Dead Trees and eBooks

Last night, as I wrestled with Monday night insomnia, I was thinking about how I prefer reading a dead tree to trying to scan pixels on a screen. My thought process usually ends there - I accepted my preference and moved on. Last night I happened to have a lot of time to kill, so I pondered the root cause - why do I find it difficult to process information from an eBook.

After a while, it finally clicked! I have a very specific reading style - I’m not linear in any way. When I open a book, I’m actually looking at two pages at the same time, taking all of it in. I don’t so much read each word as take a snapshot of the pages. I also flip around - when something catches my eye, I’ll stick my finger into the book as a placeholder, and search for more information about whatever I noticed.

An eBook is a different beast - if I want to be able to read the text, I can only see a paragraph or two on screen at the same time. When I want to see the full page, I have to zoom out so far that the text might as well be hieroglyphics - certainly doesn’t enable me to see two pages at the same time.

Based on that, I’ve decided to try to fiddle around with Acrobat and try to re-create my preferred knowledge hoovering style. I’ll see if I can shrink/widen thing, maybe rotate a monitor or two, maximize across multiple monitors, etc. Unfortunately, dead tree printing won’t be around forever, and all signs point to eBooks in one form or another. Time to adapt.

All of this came about because I snagged a few books about Drools and jBPM - the physical medium had the virtual as a bonus. While I’m waiting for my books to arrive, I’m trying to glean some knowledge from the digital edition.