![]() ![]() Most have the option to view pages as thumbnails to more easily browse through an entire book at a glance. What we might be seeing though is the settling of a grammar for interacting with digital book displays.Īnd they do share a few commonalities that point towards the future of viewing books (or paintings, or documents or even videos and audio files) online. Some offer a paging animation clicking on the pages themselves, some only buttons in a control panel, making for a more fluid mobile/touchscreen experience. Some have the book paging facsimile, showing both pages side by side and approximating the movement of pages being turned, some do not. The Internet Archive/OpenLibrary BookReader The Library of Congress' World Digital Library Viewer Įach of these, and other viewers online, have their individual design decisions as they were all built with slightly different general use cases in mind. They all appear to be great options and all appear to have fantastic documentation and demos on their respective sites. What I’ve found so far (as possible client end solutions for sharing our digital collections) are: The Internet Archive/OpenLibrary BookReader The Library of Congress’ World Digital Library Viewer The Wellcome Library Player and The New York Times/DocumentCloud Document Viewer (only to name a few). In the context of the cultural institution (to say nothing of e-books and e-readers), there are already a few different open source book viewers that take on the display of texts for which the text is not the only important feature. And as we move into a time of increasing digital reading material, the page marker gives way to other forms of breaking up and pointing to parts of a text. Putting the book and its conveyance into historical perspective is an article from the Atlantic that discusses how paginated books only make up a part of the history of written texts. These books are in and of themselves as much works of art as they are vehicles for information. While making the initial explorations for a recent project involving the digitization of some rare books, I wondered what it is that makes for a satisfying user experience when it comes to handling digitized books, particulary rare books. Title page (De humani corporis fabrica) from the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library Where I work, a common focus is on how to put books like the one below online for the public to view from a web browser. ![]()
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