[tt] CHE: Researchers Design E-Book to Mimic Turning Book Pages

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Researchers Design E-Book to Mimic Turning Book Pages
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3123/researchers-design-e-book-to-mimic-turning-book-pages?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
June 26, 2008

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

Comments

1. The biggest problem here is that these are much more expensive to 
manufacture.--Kelly Sutton Jun 26, 12:38 PM

2. 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

3. to 1: the biggest problem is that it is sillier.--jon Jun 26, 06:44 PM

4. 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

5. Note to UMCP and UCB researchers: research "Rube Goldberg."--MSUMLarry 
Jun 27, 10:58 AM