Multi-Touch Page Flipping eBook Concept Shown on an iPad

[MacRumors]

The KAIST Institute of Information Technology Convergence has posted this video demonstrating their patented eBook interface prototype.

The prototype is implemented on an Apple iPad but reportedly uses private Apple APIs, according to the video description. The use of private APIs would prevent the app from being approved for the App Store, but the video shows a number of novel ways to navigate eBooks besides the simple "page flip" motion found on Apple's iBooks app.

The new gestures shown include:

- Page Flipping, by spreading pages and then flipping through
- Page Flipping with finger bookmarking
- Multiple page turning using multiple fingers
- Faster swipes turning multiple page
- Longer presses, then swiping can turn multiple pages
- Writing the page number

Interactive eBooks have been a big topic of discussion over this past week, since Apple's launch of iBooks 2 with their new electronic textbooks. (via Reddit)

Article Link: Multi-Touch Page Flipping eBook Concept Shown on an iPad

[Jayse]

Wow, now that IS a nice touch to conventional eBook reading!

[Caliber26]

I particularly like the page number writing part. Hopefully iBooks will evolve into this, or at least some variation of it.

[Dreamail]

They pretty much nailed it.
Not a single flaw in any of their implementations.

Not all gestures will be liked by all people, but because they found so many different ways to flip forwards and backwards, there is one way for everyone.

Particularly love Page Flipping and Finger Indexing.
Also drawing page numbers on the display to jump to a page is great.

Hope this gets implemented fast!

[gibbz]

That's pretty slick.

[H2SO4]

Been done before I'm sure of it. Not using touch obviously but the page flipping definitely.

[Watabou]

There are some good ideas here and there and I too want Apple to incorporate some of these features on iBooks.

The one problem I see is that the gestures are too complicated and confusing. The one thing people like about ebook reading on the iPad is the simplicity of it. People could easy get confused if you add that much functionality.

But I'm sure Apple will find a way to make them less complicated.

[Mr. Gates]

Originally Posted by Watabou

There are some good ideas here and there and I too want Apple to incorporate some of these features on iBooks.

The one problem I see is that the gestures are too complicated and confusing. The one thing people like about ebook reading on the iPad is the simplicity of it. People could easy get confused if you add that much functionality.

But I'm sure Apple will find a way to make them less complicated.

Agreed.

A bit too much

[Dreamail]

Originally Posted by Watabou

People could easy get confused

I wonder. Might not be the case.

These gestures I think can pretty much co-exist with the simple ones implemented so far. From what I can tell they do not re-define them. If you don't tell people about these extra gestures they would probably not realize they're there.
And if they accidentally discover some, they might be intuitive enough for them to figure out how they work.

Hope Apple licenses these patents.
[Though they are notoriously bad at accepting Things Not Invented Here...]

[larrylaffer]

PROTIP: Average people don't bother learning gestures.

[japanime]

These gestures look great for fixed-layout ePubs. But for ePubs with resizable, flowing text, many of the gestures would be cumbersome or simply pointless.

It's nice to see developers experiment with the iBooks infrastructure, though. Kudos to this company!

[Makosuke]

Certainly cool concepts; Apple should get on buying this company (or hiring the guys in it) immediately--even if they don't use the specific technologies, they seem to have the right idea about how touch interface should work and some good ideas.

The pause-to-turn-more-pages gesture I don't think would work with a broad user base--from what I've seen, a LOT of nontechnical users, particularly older ones, have a tendency to move very slowly, which could confuse a gesture like that when they start getting multiple page flips for no apparent reason. I'm also not convinced that the multi-finger gestures would work without confusing people unaware of them, but not positive about that one.

The edge-of-screen gesture, however, is genius, because it's not going to interfere with inexperienced/slow-fingered users, has an obvious visual cue about what it's doing, and a huge amount of utility (particularly the flipping-for-rapid-advance part).

[wiredx]

I thought one of the major advantages of ebooks was that you dont have to do all these page flipping anymore

[nick219]

Too complicated for the average consumer.

[The Phazer]

Just think, if it wasn't for the App Store we'd probably be using this right now.

Phazer

[needfx]

Rather complex. I can foresee many tangled & strained fingers with this gesture.

[The Mad Mule]

Definite game changer.

[Yumunum]

Perfect. This was one of the annoying things about ebooks, how tiresome it is to flip page by page. Especially with school books where you're flipping through quickly looking for a specific image, figure, or lesson number in big text or something of the sort.

[tripman]

These are exactly the kind of functionnalities that are missing on e-books for me. For those who think this is too complicated, look at the multiple gestures on the track pad of your Mac. And if you don't like them , you just switch them off.

[mk2012]

This will never take up, Apple likes simplicity. The experience they provide has to be for 8 Year olds as well as 80 year olds.

Sorry, nice video though.

[carmenodie]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

This will be great especially when a student needs to compile thier note for a class. This is just awesome.

[tdream]

Apple will be ripping this off in 3 - 2 - 1 - now.

[olowott]

awesome functionality!

i Love the page "Writing the page number" most

Teacher : "go to page 133 for your next assignment"

Student with iPad : writes the number on the screen - simples!! and

[AdeFowler]

Where does all this awful background music come from?

Nice concepts though.

[blipmusic]

Originally Posted by Watabou

There are some good ideas here and there and I too want Apple to incorporate some of these features on iBooks.

The one problem I see is that the gestures are too complicated and confusing. The one thing people like about ebook reading on the iPad is the simplicity of it. People could easy get confused if you add that much functionality.

But I'm sure Apple will find a way to make them less complicated.

Perhaps it would be complicated to have them all active for some users, but couldn't a simple settings screen solve that? Or just "curate" the gestures to only those that make sense for the content. Apple is usually of the latter opinion.

Originally Posted by japanime

These gestures look great for fixed-layout ePubs. But for ePubs with resizable, flowing text, many of the gestures would be cumbersome or simply pointless.

It's nice to see developers experiment with the iBooks infrastructure, though. Kudos to this company!

I don't know. I would like to browse/skim (well, perhaps not skim - I probably couldn't read what's on the pages in the video) even on resizable text. Perhaps it makes less sense for novels, since those are usually read in a linear fashion, but it makes a lot of sense for text books, manuals, business/scientific papers etc, imo. We already have page indicators/indexing on iBooks and other readers, regardless of text size.

For reading, I personally like having digital stimuli that ask for input that corresponds to the physical world. Partly because you won't have to learn anew. It responds in ways people expect and already know (or at least will quickly learn to expect). Cognition and all that.

The virtual "page" concept that borrows from paper books/magazines is nice and bite sized, regardless of content. So it makes sense to build upon that.

It's actually one thing I love about Flipboard, since many of the articles are divided into pages to flip through on the iPhone. I wouldn't mind if some of the digital publications that are available on Zinio/Newsstand etc came in "Flipboard-format" (iPhone) when it comes to the actual browsing as it works well even on smaller screens.