How academic ebooks will happen

My kids both have iPads now (and this post is not about how they're growing up "digital natives"—it's much more practical than that). Theirs are a few generations old, hand-me-downs from an aunt and a friend of ours. We have other friends who are already eager to get the latest models and pass on their old ones (and, to be honest, we're looking forward to getting these as hand-me-downs from them: thrice-outdated tablets).

All of which adds up to the increasing ubiquity of 7- and 10-inch screens in our lives. As a family of two adults, one reading child, and one pre-reading child, we now have two 10" tablets, one 7" tablet, and three e-ink readers. (I note here that of those, we've purchased only two of the e-readers—avid consumers will have even more.) And this erodes one of the biggest competitive advantages of paper books over e-books in an academic context: the computing power of a big desk.

When I was in graduate school, it was not uncommon for me to be working with a monograph or two open on my desk, a Greek text of Josephus or Philo, a translation of the same, a Septuagint, a Hebrew Bible, a commentary or two, a lexicon or two—and a computer on which I was taking notes or writing. Obviously, the first of these to go electronic were the lexica (flipping alphabetical pages is a nearly-unmitigated waste of time). Then—mostly when reading secondary literature—the ancient texts. Again, flipping for references, and checking text against text (Josephus's telling of a story, the Septuagint's rendering, and the Hebrew) are sped up by clickable text. But for delving deep into the texts themselves, the 15" screen of a laptop was too crowded.

It's well-known that bigger monitors increase productivity. Academics, however, already had bigger "monitors"—to wit, desktops, with two, or six, or ten books and journals and notepads and scraps of paper on them. You could (I did) physically print out a paper and cut it into sections, and rearrange those sections in order to see if the argument made more sense a different way, or if a section of the thing you were writing was weak on evidence.

The sheer number of screens in our daily lives, increasing by the year, makes ebooks vastly more practical for the way academics work, comparing and weighing sources (whether textual, visual, or artefactual). The next step, by the bye, will be apps to make multiple devices work together seemlessly.

Commuting

A quickie, lunch-time post (culled in part from a few emails I've written over the past week):
Dr. Fledermaus, Bat Jr. and I were interviewed last week by the local media (to be linked when available online) for a segment about winter bike commuting.

It was an interesting experience to be interviewed; I've managed to avoid very many interviews and, though I'd thought about what I'd like to say--I even came up with my own sound bite ("I really like biking, and sometimes I wish that we had a 20 or 30 mile round trip. But the thing about what we're doing is that anyone can do it.") I didn't have the mental dexterity to get it into the conversation. The politician's skill of answering the question he wants to rather than what you ask continues to elude me. And then of course there was the moment after the interview when Dr F. said, "We should have mentioned global warming." and I thought, "Yeah, I suppose so." It's just that it's one of those staggeringly obvious things--surely there's no one out there who thinks that more auto exhaust is good for breathing!--that we don't even think to mention it. But, I suppose, like all bike commuters, we'd happily bore any listener for hours with all the personal, environmental, financial, etc. benefits of riding.

Dr. F did a great job summing up our goal: bike or walk within a 2-mile radius of home. Soundfamiliar? (We started doing it before Clif put it so succinctly, really! But their web site does help!

All in all, the piece was great, though, and hit all the high points, from a variety of perspectives--lots of different commuters: young, old, female, male, bike-geeky, 'normal'....

A few more things occurred to me, though, over the week since, specifically regarding our commute with a little 'un. First off, the bike trailer is really the warmest--even at the coldest outside temperatures--and, of course, quickest way to get her back and forth to day care (3/4 mile). We start off in our basement in the morning, so we're able to buckle her in while we're all inside, and put warm blankets on her. Then we bike out the loading dock and straight up the street to her day care, where we can get her out twenty feet from the door. Compare that to the alternatives: The stroller isn't nearly as weather-proof (especially since we added a zipper to the front of the trailer). A frozen-cold car seat certainly wouldn't warm up in the time it takes to get there, and the walk to and from the car would be way longer than the time we spend outside now. Waiting for the bus? Up to fifteen minutes outside.

But enough justification. It's also time to mention that we have a great advantage of a bike-in, bike-out basement which really makes this whole system work like a charm. Not everybody has that, to be sure--but a lot of people have garages, which perform just the same function!

The take-home message from the segment, and from us, is, "If we can do this, anybody can; we're all just ordinary folks!"