The real growth in the adoption of e-books will happen when the traditional book is deconstructed and reconstructed (textually, behaviorally and commercially) in order to create new paradigms for storing and delivering content in electronic forms. Carden, 2008
This is an important problem because Mass adoption of written media with novel cognitive supports requires mass adoption of reading on computers (or else we need Methods for bringing dynamic mediums to physical reading contexts).
Related but separate:
Carden, M. T. J. (2008). E-Books are not books. Proceeding of the 2008 ACM Workshop on Research Advances in Large Digital Book Repositories - BooksOnline ’08, 9. https://doi.org/10.1145/1458412.1458416
When reading physical books (particularly during Inspectional reading), a skilled reader naturally maintains their reading position in multiple sections of the book simultaneously. For example, this might be a “stack” operation (keeping their place while referencing another), a “dog-earing” operation (accumulating a set of places to focus on; see Askwall), or a parallel reading operation (comparing several passages). Digital readers make this kind of operation very difficult.
Because screens are often bigger than physical books, one might use multiple windows to manage this, but Parallel reading is mostly impossible in digital reading. Even on desktop operating systems, most digital reading applications won’t even let you open a second window viewing the same document. This limitation is exacerbated by the problems described in Poor performance disrupts nonlinear reading in digital reading.
As an alternative, one might use bookmarks or an explicit in-system structure to manage reading locations. But digital readers’ bookmarks—when they have them—are always too heavy.
LiquidText is the one exception here: it uses multitouch to create ad-hoc bookmarking and provides a canvas where one can accumulate increasingly durable references.
The Amazon Kindle has a simple one-direction navigation stack for a limited set of operations, like jumping to a footnote or to a place in the table of contents. This helps, but only in a small subset of cases.
Askwall, S. (1985). Computer supported reading vs reading text on paper: A comparison of two reading situations. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 22(4), 425–439. ~https://doi.org/10.1016/S0020-7373(85)80048-1~