IE9 as a reading platform

If you haven’t already checked out the new Internet Explorer 9 beta…first off, I encourage you to go to https://www.beautyoftheweb.com/ to explore the potential for the new web browser.

I've often talked about the potential for technology in reading, and we've seen the potential for digital reading on devices like the iPad and Kindle, and even software tools for the PC like Blio. These are great examples of creating convenient and automated views of digital reading, rich pictures, note-taking, etc…but in many ways both the presentation of the information and the experience is not transformational.  It provides an online or a technology-based translation of an analog form.

I believe this a great trend and certainly long overdue, but in many ways it's not the future of digital reading.  I think the future of digital reading will be much more reflective on the identity of the person reading. It will be much more multimodal in terms of it will include input from others, ability to aggregate a whole host of information sources, as well as authorship, provide experiential and learning activities…and it will learn as you go in terms of it will take feedback and modify text, etc.. 

Increasingly, reading environments won't be delivered in static electronic book forms, but online experiences that really take advantage of the Web. We're starting to see some of this trend with the IE9 beta, which demonstrates the potential for HTML5 to really create new and innovative Web experiences. One of the things about IE9 is that it creates the ability to run websites and experiences that you visit in an app-like form…so you don't feel like you're in a Web page, you feel like you're in an application.

I think the Associated Press website on IE9 with HTML5 is the coolest of the sites. You can check out their AP News Lab “Timeline Reader” here and see the screen shot on the right. It’s a good example of making content come alive with a very rich navigation experience, multimode coming in, and the ability to drill down and get visualization experiences. Scientific American has built a really good interactive learning environment on the human brain. Another great example is Naver, which is a digital news archive (picture bottom left) for a number of different newspapers in Korea…it is interesting to navigate and select different stories from different papers to put in a scrapbook to read later…all powerful examples of the potential of HTML5.

I think HTML5 represents the future of the way in which publishers will build cross-platform devices, so as opposed to building content or books specific for one device…it also puts the future of the Web back into view. There has been lots of discussion around whether the Web is dead. The answer is I think far from it.  The Web is evolving to become much broader and with the ability to create much more rich experiences.  So, as opposed to writing applications for specific platforms, folks can use standard HTML5 based tools to build experiences that will run on other browsers.

I'm excited about what the future holds…and if these examples are indication of what's to come, it will become a huge platform for publishers, content providers, and companies to build quality and engaging education experiences that will support a range of technology devices.

What do you think?

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 29, 2010
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  December 29, 2010
  My PC is Dell Dimension DM061, Intel Core2 6420, with 4GB, using 32-bit Vista.  I update the McAfee version daily.

• Anonymous
  January 19, 2011
  Your problem isn't a known issue to the product team. They say IE9 shouldn't interfer with the actual McAfee application.  Their recommendation would be to uninstall McAfee and reinstall...or better yet upgrade to Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0.  Brand new, free forever, just as good as McAfee. www.microsoft.com/security_essentials