Dual-Screen Ebook Developed, Navigates in Real Page-Turn Style

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.

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]