Ebooks

It's general assumed that books are better than tv/movies, especially since it sounds so superior to say so. Although of course tv/movies have some advantages, other than just being easier to consume.

One of which is it is way easier to remember who characters are. Look at a show like heroes which has a large collection of characters who come and go over the course of years. Yet even if a viewer can't remember all the details of the character, when the viewer sees the character's face they'll generally remember who the character is. Compare that with a long book or series of books. There are plenty of books that can be read over a much shorter period of time and yet give the reader trouble remember which minor character is which.

I think this is a simple matter of people being better at remembering faces than names (especially when authors (I'm looking at you Robert Jordan) pick unpronounceable names, or in the case of say lord of the rings when two characters have very similar names).

I think this is one area where ebooks could improve upon normal books (heresy, I know). The obvious approach is to make character names links that take you to a page describing who they are. But much better would be to give faces to each character and display them, maybe on the opposing page if the ebook has two screens, or even over the name or something along those lines (I'm thinking more along the lines of an ipad display than a kindle display). I know part of the point of books is to let the imagination fill things in, but the face doesn't have to be a photo, it could be a sufficiently generic drawing (similar to what often appears on a book cover) that it would help the memory, but not limit the imagination. Heck for LoTR just a red eye over Sauron and a white cloak over Saruman would be super helpful. Ok, the white cloak would get confusing when Gandalf takes over as the white wizard, but you get the idea.

And about half of Snow Crash could have "more sumerian mythology, just move along" written across it. Ok, maybe that one is taking it too far.

On what I initial thought was an unrelated comment, but now realize is actually rather related. I tried reading a comic book on my phone (dr horrible) and comics seem like the perfect format for reading on a phone. For those times when you want to read, rather than watch video, but don't want to strain your eyes reading on a phone, comics get across the info and have some reading, but small amounts of large text are no problem to read on a small backlit screen.

Oh, just noticed that the first part of this post is describing comic books. So I guess the conclusion is that we should give up books for reading comics on our phones... Not really where I intended to go with this.