bit.ly/cqFtDF
Posted by: Ian Leslie | June 14, 2010 5:26 AM
Yes. The iPad and such things are a *consumption* device.
I, for one, am just waiting for the implanted RFI markers to be required so that I can obtain my Right to Read (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html should be required reading IMHO).
There's also the question of the permanence of your notes, as was found in the Kindle _nineteen_eighty_four_ Debacle (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/07/30/lawsuit-amazon-ate-my-homework) and how the Debacle shows the future of book banning and censorship: http://www.slate.com/id/2223214 http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/11/amazon
Not to mention that the vendor can remotely remove features from a device *after* it' sold to you (Kindle text-to-speech (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=46878 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Kindle technically not remote feature removal but rather activating a "do-not-convert" switch which was previously extant but unknown since all books had conversion set on), Playstation 3's OtherOs (http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/blog-post/1598719/sony-drops-other-os-support-ps3 this one is really removing a feature remotely after sale)).
Until we get a Digital Customers' Bill of Rights, you gotta get educated and be very very careful when selecting digital devices and software.
Posted by: Joseph | June 14, 2010 11:49 AM
si thank admin
Posted by: aykut | October 4, 2010 3:28 AM
I know this isn't exactly the topic in question, but whenever I hear the word iPad, I always like to throw out my opinion. Now don't get me wrong, the iPad is a great machine, but I have found devices that are based on the android platform to be vastly superior. And, as far as ebooks go, nothing beats an e-ink display, imo. Cheers.
Posted by: Daisy Chang | February 14, 2011 10:43 AM
The DRM scheme also creates the nightmare situation where purchased DRM books are stuck in the app they were bought in. If it's Kindle you can't read it in any other app, likewise iBooks, etc. What a nightmare
Posted by: altın çilek | April 2, 2011 3:16 AM
Alison – Thank you SO MUCH for making me aware izmir of this need in putting a DVD together. You are absolutely right; we need to make sure that we make the program accessible to everyone izmir . I truly appreciate your feedback. – Katie
Posted by: izmir | April 18, 2011 2:21 AM