I picked this up from Adrian Graham’s site. It is a 35 minute presentation by Google’s Veronica Liesaputra given on June 26, 2007. It is highly technical and here is the abstract posted for the talk:
An electronic book is defined as a digital book that not only captures the affordances of a physical book, but also transcends the limitations of its paper counterpart. There is much debate as to whether the use of the book metaphor is appropriate for an electronic document. User studies suggest that current popular document presentations (HTML and PDF) are not always the most convenient, or the most comfortable, for the reader. On the other hand, while realistic physically-based computer models of books have been around for years, they are rarely deployed in practice. I suggest that this happens not because of any proven drawbacks, but is purely…
Having just sat through the whole presentation, I was pleased to see somebody from the audience ask the exact question I’d been asking from about 5 minutes into the video.
It seemed like a lot of work that isn’t relevant to where we’re going. And it showed the British Library project as Turning Pages project as a huge, pointless waste of money.
I enjoyed the Medieval Helpdesk Youtube video, though (there’s an English subtitled version there).