*E* for Ergonomics

Article: (Special to Publishing Industry News.) Copyright @ 2011 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

Is the real e-book here yet? I have been waiting since the dawn of Digistan, and I'm still not sure all the pieces are in place for the brave new world. But wait—it's not so much about the page itself. Kindle, Nook, Sony, and other players have learned to emulate the tree-book page in a basic manner that works, with the right attention to fonts, lighting, justifying, and navigation. The problem is with the physical world context, including our own ergonomic evolutionary design. Like all new technologies, in the long term they must adapt to us, not we to our new gadets…

What's Missing With E-Books? We are in a state of transition and turmoil, from a 550-year-old technology—books printed in ink, on paper—to digital texts. If something is missing, and I believe it is, many people may not quite see it. One does not hear it discussed, although it's obvious when we think about it—but progress will overcome the fundamental problem that's been with us since the dawn of personal computing. Let me explain.

Tactile Media of OldMaybe I see it because I've made the awkward transition, albeit as an early adopter, from the pre-electronics age. I was born before the space age, and grew up in a mature (actually, ossified) print world. The only real surprise of my youth (and I still have it somewhere) was a Monsanto 3-D cover image, glued onto a Sunday Parade Magazine cover. It posed an attractive model. You could turn her this way and that, and she appeared to alternate between through two poses. It's a trick technology, a dead end, a faux-holograph, which is either an evolutionary dead end, or the grand shoe of a future miracle waiting to drop. Such technological imagineering was the rare exception. In the larger picture, we had predictable print media. For plain text, you could read a smallish print book. They made the print smaller and smaller for economy, although aging readers today are being wooed with extra-tall, larger print paperbacks that also cost a buck or two more. A different technology brought you magazines splashed with colorful ads; you almost didn't notice that the short stories and articles were shoe-horned in, with every last word trimmed away; no, manicured; and many magazines paid by the word. In yet another twist on print technology, you had the old daily newspaper, which came either as a tabloid or a large-fold so big you had to fold it at least four ways to read on the bus, but you could spread it out over most of your breakfast table if you read leisurely at home. I was an avid newspaper reader before age 10, and eagerly worked as a summer interne newspaper reporter while in college. I was, in short, one of the approximately 7% of avid readers (identified in long-standing Publishers Weekly polls, on which I'll write in another column). I read big, hard-cover textbooks for college, paperbacks for pleasure, magazines for information and enjoyment, and newspapers for my daily fix of info and fingertip news print (until they came out with non-staining ink).

But there is one more thing to consider, and this is key. Remember the coffee table book? Sometimes costing over $100, and available in a special room at the library, or discounted to $30 at the bookstore for lack of sales, these can be masterpieces of publishing. Lacking any size constraint, at their best they are lavish and richly embellished tours-de-force on art, travel, movies, or other subjects. They are to the printed book what the giant screen theaters of old (mostly now gone) were to the stacked-shoebox multiplex of today, where you can hear the dinosaurs roaring next door as you watch an extra-long, silent smooch between Xa and Xo on your own screen. It's not just about coffee table books.

It's about the entire ergonomic, tactile sense of pawing through a stack of remainders, or walking down an aisle in a bookstore in full-body coordination as the eyes track dozens of spine titles in seconds. It's about having six textbooks open on the table all at once during a study group. I first noticed the tradeoff in the 1970s, as I learned word processing (coincidentally, as a clerk in the Army) on an IBM Memory Typewriter (the antediluvian stage before the IBM Mag Card). The benefits included no longer worrying about retyping an entire letter because of one typo. The drawback was that one had to learn a new way of seeing text (no images back then) on the beach of a digital genesis in monochrome.

It was like looking through a keyhole. It was decidedly claustrophobic, and presto—the beginning of Computer-Neck, that phenomenon whereby ordinary mortals become sinuous, head-twisting, grimacing, neck-crunching psychos. You can always tell someone who spends many hours a day peering through the computer keyhole, because they twist and roll their heads on their shoulders the way seals at the zoo play with a beachball. Many of us also blink a lot, and talk nervously as though we breathe helium. That's the result of sitting in an unnatural position all day long, especially we big male goons, rattling our fingers on the little chiclets (made worse with laptops and smaller machines) while looming frozen before our screens.

