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.
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I find it easy and intuitive. I’m wondering what the multi-page solution will be. Going back to go forward would be tedious. How to keep it simple? Things can so quickly become complex.
I’m wondering that myself.
I think it needs to be multimodal: a sense of magnification, as here, but easily traversing the intended visual flow of the page elements, and also keeping some sense of overall context regardless of magnification level.
One big goal is to be able to present 19th century newspapers online, without needing to break them into individual columns at all scales.
But it could get tedious. Look at this book, for example—we have five 3000-page volumes of this junk sitting here waiting for a solution. Scanning it without snipping off page ends was too challenging for our Google buddies.
Let alone the ridiculous amount of effort involved in slicing and presenting a few hundred thousand page scans as individual multiscale images… let alone reading them.
Still thinking.