The Book 2.0 Is here

Posted on Wed Apr 2 2008

By: Sarah Nelson in Science & Technology

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Back when internet was beginning to explode, people were predicting that email and online information would cut down our use of paper, perhaps entirely. It hasn't; in fact, we're using more paper if you can believe it. One example is by printing things off the internet. The most often-cited reason is that people do not like reading from a screen. It's distracting, it's uncomfortable, it's hard on the eyes.

Enter Turnover, an E-Reader designed by Timothy Yeoh. Using a relatively new flexible-screen technology, Yeoh has created an electronic reader that looks and feels more like a book.

Turnover has two pages, or rather two displays. Insert a chip containing an eBook or a library of eBooks and use a touch screen to navigate your way through. Here is the innovative part, when you've read one page you simply flip it around to the back it will reload as the following page. And get this you can electronically dog-ear the pages to bookmark them and the system will remember which ones you marked next time you flip through.

With a 170-degree view and a format the same as a printed book, could this design be the answer to our problems with reading from a screen? It's still as bulky to carry as a book but not nearly as large as several books or a laptop. You can't highlight text but you can turn down page corners. Perhaps students could save their backs by carrying an e-reader back and forth to school instead of several textbooks. You'll never be caught without that one book you wanted to reference or read during that long trip home on a bus. In Japan, you can buy a subscription and get full-length novels to read from your mobile phone. Turnover is a similar idea but much easier on the eyes. It incorporates what are supposed to be the most essential aspects of reading: turning pages and dog-earing them.

The way of the future? I can't help but suspect I'd feel a little silly if anyone saw me insistently flipping the same two pages around to read a book. But now more then ever we need innovative technology like this that will steal people away from printing on paper and help save a tree.

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