Printed books and electronic books have been read in parallel for many years now. However, a new approach that can combine the best of both worlds is being developed by researchers at the University of Surrey in the form of an a-book, an augmented printed book. The team provides details of their approach to the printed word and how it can be adapted to the digital world in the Journal of Design Research.
The so-called “paperless office” predicted from the very earliest times of the digital age has not, despite the advent of the internet, the emergence of smart devices, and countless other “online” and “onscreen” tools and systems, led us into a world where the printed word has been usurped by modern technology. Indeed, many people still prefer to read from paper products rather than from a screen. As such the paper and the digital world happily exist side by side. However, digital tools have many useful characteristics that are simply not achievable in the world of the printed word, at least until the printed world is augmented.
Emily Corrigan-Kavanagh, Haiyue Yuan, and Miroslaw Bober of the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) working with David Frohlich of the Digital World Research Centre (DWRC) explain how they have developed an advanced process for designing a-books that contain multimedia links that can be presented on a nearby device such as a smartphone or tablet. They concede that the concept of augmented paper is not new. However, they add that their approach facilitates mass-market use by using industry-standard publishing software to generate the a-book. A regular smartphone can then be used to scan the printed page for links and play the appropriate digital media.
“The Next Generation Paper process could provide an accessible means of creating a-books, allowing new capabilities in designing for and supporting immersive multimedia reading experiences through emergent multimodal interactions,” the team writes. Early experiments with the workflows used by travel and tourism book publishers offer a positive reflection on how a-books might be developed for that niche, but vast, market, where readers might benefit from access from their printed book to up-to-date information and videos pertinent to their destination as well as reviews and advice on exploration, eating, and entertainment there. Of course, the concept of an a-book could be extended to almost any feasible topic or subject matter one might find in a conventional book.
Corrigan-Kavanagh, E., Frohlich, D., Yuan, H. and Bober, M. (2020) ‘Designing for the next generation of augmented books’, J. Design Research, Vol. 18, Nos. 5/6, pp.356–374.