A number of organisations are experimenting with how the experience of reading a paper book or a magazine can be replicated when they are displayed on a screen:
- Science writer Eli Kintisch has created a Flash-based guide on using technology to deal with the effects of climate change, in the style of an airplane safety instruction card.
- Marvel Comics has released an application for the Apple iPad for displaying its comics (see the video from the BoingBoing Web site below)
- Wolfram Alpha has released “The Periodic Table of Elements” series of books as an iPad version, that’s said to be akin to Harry Potter’s “Daily Prophet”.
- The New York Times will begin publishing “The New York Times on the iPad”, a daily edition designed for the iPad.
Underlying all of these, is an assumption that people can and want to read content online (or on screen) in the same way as they read paper books and magazines.
That may not be the case. Numerous usability studies have shown that people typically scan (or “graze”) screen-based content, so it will be interesting to see if this habit can be changed.
Indeed, Techcrunch published an April Fools joke, where they modified a 1996 NYTimes article announcing the launch of the newspaper’s Web site. The only changes they made were to replace “Web Site” with “iPad App” and “Word Wide Web” with “iPad”, yet they even managed to fool some NYTimes writers.
It’ll be interesting to see how this develops. Call me old fashioned but reading from paper causes me less eye strain than reading from a screen. E-ink goes some way to resolving this and has power saving advantages too, but I believe the iPad has a conventional LCD. If the industry comes up with a way of delivering information more effectively on screen then finally, the paperless office could become reality. In terms of environmental impact, now that we recycle paper and manage forests, is printed paper still worse than producing all these quickly obsolete and therefore disposable electronic devices?
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