Chiropractors and doctors are treating sometimes irreversible damage to nerves (in our fingertips especially) from typing. Writer's cramp, a nightmare of all of us who started with…well, I'll be honest; I learned to write with chalk and a slate, and graduated in second grade to the inkwell and dipping pen, in a 19th Century-like European school room; honest! I remember crying with writer's cramp while learning the unnatural hand actions of writing as a first grader. Just so, the digital body effect is unnatural, uncomfortable, and ultimately damaging. Someone will inevitably goose technological innovation and evolution by coming up with a better way. That better way is usually something more ergonomic. It took tree books centuries to evolve—from a lavishly illumined monastic masterpiece worth more than a block of suburban homes—to a point where you could carry a cheap, mass-produced paperback in your pocket.

Keyhole Effect. There you have it. Even as one of digital publishing's earliest and staunchest advocates, giving no quarter to the missing future of the print book, I can now take the high road and recognize what is missing in the digital experience. For example, there is the 'picking' process. That's a technical term for choosing your next read. You can't use your primordial paws to swat aside physical books, as you look through a pile for the next interesting cover, and then pick the thing up, sniff the perfume in its binding, and open it with a satisfied sigh to begin reading the finely typeset first paragraph.

For another thing, you can no longer open a coffee table book and spend twenty minutes just understanding, much less absorbing, the intricate layout of its text, pictures, headings, sidebars, footnotes, and other rich embellishments. So there's the question. At the moment, I am writing a massive book about ancient Rome. Aside from tons of color images, I have huge maps that cannot be reduced in size without losing detail or clarity. The maps are there to explain an already very difficult subject, not make it incomprehensible. Again, it's the keyhole effect. Not only do we reduce the possible viewing size to an uncomfortably small size, but we lose much of the tactile involvement of our hands, or even our whole bodies as we walk around the bookstore.

Interim solutions… Computer aficionados have long learned the designed trick of having several monitors stacked together, and pouring their display across multiple screens. Already, certain touch-screens allow you to pinch or flick aside screens or move objects. But the real innovation is to be found in the news and fictions of our television screens.

E-Paint and the Digital Wall. Back around 1999, in an editorial for Far Sector SFFH, I predicted a day when we would work on digital desks. You could paint a wall in your house with e-paint (think e-ink but smarter), and run a current through it to change the giant, wall-size display at will: a tropical beach at sunset, an Alpine snowscape in the morning, your taxes spread out on that dreadful April 14th. Likewise, you would be able to buy e-clothing, in standard PC or battleship gray, and have it change styles and colors at will; from a garish suit in multi-colored checkers one day, to a subdued Navy blue the next day.

The world I envisioned would be paperless, and the technology for my e-desk is already here (on CNN, on Hawai'i Five-O, on NCIS, on your table top tomorrow). It would be a paperless world, in which virtual sheets of paper were stacked in your virtual space before you. You could move virtual objects (sheets of paper, bundled reports, etc.) with your hand, or with voice commands. [A note on Voice Recognition for writing: some will tout it as the replacement for the keyboard, but don't go there so fast. Our voice box is a fragile instrument. I've tried this, and I can see talker's cramp of the diaphragm, or hoarse voice, or worse around the corner. It must be a key reason why the 1950s Dict-A-Phone didn't replace handwriting.] If you watch CNN and other leading real news channels, you'll more and more see huge wall displays that can be manipulated by the presenter as she or he speaks. Likewise, in crime dramas like Hawai'i Five-O or NCIS, you'll see the screen-cops shuffling richly mixed data as they explain their case. That's a key part of the future.

We're just blindly flying through this keyhole on our way from an old set of technologies to a future world. It's hard to look out the port hole at the dark, swirling chaos and bubbles, and imagine that soon the sunlight and blue skies will shine through. The tumult will subside as the old world lies beneath a digital sea. Just as we think nothing of cell phones, color television, computers, and other innovations I did not know as a child, so the new world will make sense—especially for the newly born, who never knew the old. Imagine someone missing inkwells, dipping pens, or going to work on a horse. One day soon, all this will seem silly. Right now, a lot of people are in hysterics about changes to their allegedly comfortable world (which is about as handy as crusty, nasty old cotton handkerchiefs before the advent of tissues). There may be many reasons, but the largest of all is simply fear of the unknown. That's the ultimate human ergometric at work in this transition.