A growing trend
among students, professionals, and educators alike is the use and purchase of
E-readers. An E-reader is a device which, among other functions, can store in
the thousands of electronic books for readers to peruse and engage in any
place. Top competitors are the iPad, Amazon’s Kindle, and the Barnes &
Noble Nook. They store digitized books that defy space, providing users with
pocket-libraries.
In the 1970s, a
venture to upload important cultural documents to the Internet began at the
University of Illinois. Student Michael Hart named his undertaking Project
Gutenberg, after the inventor of the printing press, Project Gutenberg. His
initial digitization of the Declaration of Independence paved the way for the
advent of the E-reader. Electronic books are no longer just available on the
Internet, through a database; portable E-readers holding in the thousands of
books allow users to purchase and carry personal libraries wherever they go.
Not since the introduction of the printing press has the user-ship,
perspective, and interaction with books changed so significantly (Qian, 95).
Initial products
were simple black and white, flappable pages. In the last few years astounding
break-throughs in technology have made E-books even more enticing. Al Gore’s
feature-length interactive e-Book, Our Choice, is
advertized as “a new, ground-breaking multi-touch interface [that] allows you
to experience that content seamlessly” (http://pushpoppress.com).
The technology is astounding. The book includes an hour of documentary footage,
a globe hyperlink icon in the corner that, when clicked, will lead you to the
geographical location in which the photograph on the page was taken. It also
contains audio of Al Gore, allows you to scroll through the table of contents
at the bottom on the screen while your current page is on the main part of the
screen. It has a graphic of a windmill that when you blow on, moves (Matas).
References
Matas,
M. (2011, April). A next-generation digital book. TED Talks. Video podcast retrieved June
22, 2012, from http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_matas.html
Qian, J. (2011).Evaluating the Kindle DX e-book reader:
results from Amazon.com customer reviews.
Performance Measurement and Metrics, Vol. 12 (2). 95 – 105. doi:1108/14678041111149318
