Do you enjoy showing off your books? Or maybe you enjoy seing your shelves filled with books. While I do like my book shelves, I also find myself running out of shelf room for additional books. Enter eBooks. Readers are no longer limited by shelf space. You can own hundreds or thousands of books. But what becomes of your library?
Is a list of icons on an eReader really a library? In function, perhaps yes. But poetically, books provide not only words on paper, but an environment of knowledge. With books buried inside a screen, book lovers will want to be surrounded by their books.
Solution: book posters. Imagine if you could have a poster of all the books you own. It could be a life-size printed poster hanging on your wall. But hey, we are in the digital world. We read books on screens. Why not have your book shelf be one large screen? The same technology that powers the Kindle could create your bookshelf.
Eventually e-ink will get cheap enough where large posters with the digital technology can be created. Every time you buy a book, it will automatically appear on your digital poster bookshelf. Every time you read a book on your Kindle, the book’s space on your shelf will show an empty spot. Loan a kindle book to a friend? The book will be ghosted on your shelf with the words “on loan to Sally.”
Digital bookshelf posters will be a reality.
The official eink.com website has some concepts of what can be done with eink. There is some in-store displays, but they are all quite small. http://eink.com/customer_showcase.html
A google search for:
* “six foot” “e-ink” display
* “four foot” “e-ink”
doesn’t yield anything either.
If these eBook wall posters were to happen, the eBook industry would need to start designing spines for books. Instead of making all the spines the same size, it would be nice if the size of the book would determine the width of the spine.
When this shelf image is generated, it would be good if it wasn’t designed to be totally flat. See how in my photo, the books on near the left of my photo have dimension? You can slightly see the front of the book.
Part of the point of this poster is not to create an interface for your book collection, but to create an ENVIRONMENT of your book collection. The 3D feel is essential to achieving this.
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