Researchers from this university and the University of California, Berkeley, recently released a prototype of a new e-book reader aimed to revolutionize how people read and study.
An e-book reader is an electronic device individuals can carry with them, just as they would a traditional book. It is slightly smaller than a typical book and reads any electric document you could view from a computer. An e-book reader can hold multiple documents at one time, so rather than carrying around heavy books and excessive handouts, an individual could just carry one electronic device.
An e-book will especially help users working with electronic documents, said Nicholas Chen, the lead graduate student on the project.
“These documents include handouts, forms, term papers or spreadsheets, in addition to a wide variety of books,” Chen added.
Other single-display e-book readers have been available, but the one that was released by the university is a newly designed dual-display reader. The dual-display reader format allows the e-book to be used in a more “book-like” fashion, as the two separate screens can be fanned to imitate page-turning, Chen said.
There are single-display e-book readers on the market, such as the Amazon Kindle. These products use Eink, designed to make the screen easy to read in direct sunlight. These e-book readers also do not require power to maintain the image on the screen.
But e-book readers are expensive, ranging from $200 to $500, so they are not widely used. As the technology advances, however, the prices should decrease drastically, Chen said, and they will probably be marketed to younger audiences for their ease of use in the future. They could possibly even compete with textbooks, Chen added.
“An electronic version of a textbook would be considerably easier to carry around, and the activities people do with textbooks tend to intersect with what electronic books are good at: Namely, searching for a specific topic, or jumping to a section of interest,” said Chen, who is also affiliated with the university’s Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory.
Yet, there are still issues to be worked out with the e-book reader, Chen said. Students often like to write and highlight while reading, but the newest model of the e-book reader is not sophisticated enough to allow for writing or highlighting. To appeal to those users, researchers say they are interested in adding that feature, which will work well with this e-book’s two-screen format.
“We’ve had writing in mind from the beginning of the project,” Chen said. “One of the key advantages of having two separate screens is that one screen can be positioned at an angle that is most comfortable for reading, and the other can be placed so that it is most comfortable for writing.”
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