June 26, 2008
Researchers Design E-Book to Mimic Turning Book Pages
Researchers at the University of Maryland at College Park and the University of California at Berkeley have recently unveiled a prototype of a dual-display e-book reader. The reader features two detachable screens that can be viewed side by side like an open book, or with one screen folded behind the other like a paperback. The screens can also be flipped to simulate turning the pages of a book.
The big question, of course, is whether readers will prefer this device to the Kindle. —Andrea L. Foster
Posted on Thursday June 26, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
Commenting is closed for this article.
Previous: Real Snail Mail
Next: Scholarly Publishers Sign On to Plagiarism-Detection Service
The biggest problem here is that these are much more expensive to manufacture.
— Kelly Sutton Jun 26, 12:38 PM #
An e-book that actually manages to be clunkier than an actual book? That’s surely worth flushing a few million dollars of venture capital down the pot.
— morris Jun 26, 04:31 PM #
to 1: the biggest problem is that it is sillier.
— jon Jun 26, 06:44 PM #
The ability of this conceptual device to show (and allow innovative ways of hybridizing) two pages from the same or different documents has remarkable potential for taking the e-book beyond its current market of extreme-tech mass consumers happy to use their e-book just to read the lastest turn-to-the-next-page-only detective novel. (“Extreme tech mass consumer” is an oxymoron equating to very few actual people.) Two-page, multi-source display immediately opens up the market for professional, research, and educational use—probably a hundred-fold increase right off the bat for this early-adopter niche. (Now, if we can only solve the page reference and citation problem! Not having stable reference pages corresponding to the print book—my main problem with the Kindle—is an absolute barrier to anything other than pleasure reading.) In any case, the conceptual possibilities of this two-page design far outweigh any ergonomic, weight, or other physical disadvantages, which are no less prevalent in actual books and are likely to diminish over time. We’ll have to watch out for the advertisers, though. Imagine that my comment here appeared on one page, ending in the word (as per above) “time”; while on the other page a company pushed an ad about a new line of watches!
— Alan Liu, Department of English, UC Santa Barbara Jun 27, 06:35 AM #
Note to UMCP and UCB researchers: research “Rube Goldberg.”
— MSUMLarry Jun 27, 10:58 AM #