A few months ago Apple fired the first salvo in filing a patent for the ebook page turn. It caught the eyes of many developers and companies making Android and iOS apps, in that they might soon have to license the technology from Apple. Samsung obviously could not let Apple get away with monopolizing the animated page turn and filed its own patent for a different way of handling it.
The essence of the new patent is to give users the experience of a real book. Generally it is difficult to give a user a sense that manipulating an ebook is similar to manipulating a real paper book. For example, when detecting user input information about turning pages, the conventional method and apparatuses for displaying an ebook immediately change from a currently displaying page to another page, or scroll a current page in a direction corresponding to the input information to change from the current page to another page. That is, this changing scheme is not really similar to turning a paper page, but is more like browsing a web page. The new patent really kicks it up a notch and gives you a real book experience within the digital edition.
Obviously, the new Samsung patent is way more involved than the Apple one, in terms of technology employed. Apple basically tried to patent the animated page turn, but Samsung goes a step further. They document the entire faux page turn, including peaking at the next page. The race to patent technology in relation to ebooks is heating up.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
