Everybody loves them some eBooks. Cramming a whole library in one device with easy access to yet more tomes is the kind of convenience that’s pushed the digital reading to the fore, but there are still drawbacks that you don’t get with a real book. Navigation is one such failing, but that could be set to change with a prototype technology making flicking through books and gesture-based page-turning possible and intuitive.
The prototype has been written for the iPad using Apple’s iBooks API by the KAIST Institute of Information Technology. It makes book navigation possible through an absolute deluge of new options, all based around your wandering digits.
iBooks 2 launches: Apple takes on the textbook
As well as simple peeking, turning and the ability to reveal a stack of pages, the demo shoes it’s also possible to turn by a number of pages based on how many fingers you use or how long you hold one finger down.
You can also flick through multiple pages rapidly or fold the page you’re on down with one finger and use another to flick through the ones behind it, just like you can with a real book. The best bit, though? Draw the number of a page on the screen and the eBook will jump straight to it.
All of this would fit in perfectly with Apple’s new focus on textbooks in iBooks 2, so we’d be interested in seeing if the company goes after KAIST’s ideas. The protoype software’s been patented, but there are probably workarounds if Apple does decide to half-inch some of the ideas on show…
