Sure the Kindle is fab, and printed media may soon be “dead“… but ebooks really don’t feel quite as good the real thing do they? A science team from Maryland and Berkeley Universities noted that we do much more sophisticated navigation when we read a real book than is offered by current ebooks, so they’ve designed an advanced prototype with two pages. It works like a normal book, with page turning maneuvers to get to the new page, and you can even fold it back into a single-page version, or separate the pages to share info with someone else, as the video shows.
https://gizmodo.com/analyst-predicts-750-million-worth-of-kindle-sales-by-390956
The team demonstrated their prototype at the recent CHI08 human factors in computing conference. It seems like a natural progression of the ebook device, and has gone down well with test readers. The main complaint seems to be the weight of the prototype makes it tricky to use: and that’s something easily fixed in a commercial variant. In fact, if Kindle2 was something like this, I may even be tempted to take my book collection into the digital realm, in the same way as my CDs and DVDs. [NewScientist]
