A developer’s e-reader wish list

Despite several well-intentioned attempts, the tablet PC has never caught on with consumers. So why were tablets and tablet-like devices all the rage at this year’s CES conference in Las Vegas? And why does the rumor that Apple plans to announce a tablet device later this month have bloggers and the media whipped to near frenzy?

While past attempts to spark interest in tablets have failed, there’s reason to believe it might work this time. The new devices are cheaper, lighter, and more power-efficient, and they have better screens. More important, this time they’re not meant to replace traditional laptops. Instead, the new tablets will be marketed as portable media devices, with a particular eye to a relatively new application for consumer electronics: reading books.

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Doubtless many customers will always prefer the comfort and familiarity of their local bookstore. Still, there are signs that e-readers could be the breakthrough tech product of 2010. According to Amazon.com, its Kindle e-reader was a runaway success over the 2009 holiday season; on Christmas Day the online retailer actually sold more e-books than paper ones. And orders of Barnes & Noble’s Nook are now backlogged into February.

Even if e-readers don’t catch on with mainstream book buyers, the devices seem all but tailor-made for specialized audiences. To students, for example, the prospect of trading backpacks full of heavy textbooks for a single, lightweight device must be tantalizing. And what about software developers? Every programmer I know keeps stacks of technical material close to hand, all of which could benefit from portability and improved navigation.

Unfortunately, however, my own attempts to use e-readers with developer documentation and other technical fare have been disappointing. While current devices work well for novels and general nonfiction, working with reference material was an exercise in frustration. Slow performance, clunky UIs, formatting problems, and missing features quickly had me longing for the old stack of dead trees.

If Apple or another vendor could work just a few more upgrades into the next generation of e-readers, it could have a real hit on its hands. So what’s still needed?

Even better screens The secret ingredient of today’s e-readers is e-ink, a new type of screen that draws power only when the page changes. But e-ink screens refresh slowly. Reading sequential pages is painless enough, but flipping back and forth between sections of a reference work can be frustrating.

E-ink screens are also grayscale-only. Again, that might be fine for novels, but there’s no allowance for it in a textbook. Publishers design books in black and white because printing in full color is expensive, but that’s no longer true if your target is a screen instead of paper.

Fortunately, a number of new, energy-efficient screen technologies are in the works, several of which support color and refresh rates fast enough to display video. In particular, watch for devices based on Qualcomm’s Mirasol technology later this year.

Of course, the ideal screen would have to be large enough to display pages with complex formatting. The Kindle DX does this best so far, but there’s still room to experiment. And higher resolution would be nice; where are the screens that can match my inkjet printer for crispness?

Improved book formatting Most current e-books ship in formats analogous to HTML. Text flows to fit your screen, and font sizes are fully configurable. That has advantages, particularly for people with vision impairment, but for professional use I’d prefer a format that can take advantage of modern page layout conventions. Tables, charts, multiple levels of subheads, sidebar boxes, code snippets, and other typography all add to the experience of learning from textbooks — to say nothing of illustrations.

The best format for this is PDF. It has the advantage of being supported by every graphic design and publishing program out there. But PDF support on today’s e-readers is still lackluster. I’d like to see someone make a priority of improving it, particularly in the area of zooming and scrolling. (Multitouch, anyone?)

Advanced indexing and navigation E-books are more searchable than paper ones, but free-form keywords are no substitute for a well-researched topic index. Right now, indices in e-books are little more than a list of hyperlinks; I’d like to see vendors make them a primary means of navigation. How about this one: Integrate the index with the bookmarking feature, and let us add to it as we find topics that haven’t been indexed to our liking.

Also, I’d like to see better page-preview features that allow us to take a peek before we navigate away from the index. Until e-books offer navigation that lets us flip through them as quickly as the battered, dog-eared manuals on our desks, they’ll be a hard sell for software developers.

Networking and sharing The biggest drawback of today’s e-books is that they come encumbered with digital rights management to prevent copying and sharing. I doubt we’ll talk publishers out of this habit in the near future, but they’d be wise to loosen their restrictions somewhat. Most development shops have a shelf somewhere with a library of reference books that can be shared by everyone; even the Nook’s book-sharing feature isn’t nearly flexible enough for that.

There’s room for lots of creativity. If unrestricted sharing is out of the question, how about developing a library server that could manage lending out one or two copies of an e-book within an organization? Or how about letting us wirelessly swap notes, bookmarks, highlighting, and other annotations with coworkers who have a copy of the same e-book? Just being able to e-mail short passages without restriction would be an improvement.

Of course, the real trick is to do all this without taking anything away from current e-readers. The ideal book-reading appliance should be lightweight, power-efficient, and readable under a variety of lighting conditions. To do all of the above and still meet these requirements is a tall order, but it’s not out of the question. It will take ingenuity on the part of device manufacturers, but more important, book publishers will have to play along. If Apple has been working on both counts, as some rumors suggest, e-readers could take off even faster than netbooks.

This article, “A developer’s e-reader wish list,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in software development at InfoWorld.com.