Context does matter

It turns out that I was misinformed about the reading assignment due Tuesday. The public library does not have the book. Neither does the dead tree store out at the mall. But by the magic of the internet, I can have it near-instantly in digital format. Imperfect magic, but I won't bore you with my tribulations with Barnes & Noble online.

I'm too much a tightwad to spring for a Kindle or Nook just yet, so the only option is to download a reader application for the PC (there being no Linux distribution, thank you very little!). The software leaves any number of things to be desired: For instance, its window cannot be maximized (thereby allowing more text per horizontal line). In fact, if I try that on my dual-monitor work setup, the text disappears entirely.

But nowhere is the dead-tree mindset more glaringly obvious than in the way it clings to the paper page paradigm. Correct me if I'm wrong, but when you read multi-page text on a computer screen, your instinct is probably to scroll with the mouse-wheel to keep the text at or near a certain eye-level, no? In the reader, the scroll-wheel advances the pages, not the text. Thus I've repeatedly found myself having to backtrack (thereby losing my place and the flow of the content), simply because I've been hard-wired by MS Word, various web browsers, etc., to increment rather than iterate. That, in my line of work, is a glaring usability problem--one that I'm willing to bet is a direct heir to the hide-bound mind-set driving content packagers out of business.

I'll probably manage to train myself to wait until I'm done with the entire page before rolling the wheel. Until I've finished the content, anyway. But it strikes me as arrogant of Barnes & Noble to expect such auto-re-training. Not simply the arrogance of forcing a paper-and-ink paradigm on a digital context, but also that they are clearly not eating their own dog-food at the appropriate decision-making levels. If, for instance, TPS reports were only available to B&N upper management in their reader format, I strongly suspect that a scrolling feature would become de rigeur faster than you can say "wrong cover sheet."

Now, in its defense, the reader's ability to remember my place is appreciated. And--darn their eyes!--once you have a credit card on file w/the B&N website, it's waaaay too easy to click-and-add new titles. If the company manages to scrape together enough of a clue to offer a Linux reader, I could be in serious trouble. But given the experience so far, I'm not particularly worried.