Cognitive Design

Electronic books, or e-books are finally making real inroads to reinventing the book.   Clear evidence comes from an Amazon press release that claims on Christmas they sold more Kindle edition books (electronic books on Amazon’s e-reader called Kindle) than physical books.  And Amazon is not the only one pushing e-books hardware and software. I just read that Ray Kurzweil will unveil a new e-book “platform” called Bilo at the Consumer Electronic Show on January 7th.

The cognitive design challenges and opportunities are significant.   e-Books are highly-networked and dynamic knowledge structures versus the static standalone knowledge encapsulated in a traditional book. This will change the cognition of reading. But how, and what e-book features do we need to really leverage that opportunity? The visceral experience and finger-level human factors are very different with e-books.  This could, for example, impede speed reading techniques but accelerate quick reference and look up.  Perhaps it would enable an entirely new class of speed reading techniques.

E-book innovators will bring us many features – color, the ability to annotate, embedded links, automatic language translation, text to speech and so on. The real question to ask is what cognitive processes are we trying to support and enhance?  More generally, how can we design an e-book optimized for how minds work best?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 at 10:42 am and is filed under Books, Service Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.