For the past few days I’ve been playing around with a Sony Portable Reader (for eBooks), and I have to say I’m not that impressed. The typography was atrocious, the interface didn’t feel smooth enough, and even if those weren’t the case, the page switching thing (flashing black for half a second) was very annoying and distracting.

Reading Jeffrey Young’s review just now, I rather find myself agreeing — the real book wins out because it “is utterly portable, requires no batteries, has a well-defined user interface, and comes eqipped to be understood by most pairs of eyes.” And books don’t cost $400. You can’t trump the real thing.

That said, I don’t really know that eBooks are meant to replace paper books. I see them as being supplemental devices for times when the real thing isn’t feasible (textbooks, for instance, and reference works). Sure, some people will use them for leisure reading, and that’s great. There are times when it’s difficult to get a hard copy of a book you want to read, and eBooks could definitely fill that niche. (I’m thinking primarily of out-of-print books here.) But for works that are easily available, nothing beats the local library and a real, paper-and-ink book that you can take to bed without worrying about the batteries running out or it falling off the bed and dying an ignominious death.

Even so, I still think we need to continue research into making eBooks more palatable and feasible. And that’s a topic for another post. :)

So, I’ve decided to rechristen this blog. I don’t write often enough about programming to really justify having a separate blog for it, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. But what I do have a huge itching to start writing more about is design. Not graphic design, mind you (I have BenjaminCrowder.com for that), but all the rest — industrial, instructional, UI, you name it. It’ll be the same thing I’ve done over on my Beyond blog, just with wider scope. (Everything except genealogy. :))

As a quick sampling of what I’ve got in mind, here are some of the topics I’ve got floating around in my head: ebooks (how to make them more palatable), kitchen designs, map design, and information design theory. And my inspirations include Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things, Edward Tufte’s books, and the TED talks, so that’s the sort of flavor I’ll be getting at.

I’ll have the maiden post up in the next few days.