The Smart E-Book System is a fascinating new e-book technology that does an amazing job of mimicking what we all learned to do with books. Does it really outperform the iBook software that Apple provides with the iPad? See for yourself.
The following Smart E-Book System video demonstrates the ease with which users can navigate the pages of an e-book. By starting with the bezel (the border of an iPad, Galaxy Tab or other tablet computer), the reader can initiate different kinds of page turning. Unique multi-touch gestures and lengthy touches allow the reader to maneuver through an e-book in all of the ways that a reader of a physical book can explore its content.
(Smart E-Book System video)
SF writers have long been fascinated with the idea of e-books; take a look at this quote from Return from the Stars, a 1961 novel by the incomparable Stanislaw Lem:
The books were crystals with recorded contents. They can be read the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it.
(Read more about Lem's opton and e-book store)
I hope that Apple's patent lawyers noticed that Lem's e-book readers operated "at a touch"!
Do you think that the Smart E-Book System is a better approximation of book reading? Is it important to mimic the reading of paper books? Let me know.
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