Page numbers aren’t crucial in how much book context you later can recall.

This is slightly off to the side, but it relates to the articles you’ve linked to here. In 1987, a guy named Jeff Conklin wrote a truly excellent and oft-cited survey of hypertext systems up to that point. In that paper (which is available online here(.pdf)), Conklin talks about two disadvantages of hypertext systems: disorientation and cognitive overload.

Disorientation is “the tendency to lose one’s sense of location and direction in a nonlinear document” and Cognitive Overload is “the additional effort and concentration necessary to maintain several tasks or trails at one time.” — As I see it, both of these are problems that still haven’t quite been licked with ebooks, which aren’t even non-linear.

The problem with ebooks is essentially the same as that of the modern web browser: Only one page open at a time. A simple fix for this to create simple spatial visualization so it’s easy to see a number of pages at a swipe. Other fixes could be devised, I’m sure.

Still, ebooks and ebook readers are not like regular books and likely never will be. Many of the points made in Sellen and Harper’s book The Myth of the Paperless Office (2001) very much still apply today.

Thanks for looking critically at ebooks. Too many these days are getting caught up in the marketing technobabble and being sold features they don’t need while losing ones they do.

Computers have changed the world, and they are continuing to change the course of human adaptation. eBooks are simply bad for the reasons mentioned in the study, which makes their publishers positively evil when combined with their prohibitive DRM schemes.