Apple now owns the page turn

 

Want to turn over a new leaf this winter? Well, you can forget it, — unless you own an Apple e-reading product, that is. That’s because Apple, in a patent that was granted to the California company this week, now own the exclusive rights to the use of a “page turn” in an e-reader application.


In a deeply Orwellian turn of events, the digital effect of a page turning — something readers have been familiar with since the birth of the physical book — now belongs in the domain of Steve Jobs innovations. You can still flick through the leaves in a novel of course, or scroll through a piece of text, but if you want to have the effect of a page turning on a screen? Well, you’ll just have to bite your lip and buy into the Appleverse.

Not only does the patent — which Apple applied for in December of last year before its eventual acceptance, along with another 38, this week — grant ownership of the effect to the company: it credits Apple with the effect’s invention. Apple have has defended itself  by claiming the effect was “unique” and involved a “special type of animation,” but that’s probably news to the creative agency Perfect Fools which is credited with the effect’s invention in 2002. Their effect even won website of the day from the Favorite Website Awards.

While a patent like this seems shocking in its audacity, the sad fact is that Apple has made these actions par for the course. It already owns the patent to the image of a musical note — I mean, where would sheet music have been without Apple? — which it uses to illustrate its iTunes software, as well as the right to produce the see-through staircases of the kind that are found in their ubiquitous stores.

What makes this acquisition of ‘intellectual property’ so sinister is not simply its increasing aggressiveness, but the fact that its motivations are so mysterious. Why would a company that has been repeatedly praised for the design of its products, which are recognized the world over, need to possess common culture icons such as the music note, or the motion of a page turning?