Putting books back on the shelf

Abstract

We consider the reasons why we organise books in a physical environment and investigate whether situating interactions with a smartphone could improve the user experience of e-readers. Our prototype uses the Kinect depth sensor to detect the position of a user in relation to sections of a physical bookshelf. We also built a mobile application that allows users to browse and organise digital books by moving between each section. We present our initial observations of a user study that evaluated search and categorisation tasks with our prototype. Our findings motivate reasons to explore digital books in a physical environment and indicate issues to consider when designing situated interactions with e-readers.