Have e-books turned a page?

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You need more than 72-90 dpi for comfortable reading

> But until they can actually make a LCD specifially "book like", it's just not the same...

You need more than 72-90 dpi for comfortable reading. This is doubtless coming (as IBM has been selling an LCD with 200 dpi for a while now, but it's very pricey), and when it finally happens, then I think you'll find reading on the screen is about as comfortable as reading on paper. Well, assuming that nothing's glaring onyour screen, of course -- in that situation, ordinary book paper remains superior.

So that takes us to the next step: Epaper. There are various display technologies making their way forward that are based on actual papaer or paper-like substances. These are typically flexible and could be matte-finished rather than glossy.

Finally, there are the navigation issues. The human brain actually is pretty good at "spatial" navigation so although you may not always realize, in a volume that you know well, you know where (how far in and on what position on the page) certain information is stored. Because of this, you can navigate a well-known paper book *VERY* fast. An on-screen presentation fails to give one or more of these same cues, so it feels clumsy.

Again, IBM did an interesting proof-of-concept/thought experiment. They proposed a "universal book" that would have, say, a hundred flexible leaves of Epaper. And in the spine would be the controller with a large hard drive. At you command, this universal book could become *ANY* of the eBooks that were stored on the hard-drive. And once it took on the personality of the eBook, the non-volatile ePaper would require no further power to maintain the current content "on display". And because the universal book had physical leaves (pages), the universal book would allow youto avigate almost exactly as a real physical book would. Plus it could do all the tricks an eBook could do such as full-text searching and hyperlinking.

Imagine the Library of Congress in your hand!

There's hope yet!

Atlant

Posted by: Atlant   Posted on: 08/27/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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