Many of us have observed true anxiety amongst our friends and family over the loss of the materiality of books. “Digital books” can conjure up images that make them feel uncomfortable. Moving from analog to digital can seem scary, but the digital offers us something that we can’t get from our analog books.

One of our richer sources for information about the Kindle was Amazon’s video ad. We watched and dissected this video so we might really understand what affordances cloud computing and mobile devices allow. We imagined how the kindle might function as an analog system in order to understand how new technologies support and maintain our old reading habits and how they help us with new ones.

What was especially clear was that even though the Kindle is a highly functional system it is not in any way a poetic one. This translates into an object that is equally un-poetic. We wanted to make it poetic and relevant. To us that meant we had to understand how new reading behaviors are integrated into this object but it also meant we had to understand which traditional behaviors would stick around and how they would be translated within this new medium.

What behaviors haven’t been well addressed in the current Kindle?
Reading is so much more than the passive intake of data. It’s active. We got really excited about the potential to more fully integrate active annotative tools into future ebooks. Annotation is increasingly part of our lifestyle. People are posting blogs, reading bits and pieces of books here and newspapers there and making their own stories. The new Kindle should incorporate this.

We call it a “Living Document.”
As part of a final presentation we presented a smoke-and-mirrors prototype that helped walk our audience through the insights we had gained and how they might come to fruition in a new dynamic user experience.

Consider Scrapbooking.
Increasingly we are becoming a culture of reconstitution. Throughout the day/week/month++ we retrieve bits a pieces of information from a variety of sources. Many of us (especially designers, engineers and other creatives alike) combine this information into new wholes via bloging, linking articles, keeping a journal or scrapbooking, making notes in the margins, sketching on napkins and even tweeting – the list goes on and on.

There is a great potential for a reading device to incorporate new reading patterns, to help people construct their own narratives and highlight personal values by reconstituting the information they have. Through this the reader becomes a more active participant in the reading experience.

Imagine a digital book that acquires data about your environment and maps or applies that into your library data. One summer, while taking a road trip across the country, I decided I would finally take on the daunting task of reading Moby Dick. Every night I’d pull into a campsite, fix my dinner, and then read a chapter or two by candlelight.

To this day, several years later, I can pick up that same copy of Moby Dick and flip to any given chapter and remember where I was at that moment in time on my trip. The funny thing is that I remember because there are several food stains on pages throughout the book – “oh, that mustard stain is from the night I was reading such and such chapter. Something as simple as a food stain on a page can trigger and connect a variety of reading and non-reading memories.

The concept of a living document, of annotation, it extends beyond cutting and pasting. Imagine an e-book that grows and shrinks in size to match your environment or your mood. What if when you opened your book you could feel how much you had left rather than having to look at a time line.