Although electronic books have been around for decades, they have only started to be recognized as a viable option in the last few years. Currently, e-book sales are soaring, yet they remain a fraction of overall book sales. It is too early to tell whether the e-book reader Amazon launched last November, the Kindle, will gain wide spread popularity. Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, recently disclosed that e-books already account for over 6 percent of units sold, but is not revealing how many people have actually bought the e-book reader (source: Chicago Tribune).

A team of computer scientists from the University of Maryland and the University of California have designed an e-book reader that does a better job at supporting the types of behaviors people perform when they read - like folding, flipping, and fanning pages. The recently released paper, Navigation Techniques for Dual-Display E-Book Readers, presents their innovative dual-display design and explores how it can be used to interact with electronic documents. Watch this video to see the e-book reader in action.

While I’d be more than willing to try out the latest e-book technology, for now I’m quite happy with my collection of paperbacks sitting on my book shelves. What do you think about e-book readers? Are you willing to make the investment? What changes would you like to see in their design?