Notes On The Design Of "Smart Book" ["E-Book Readers" Redesigned From The Ground-up]

I will bring a Smart Book (a new gadget; one of my Physical Digital Products) to Market.


Navigation features

Enable quick, intuitive movement between pages. Most important.

You see how many pages you are moving. You can "always" have an eye on how many pages are left on both sides. Paper book like experience.

This is the feature I miss most. I can't go back and forth quickly (say, to understand a topic better) while I am reading an E-Book as I can when I read Paper books.

Keep several pages open at once - quick movement [Example: Browser Tabs] Just tap to keep a page open.

Double Screen. Foldable. Paper book sized.

You should be able to view your progress. (Paper books - thickness on either side) (People miss while reading an EBook)

Annotation, Marking features 

Bill Gates misses this most [1] in E-books as they are today.

Web as a Reference

You mark and get a Wikipedia Article or Google search results (Choosing option - Settings). You don't have to leave the book while browsing Web (2 screens. Go back to book. Web Browser limited to a small space.)

 Less Eye strain

+ 

Carry around thousands or even millions of books (a few pounds) wherever you go.

Do not focus on squeezing all the "Tablet and Media" features into your gadget. Focus only on books. If you can really design a gadget that is good enough to replace all the paper books people read - it's huge! Students and Book lovers all over the World would thank you!

  UI completely focused on E-Book experience. Not Tablet (Android /   Windows) UI extended to E-books.

Tablets are mostly, media consumption devices. Gadgets that foster creation -> Tochscreen + Keyboard

Once Book 2.0 becomes widespread, books would contain video, audio, Multimedia and most importantly, Interactive features (imagine being able to write Javascript scripts for multiple-choice questions and answers inside a book - better learning experience). 

Everyone knows about my passion for books! I am involved in a Political movement in Bangladesh with the goal of turning it into a political party and we have decided that the symbol of our party (for elections) would be "Book". In our movements, people would bring their "Book"s with them.

People of Bangladesh would use their own "Book"s as symbol of protest.

Best of both worlds:
 
Physical Book like

• Navigation (quickly go to any page you wish; rapidly go back and forth), made possible by Innovative UI 
• Dual screen 
• Annotation 
• Less eye strain (E-ink?)

Digital Book like

• Information management 
• Search , etc. 
• Reference 
• Web access 
• Multimedia & Interactivity (Scripts) integrated in "new kinds of" books 
• Access to millions of books from a light gadget

Reference

1. Bill Gates: Here Are the Books I Read When Out on the Road (Wired)
2. The Science of Reading: Paper versus Screens 
3. The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens (Scientific American) 
4. My Youtube Playlist: Smart Book [E-Book Readers Designed From The Ground Up] & Digital Publishing