Realistic Books
People like books. They are convenient and can be accessed easily and enjoyably. Their physical characteristics—size, heft, condition, the patina of page use—communicate ambient qualities of the document they represent. In contrast, the experience of accessing and exploring online document is dull and utilitarian. But people also like electronic documents. They provide great added value over ink spots on paper: searching, hyperlinking, animation, multimedia. Can the advantages of both media be combined in a way that people can actually use today? Realistic Books program is a lightweight Adobe Flash-based page turning mechanism that allows books to be automatically presented using animated page-turning. The system is reactive: it responds instantly to the user’s mouse gesture. It extends the book concept to embrace many advantages of electronic documents, such as search, hyperlinks and multimedia.