Two Ideas to Improve the Digital Book Reading Experience

Over the weekend, I put together a prototype e-book reader to demonstrate two features that I think would make the digital book reading experience much better. If you’ve made the leap to digital books, I’d love to get your thoughts on the video above. And if you like the ideas, please help spread the word.

10 thoughts on “Two Ideas to Improve the Digital Book Reading Experience”

Neat ideas, Cristian
I like reading ebooks, and these features would be nice to have.

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Brilliant. And now we have prior art on these features so no one can patent them.

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I quite like these, the snap back especially. I use the kindle and its a pain to do.
Any plans on releasing the e-book reader for iphone / ipad?

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polyGeek, unfortunately, the prior art dictum is no longer the case, any where in the world, since the United States switched to first-to-file last year.
Now, anyone reading this blog post could pony up $7500 and patent this idea after just reading it, then block anyone from implementing it for 15-30 years.
What a wonderful world we now live in! All praise Obama and the Republican Congress who got this through!
Seriously, Christian: There’s your prequel to the HLP right there! A world where *every* idea is patented and locked away for corporate approved (and paid for) activities.

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I actually like the Snap Back feature a lot… indeed it would be very useful.
Regarding the progression bar, in iBook Reader there’s the little progression cursor and dots at the bottom which clearly show the exact same thing.
That’s exactly the same… it might need a graphic redesign if you like, but IMHO it’s just perfect, small and elegant.

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I love the ‘Snap Back’ idea. I’m reading long form fiction on my iPad and was wishing for an easy way to go back to the beginning of the book to re-read one of the character discriptions.
It would also be valuable for study. I flip around in books a lot while learning something new.

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I’ve had some really great success hacking the Kindle Touch source code to add some of these!
You can get the source code over at http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200203720.
I’ve been able to add a long hold on the left to get you back to the beginning of the chapter. A long hold on the right snaps you back to where you were before, a second long hold on the right takes you to the next chapter.
Next, I’m going to try to add that progress bar on the top thing.

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A thought on the bookmark concept. What if you used a tilt gesture and it would display a top/down view of the book like you showed with the paper book at the beginning of the video. The top/down graphic could display a bookmark of the progress.

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