 The bookwheel was an early attempt to solve the problem of managing increasingly numerous printed works, which were typically large and heavy in Ramelli's time.It has been called one of the earliest "information retrieval" devices and has been considered a precursor to modern technologies, such as hypertext and e-readers, that allow readers to store and cross-reference large amounts of information.Other inventors, such as French inventor Nicolas Grollier de Servière (1596–1689), proposed their own variations on Ramelli's design.