Most tv's are situated in a room arranged for several viewers. The set and its controls are a bit distant from any of the seats. So, of course, without the tv remote control, there is more work to channel-hopping. The remote allows a viewer to rapidly scan through channels, hop back and forth between them,
The Kindle and similar ebook readers allow a reader to do much the same thing with multiple books. Just as getting up for the chair and moving over to the tv set and returning to the seat slows down switching and sampling, marking one's place in a book, finding another volume and opening it slows down the transition. But the modern reading device allows you to keep track of where you are in multple books automatically.
I gave Lynn a new Kindle for Valentine's Day. The main motivation for that gift was the new software in the latest Kindle that allows the user to see the page number in the printed book version of the text of any Kindle page. Since the Kindle can show a book in about 8 different font sizes, the page numbers change. In the Kindle, the numbers automatically adjust and are called "locations". The words at any location remain the same, regardless of the font size being used. Clearly, that effect requires special programming.
The print page numbers are not displayed continuously, as the locations are. Still, they are available and that may help in a book club discussion where some people have Kindles but most have paper copies.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
remote for reading
