Emerging technologies e-texts, mobile browsing, and rich Internet applications.

The new e-book readers generally feature additional file storage through the use of SD (Secure Digital) cards. This allows for the equivalent of a library of up to several hundred titles to be loaded and available. A different model of accessing texts is that provided through mobile devices such as smart phones. Of course, the small screens on most cell phones work fine for short text messages but are not well suited for any kind of sustained reading. Moreover, proprietary browsers from many cell phone providers make it difficult to freely browse the Web, as they direct users to recommended sites that are cached for faster access. This makes it more difficult to find and retrieve Web texts. However, with the arrival of Opera mini, users can have a browsing and reading experience closer to that of a PC's. It renders pages much better than most small browsers and at reasonable speeds. Opera mini is actually a small Java application that is loaded into the phone and which then communicates with a dedicated server, retrieving the requested page and optimizing it for the display on the mobile device. Opera mini will run on most mobile devices (including Palms) that have support for Java. Some companies, recognizing the strong public preference for an open browser, are beginning to support use of Opera mini on their phones. T-Mobile, for example, is beginning to pre-load the application on their phones in some markets.

Microsoft has recently released a version of their own mobile browser, Deepfish, which promises to provide a browser experience closer to that of a desktop computer, although in the currently released version neither cookies nor JavaScript are supported. Mozilla has also recently released a mobile Web browser, Minimo. One of the most advanced browsers for mobile devices is the S60 browser, S60 being a dedicated cell phone OS (running a version of Symbian). It is available from Nokia and other phone vendors. The browser has many sophisticated features, especially when compared to most other cell phone browsers, including visual history, support for up to 5 simultaneous browser windows, and page saving for off-line reading. You can zoom in and out of a page, and a transparent page map shows where you are. It offers both Flash and JavaScript support. It is built using the open-source Webkit, which incorporates the Web display and scripting components Apple developed for use in its Safari browser. The big news this year in the area of mobile browsing has been the release of the Apple iPhone for the US market in June. It features a version of the Safari browser that, like the browser for S60, features faithful rendering of original page design. It adds interesting new features such as two-finger zoom and support for up to 8 windows. The current version does not support Flash. As is the case with most other mobile browsers for cell phones, the iPhone does not have a file system for saving and viewing documents. This makes it dependent for the viewing of text documents on either email attachments or network retrieval. In fact, with the built-in WiFi and cellular data support, the assumption is made that storage will occur on the network, not on the device. This use of a network rather than local storage follows the trend evident in other areas such as photos (Flickr), videos (YouTube), or bookmarks (del.icio.us). This development is favorable to the use of mobile devices with limited storage capacity and seems likely to accelerate their popularity. In a recent Web posting, Robert Nagle argues that the future of e-books may very well lie in online rather than local access. The new Touch iPod also features the Safari browser, although network access is only through WiFi.

Due to its unusually attractive, high-resolution screen, the iPhone has stirred a lot of interest in its potential use as an e-book reader. Several Web sites have sprung up to support the retrieval and reading of e-books on the iPhone, such as book.app and Readdle. One of the more interesting is Books on iPhone, which offers an interface very similar to that of the iPhone and adds bookmarking and page-based navigation (rather the default scrolling system used by the iPhone). Currently, it offers some 30,000 open-source texts in English. Its design is similar to other iPhone Web portals which have emerged, such as Leaflets. One of the hopeful developments in terms of mobile Web browsing has been the support from Apple and most other creators of mobile browsers for the use of official Web standards rather than the proprietary formats. While there are specific XHTML tags that can be used to format Web pages more optimally for the iPhone (such as "viewport"), Web pages by no means need to use these tags to display well on the device.

Unicode support is the same as provided on other WebKit browsers. It seems likely that users will embrace the full Web page view used by the iPhone and the S60 browsers. The attempt in 2006 to introduce the ".mobi" domain name as a way to have parallel, essentially dumbed-down, Web pages for mobile devices has not proven to be very successful. The iPhone and similar devices sure to arrive in the near future seem likely as well to prove to be more popular as potential e-readers than dedicated electronic text readers, which tend to use proprietary formats. The other draw of the iPhone is its intuitive user interface, which is quite different from the clunky navigation schemes used even in the newer e-book devices. This has been and, from user reports, continues to be, one of the least successful aspects of the dedicated e-book readers.

FROM DOCUMENTS TO APPS: RICH INTERNET APPLICATIONS

Developers who want to create applications for the iPhone will have to design those apps to run within the Safari browser, which provides the application framework and display, thus creating a "rich internet application." Increasingly, RIAs are being used to display text more dynamically and with added options. RIAs are Web applications that have many of the attributes of desktop apps (although not the ability to access local files) and in which the processing is done on the local client (usually a Web browser) while the bulk of the data to support the app resides on a Web server. An example is the new online version of the New York Times, called the Times Reader. While maintaining a basic design based on the print edition, it incorporates automatic reflow of text (including dynamic column repositioning as well as text wrapping, hyphenation and font adjustments) depending on the browser and user choices. There are multiple and flexible search options, including a topic explorer. It is built using Windows Presentation Frameworks (WPF) from Microsoft, which requires Windows Vista (or an upgrade from XP) and .Net 3.0. Since it is designed to work with Microsoft products, WPF has special features for display on a Tablet PC or Windows mobile device.

Another e-book project built using WPF is Turning the Pages 2.0, which presents fifteen of the most valuable (and fragile) manuscripts and books from the British Museum. The online gallery allows users to magnify details, listen to audio commentary, and store notes. Several of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks are available, as is the "Diamond Sutra", the world's earliest printed book. For users who do not have "Vista premium ready" hardware, Shockwave versions of most of the books are available.

While projects built with Microsoft WPF have limited compatibility across browsers and operating systems, the use of AJAX offers widespread deployment, including on mobile devices. AJAX (for asynchronous JavaScript and xml) refers to the use of a combination of technologies available on modern Web browsers, which together provide interactivity. This method of displaying Web content has evolved as one component, JavaScript, has become more powerful and another, the DOM (document object model--the structure that allows access to page elements), has received more universal support in browsers. The third key component is the ability to pre-load data in the background from a Web server using XMLHttpRequest. This pre-fetching allows updating of information on the Web page without the necessity of reloading, thus providing instant updating of data tables or, in the case of online reading, quicker look-up of notes or annotations. With the growing popularity of AJAX has come the development of frameworks (such as jQuery, Dojo, and Ext)--essentially code libraries and ready-to-use components--to make it quicker and easer to take advantage of AJAX.

AJAX is not the only possible approach to developing rich internet applications. Microsoft has recently released the initial version of Silverlight (code-named "Windows Presentation Frameworks Everywhere"), built around a subset of WPF as an alternative to AJAX and Flash. In contrast to WPF, it runs on multiple browsers and operating systems. OpenLaszlo is another recent entrant into the field of building RIA's--it is designed to provide an open source alternative to using Flash.