So as many readers know, I travel quite a bit. One of the challenges I have been wrestling with is reading material and how to deal with it. I have also been trying to figure out how to deal with documentation that I might need to have around or review. I have been looking at doing things all electronically. Just read PDFs and eBooks. However what has become a problem for me is not the screen size or battery life, it is having the keyboard on the laptop.

The form factor for easy reading is just not there. The keyboard is in between me and the material I am trying to read. Also the screen is the wrong proportions. The typical book, magazine, document… etc is printed in a portrait mode where the width is less than the height. A typical piece of paper here in the states is 8.5 inches by 11 inches; narrower than tall. A ratio of approximately 4:5 ratio. The exact opposite is happening to laptops, more and more are going to HD or 16:9 ratio. The exact opposite of the way a typical piece of paper is used.

This change in display is good for lots of things as one can have tools on the screen and still have the document/image being worked on be in the proper ratio. However for reading it is not so great. The user has to debate between line height to line width. How often does the user want to scroll down versus scrolling left to right. The fact that there is a keyboard in the way can also make it a little awkward for some things. Also large diagrams can be problematic.

So I started looking at doing Reading Devices, Amazon’s Kindle & Sony’s  Digital Book Reader, longer battery life and more friendly form factor. The proportions of the page are correct. It allows one to hold the electronic document like a book so the interface is pretty nice. They are starting to be able to accept various file formats. So perhaps there is a winner.

Then I took a look at a few things and decided against them. One cannot mark up the document that is being read. Well one can put comments in using the note or highlight tool; however no one can tell me how to get those marking back out. What I am thinking about is the amount of things that I read for review and comment that I then need to get the comments back to people. Not everything is available electronically; there are valid reasons for it. I am not sure I want to pay approximately $300 for a “reader only”.

So then I started looking at TabletPCs and looking for inexpensive solutions that would allow me to mark things up using Acrobat Reader or other programs. Definitely more than $300 for one that would not be slow and then the battery life is not good. Plus it means another laptop to travel with. Also once again not everything is available digitally.

However what finally made me decide that made the “Reader” is not there yet is what happened while travelling recently. I was on board the plane and the door to the plane had shut, this means “everything with an off button must be in the off position” so the person seating near me had to turn off their reader. We then had to sit inline to take off, about 30 minutes, then wait 10 minutes for the “okay” to use electronics. Then the reverse on the way down. The person with the “Reader” had nothing else to read and looked bored. I chuckled a little too myself and kept reading my analog edition of Peter Sagal’s The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (and How to Do Them) Yes, it is availabe for a Kindle.