Flipping Pages
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I have seen recently a demo of the British Library ‘Turning Pages’ system for displaying books. Go to their web site and take a look here. There seems to be this trend for making the sense of turning the page of an electronic book as realistic as possible and I thought I would take a look round and review the scene.
furthermore...
Back in 1996 when the ‘Lulu’ CD-ROM by Romain Victor-Pujebet was published by Hachette (and in the UK by Wayland Multimedia), the idea that a CD-ROM could ‘look’ like a book was very rare. Since then all sorts of developments have led us to this state of the art display at the British Library. Octavo have devoted their whole business to electronic publishing of rare books and beautiful things they are! They are published on CDROM as Acrobat PDFs. You can interact with several examples on their web site, but the pages don’t flip! Most ‘ebooks’ don’t flip. The reason being, that this little detail of animation adds significantly to the bandwidth required to display. It also means that bespoke software needs to be used in the authoring and display of the work. That being said; take a look at Zinio. They are an electronic publisher of journals. There are some free ones if you want to try it out but you need the special player or reader available from the web site. The interesting thing about this page flipping product is that it seems to be a kind of PDF hybrid format. The player ‘flips’ the pages in 3D and also has a dynamic ‘zoom’ feature.
There are other ‘flip players’ on the market. Flipviewer seems to be a clever looking piece of software and even makes the sound of a page turning, however, it seems to be PC Windows only. Why make an eBook look (and feel, and sound) like a real book? Maybe the lack of success in the eBook market has tempted publishers and developers to give users that familiar feeling when using an eBook. However impressive the British Library ‘Turning Pages’ pieces are, the most successful component of this is the ‘magnifying’ panel, which adds much more value than the page turning simulation.
These page turning systems make it less easy for small scale publishing because proprietry software makes it prohibitively expensive and technically complex. The British Library system uses Macromedia Director as the authoring tool.
Posted by Chris Jennings on 08 Dec around 5pm •
Tags: Ideas •
PageToScreen - Flipping Pages.
