From Wired Campus, comes a report of an e-book design where users can ‘turn the screen’.

Comments on the article suggest that readers are underwhelmed at the possibilities presented by researchers from the University of Maryland and the University of California at Berkeley in a prototype dual-display e-book reader. But the researchers state that “Our users’ feedback about the greater comfort and flexibility of our device argues in favor of a specialized device. Specialized reading devices may not provide all the capabilities found on a computer, but in return, minimize size and weight, which positively affects the reading experience.”

Abstract from Nick Chen, François Guimbretière, Morgan Dixon, Cassandra Lewis and Maneesh
Agrawala.Navigation Techniques for Dual-Display E-Book Readers. Proceedings of CHI’08, pp. 1779 -
1788:

“Existing e-book readers do not do a good job supporting many reading tasks that people perform, as ethnographers report that when reading, people frequently read from multiple display surfaces. In this paper we present our design of a dual-display e-book reader and explore how it can be used to interact with electronic documents. Our design supports embodied interactions like folding, flipping, and fanning for local/lightweight navigation. We also show how mechanisms like Space Filling Thumbnails can use the increased display space to aid global navigation. Lastly, the detachable faces in our design can facilitate inter-document operations and flexible layout of documents in the workspace. Semi-directed interviews with seven users found that dual-displays have the potential to improve the reading experience by supporting several local navigation tasks better than a single display device. Users also identified many reading tasks for which the device would be valuable. Users did not find the embodied interface particularly useful when reading in our controlled lab setting, however.”

Wired Campus: Researchers Design E-Book to Mimic Turning Book Pages - Chronicle.com