Effective E-Books
Ahmed Murad Akhter, Rebecca Maria Currano.
Project Milestone #1.
Abstract
e-books promise several advantages over traditional, paper books by augmenting active
reading tasks such as high-lighting, annotating and searching text, as well as by offering
physical advantages such as self-lighting for reading in darkness and the storage of
multiple books on a single device. Despite these advantages, however, e-books have not
replaced or challenged the popularity of paper books. This is partly due to technical
limitations such as lower screen resolution; short battery life of portable devices; and
proprietary document standards. At the same time, physical paper is extremely flexible,
portable and easily manipulated. In other words, it provides affordances that simply do
not exist in the virtual domain. These affordances are a major force behind the
popularity of paper as a reading surface. We believe that we can replicate these
affordances in the virtual domain by paying greater attention to the sensory experience
of reading. Our hypothesis is that modeling and then approximating this experience
with new e-book interfaces will greatly improve current e-book implementations.
Task analysis
The users are all people who read for pleasure and personal development and would
benefit from using e-books. Our project’s goal is to explore the aspects of paper books
that are well suited to the human sensory experience, therefore, our users will be asked
to perform physical manipulation tasks such as skimming, flipping, scanning and bookmarking using an e-book prototype. This e-book prototype which will closely mimic the
behavior of paper books and will be built using Flash, d.tools or E-Ink’s Active Matrix
Electronic Paper Display (EPD) Prototype Kit. We will use the later development
environment if we are able to procure funding for the kit and receive it in time during
the quarter. We will also run control experiments with real books and prominent e-book
readers such as Zinio and E-Book Systems.
Ideation Summary
We looked at the various physical interactions users have with paper books to
determine the set of natural actions that are currently missing from e-book interfaces.
We then looked at various e-book hardware and software readers and highlighted
interaction techniques that could be redone to more closely correspond to the actions of
users interacting with paper books. We looked at the physical characteristics of
hardware devices on which e-books are read, such as size, shape, casing, temperature,
form-factor, flexibility etc., and compared them with paperback and hardbound books.
Our focus was on defining the problem space in relation to the body of the user to
describe it in terms of his sensory experience. We, therefore, thought about newer
tangible interfaces that could be introduced to make e-book manipulation more
intuitive and natural and chose against focusing on technical problems such as screen
resolution, battery life, availability of content etc. Our overriding concern was that
while these technical issues are active areas of research, e-books ergonomics and human
factors research is not.
Ideation Results
Idea 1: Represent book-marks with physical markers on the e-book, in 3D to show location,
relative amount, category etc.
Figure 1. Types and purposes of bookmarks
Figure 2: Options for viewing and manipulating bookmarks.
Idea 2: It’s often possible to tell the contents of the next page when using physical paper, since
paper surfaces are not opaque. We could model this with transparency and alpha-blending of
pages in e-books to provide a virtual ‘look-ahead’.
Figure 3: Translucent mode for ‘look-ahead’.
Idea 3: People tend to site, lie down and move about when they’re reading. This requires them to
move their books in 3D in order to adjust their viewing angle appropriately. Since displays are
not movable we cannot model translations, however, rotations can be trivially supported.
Figure 4: Control of orientation for better viewing.
Idea 4: Bending a page allows one to quickly scan multiple pages, look at the front and back
surfaces of a page and multiple sections of pages together.
Figure 5: Flexible pages to enable bending, flipping etc.
Idea 5: Folding a page allows a user to ignore irrelevant portions of a page.
Figure 6: Folding pages to preserve space.
Idea 6: Bending, flipping, stretching and, folding paper is best done by manipulating the flat
rectangular surface of a piece of paper. Maybe tangible UI elements can be created to enable this
interaction.
Figure 7: Tangible interfaces for direct manipulation of e-pages.
Idea 7: Page turning transitions provide users intuitive feedback when reading, skimming or
going through pages in a book.
Figure 8: Page Turning, flipping, skimming etc.
Idea 8: Shuffling chapter allows one to easily sort material in a desired order before reading.
Figure 9: Shuffling pages to organize and reorder e-books.
Idea 9: It’s easier to find information on multiple pages if we can view them all at once.
Spreading them out can help accomplish this.
Figure 10: Spreading pages apart to see multiple pages together.
Idea 10: Cutting a page will let us select, sort and categorize subsets of pages.
Figure 11: Cutting / tearing parts of pages.
Idea 11: We could improve the reading experience by approximating real-world lighting
conditions.
Figure 12: simulating natural and indoor light on paper.
Idea 12: Represent pages with material properties.
Figure 13: Allowing numerous types and textures of paper and mimicking natural
properties of these materials such as reflectance and absorption of light.
Evidence
Most of the evidence in support of our ideas is anecdotal, based upon our own personal
observations as well as the considered opinions of our colleagues and friends. A lot of
the interactions we identified such as folding, skimming and book-marking pages can
be easily observed in any public library or study hall. Reading is a very common
activity, therefore, the patterns of manipulation of books are well understood.
Further Evidence
Our goal is to determine the set of physical interactions that are well suited to the
human sensory experience of physical books. For this purpose we will be building a set
of simple physical prototypes out of real books in which we restrict one ore more types
of interactions. We then wish to determine how exactly we can match this set of
interactions with a software prototype, which will be built out of Flash, d.tools or EInk’s EPD Prototype Kit as noted earlier. We will request users to perform physical and
cognitive tasks using this prototype, time their responses and compare the results
against interactions with physical books.
Evaluation Plan
We will evaluate the efficacy of various physical interfaces and our effectiveness in
translating them to the virtual realm by timing user responses to simple tasks
performed with the hardware or software prototypes we will build. Meanwhile, we will
ask users to fill out questionnaires and provide feedback on these new interfaces so we
can qualitatively determine their impact on user interaction as well. We don’t anticipate
that we will need human-subjects approval, however, one team member will be
certified to carry out such studies if necessary. Our hope is to get at least 10 users to test
our prototypes so we can draw on a broad set of userr tastes and preferences in our
evaluations.