One of the interesting points made by Anthony Salcito, the VP of Education for Microsoft, during his talk at Learning Without Frontiers, was about the persistance of the page in digital formats.
He referred to the bookshelf look of iBooks and the animated page turn in digital books. Salcito asked why do we need this in the digital form? Why does this analogue construct persist in the digital representation of text?
I have recently enjoyed reading some of the the early Sherlock Holmes stories on my iPad and I like the way I can personalise the look and feel of the text. The page turn animation and control is always quite nice too. But are we just being unnecessarily nostalgic about this and in fact limiting what can be done with text in the digital form by sticking to this traditional notion of the “page”? Are we not being ambitious enough?
I think it was either Anthony Salcito himself or Steve Wheeler on Twitter who referred to it as a behavioural artifact:
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/timbuckteeth/statuses/162560661866561537″]
And thrown into the mix was of course our love of the ‘desktop’ which was shared by Andy Powell.
The discussion about pages in digital text reminded me of the following video of further development of the user interface of the eBook, a prototype from KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)
Skimming through the pages of a book, a feature that was previously unavailable with e-books, is also possible through 3D rendering of the contents on the pages being flipped. A bookmark function allows users to conveniently go back and forth between pages of interest. In addition, the system has a “multi-touch” function as well as a smart capability of recognising dragging time, finger pressure, and finger gestures.
Professor Howon Lee said,
“I hope that our technology will accelerate the wider use of e-books and contribute to Korea’s endeavours to lead the development of software application technology for mobile devices.”
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But is this simply innovation in the wrong direction? Does it just perpetuate a form factor that limits what can be done on digital devices? Or is the 1000 year old idea of a page going to be with us for another millennium and beyond?