Some­what zoomable scan of a bookseller’s cat­a­log I have on hand here. If you reg­u­larly visit the blog, you may need to force-​​reload the page in your browser to get the lit­tle pieces to line up cor­rectly. I had to have the sitewide CSS to get this to work here.

I’m try­ing to spec out a brows­able, leg­i­ble inter­face for scanned books with some com­plex page struc­ture. You’d want to zoom in to read the images, but not lose the rela­tional block struc­ture; you’d want to be able to read the text some­how. A lot of the things I have in mind are ency­clo­pe­dic, may have 10000, 20000 entries per vol­ume. Be nice to break those apart indi­vid­u­ally, like blog entries.

But the big goal here is that the orig­i­nal page struc­ture needs to be vis­i­ble, but zoomable. I know I could do some stuff with PDFs, or with JPEG2000, or with some neat Flash crap… but you draw your pages with the soft­ware you have, not with the soft­ware you wish you had.