The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has granted Apple a design patent for the digital representation of a page turning in an e-reader application.

The animation is used in iBooks but other common e-readers, like Barnes and Noble’s Nook and Amazon’s Kindle, also make use of a similar animation that could be targeted with the newly-acquired patent. Neither B&N nor Amazon have patented their page-turning animations.

Apple filed for the patent in December 2011 and it was granted by the USPTO last week, effectively giving Apple exclusive rights to the page turn despite there being large volumes of prior art of the invention.

The page-turning design patent was one of 38 different patents awarded to Apple last week.

Source: Digital Trends