Robert Fabricant, faculty for Prototyping the User Experience, comments the design issues around ereaders. Amazon’s recently decided to remove George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. The buyers were credited their $9.99, but such a recall could never have happened with actual books.
Robert Fabricant:
“Pages, chapters—all those things are very necessary on paper. They’re not in an ebook reader. … One of the challenges has been to try to represent the page you’re on, right? And defining pages that don’t match the printed page in terms of the number of characters trying to show you in some progress bar where you are all those things are interesting design problems and the minute you buy into the metaphor, you have decide how literally you’re going to take those on.”Listen to the story