Working with Ebooks

Alright as much as I hate doing this I do have to dip into the dirty frustrations I am having with ebooks this semester. They have tons of advantages don't get me wrong, but I just never gave enough credit to those big and heavy textbooks. Something so simple as a hard covered book filled with hundreds of pages is an experience that I am finding harder and harder to simulate with my ebooks.

My single greatest complaint is real estate. In a big textbook you can sprawl it out across your desk you can see a lot of information at one glance. You can see figures, and text and then take your notes on a computer or piece of paper all at the same with very little effort. When you have an ebook this scenario takes on a new look.

At first I thought I was going to be able to do everything from the comfort of my Tablet PC. I quickly realized that wasn't going to cut it. I then hooked up an extra monitor to view the ebook with and used the tablet to take notes with. This worked for awhile until I ran into my next problem. A textbook can show two pages and has images embedded through out it. This is a similar case with my Adobe ebook so its not so bad there but my SafariX book which I view online is setup so that it has text break image break more text. So basically you can not see the image and the text at the same time without scrolling up and down between the two. For someone that sometimes has a hard time learning and needs to see the text, the image, and take notes about it all at the same time it was hard to do with an ebook, although it is surprisingly simple and easy to do with a regular old textbook.

So my latest solution may be kind of extreme, especially of those that aren't computer geeks like myself. But basically I now use my tablet to take notes, my old laptop to view the textbook with and an extra monitor that serves as extra space for displaying images or display notes from class that I can compare the book to as I add my own notes and read the book. I guess it can be best described with a picture so here ya go!



Tomorrow I hope to be able to go into the commenting issues I am having with my Adobe ebook!

posted by Jason Dorko at 6:19 PM 0 comments links to this post