Reading and Writing the Electronic Book
Catherine C. Marshall
Clippings (with some notes and paraphrasing) of the most important ideas in the book; prepared by Ahmed Kharrufa
Chapter Two: Reading
Purposes and types of reading
There are different types of reading which are usually determined by the purpose of reading. Among the most common purposes of reading are
- To learn
- To support discussions
- To answer questions
- To edit or critically review text
| Type | Purpose |
| Reading | comprehension |
| Skimming | get the gist |
| Scanning | decide on further action |
| Glancing | detect important page elements |
| Seeking | scans quickly for a particular page element |
| Rereading | |
Re-reading across multiple venues should hold a prominent position in the taxonomy of reading types.
Layout and Typography
While in printed books the layout is fixed, in electronic books, and specially with formats like HTML that do not impose a fixed page formats (i.e., like PDF), the final layout of the electronic book is produced through an interaction among three factors
- The content representation (i.e. some initial layout guidelines such as styles)
- The book reader software
- Reader controlled settings (i.e. changing the size of the browser window, or the display font size).
Questions to think about
- Does the way the words are presented on the page have any effect on the speed with which readers make their way through the text or on their comprehension of its content?
- Do these design principles change readers’ immediate reaction to the content?
- Is an argument more persuasive if the page is well laid out?
One study showed that: the optimal use of white space affected both reading speed and text comprehension: subjects read the text with margins more slowly but comprehended it better. If a document is more pleasant to read, subjects will spend longer reading it and will score better on measures of comprehension. Optimal leading (line spacing), on the other hand had no effect on performance, but subjects preferred it over text prepared with suboptimal (i.e. no) leading
But another showed that: Readers preferred nice layout, but it did not change their ability to take in what was on the page. The application of good type design principles had even less effect: subjects did not notice them to appreciate them.
Good rendering (e.g. the use of good antialiasing techniques) slightly improves speed and comprehension.
Page 33 “In the end, when we contemplate the results of these studies, we find that lab subjects prefer nicely laid-out text, although the legibility enhancements provided by rendering techniques and layout do not result in corresponding increases in reading performance. In the field, what we see is more complex. There are trade-offs introduced by good layout: fewer words fit on the screen; hence (because there isn’t as much of the text available to quickly refer back to or to glance forward at).”
In short, it can safely be said that:
Better layout and rendering -> better mood -> better performance
Font related matters
Sanserif (Arial like) fonts are more eligible than serif (Times like) fonts on screen.
Samples of fonts designed for on-screen reading:
Verdana: The fonts Verdana, Georgia, and Trebuchet are designed to meet the needs of on-screen readers
Trebuchet: The fonts Verdana, Georgia, and Trebuchet are designed to meet the needs of on-screen readers
Georgia: The fonts Verdana, Georgia, and Trebuchet are designed to meet the needs of on-screen readers
Chapter Three: Interaction
Annotation
People use annotations to
- Focus attention
- Signal for future attention
- Augment and aid memory
- Help solve a problem
- Interpretation and reflection
- Actively engage with a concept
Page 40: “Researchers have generally agreed that annotations can be a valuable artifact that reflects a reader’s engagement with and understanding of a text, an artifact that may persist beyond the immediate reading… reader annotations should not be tied to the particular eBook software that was used to produce them. Hence, it is important to develop uniform terminology for annotations and to represent them consistently.”
What is becoming obvious now is that annotations should persist across devices and across specific copies of a document
A nice side note: aquote from Baudrillard 1996, pp.32-33
“The compact disc. It doesn’t wear out, even if you use it. Terrifying. It’s as though you’d never used it. So it’s as though you didn’t exist. If things don’t get old anymore, then that’s because it’s you who are dead”
This might lead to the conclusion that there is some sense in electronically showing wear effect
Anatomy of annotations
In general annotations have three elements
- Body (the actual text for a textual notes)
- Anchor (The selection range that the body refers to or just a highlight)
- Marker (The appearance of the anchor. E.g. its color)
In addition the annotation may have meta-data like creator and time.
e.g.: A highlight has an anchor and marker but no body
Typical frequency of annotation usage
Anchor-only (underlines and highlights) 83.1%
Body only (marginal text and symbols) 6.5%
Body + Anchor 9.0%
Navigation
Navigation is interwined with the act of reading; at best, it is both essential and invisible.
It is possible to think of navigation as having two different components:
- Moving: the ability to move around in the material, and
- Orientation: the ability to stay oriented (knowing where you are in a document)
Each of these is more complex than one may think at first.
Moving around
Using hypertextual jumps as opposed to sequentially going through a material can lead to entirely different outcomes. If hypertextual jumps are used , one may entirely skip an element (such as a photo) that may attracts ones attention to an article and consequently lead to reading the article. Skipping an article by turning its pages quickly has a different overall effect than skipping to the next article using a link.
Orientation
While navigation asks the question “how do I get there?”, orientation asks the question “where am I now?”
It can be at different scopes
- Library wise:
o which book am I reading?
o Which part of the collection is it from?
- Book wise:
o Where am I in the book?
o How much of the chapter is left?
o What else is in this book?
Clipping
Like annotation, clipping (cutting out pieces from a document) is a fundamental way that we should expect people to interact with electronic publications including eBooks. It is important to translate clippings’ functions and roles into requirements for eBook applications. Like annotation tools, clipping tools need to be very well integrated with reading so that this kind of unselfconscious secondary interaction – clipping – can be performed without seriously interrupting the primary one.
Reasons for clipping
| Reason | % |
| Social/shared | 41% |
| Reference | 28% |
| Reminder for action | 14% |
| Evoke memories | 11% |
| Other use | 6% |
Among the main uses of clipping are for sharing. That clippings are used collaboratively implies a need to extend collaborative tools to work in the preferred reading environment. Such a secondary interaction (sharing the clip) should take place in a manner that doesn’t interrupt the primary one (reading). Many designers have learned this lesson where it is possible to send a document right from the application’s main menu.
Bookmarking
It might be best to consider bookmarks as a kind of annotation (or vice versa) and to treat them in a similar fashion because they introduce the same design and implementation questions:
Are they stored with the book, in a separate local store, or in a central database?
Because some bookmarks can themselves be contents (placing a picture of a certain subject to bookmark a page in a related chapter), it is possible to see bookmarks as having the same general anatomy as an annotation:
- body (which is usually null, unless the bookmark has description or content),
- anchor (where is the bookmark pointing to), and
- marker (the presentation of the bookmark).
Chapter Four: Reading as a Social Activity
Reading together
Shared Focus
When people read together in a structured situation, they frequently refer to the material they have read (and possibly annotated). This creates an immediate and pressing problem of shared reference: how does everyone in the discussion know that they’re looking at the same thing? Shared reference is a persistent problem, even given stable print editions although the problem is exacerbated when the copies differ for some reason – a different edition of the work has been read or an eBook has been reformatted according to display constraints
Readers rely on complete context rather than disaggregated parts. Although there are shortcuts to sharing a view of a single document, these shortcuts would have removed the reading group members’ ability to see their own annotations and notes in context.
Collaborative Search and Reference Following
Exploratory search effectiveness is enhanced by collaboration.
Reading together as an informal act
When people read in public places, it may be the occasion for social interaction.
Sharing the artifacts of reading
Artifacts of reading are tangible records that persist across time and space. These artifacts include intentional records, such as
- annotations,
- clippings,
- bookmarks,
- notes, and
- other purposeful things that reader has created while she was reading,
In addition to implicit records of reading that have been recorded by the eBook software that include logged events such as
- page turns,
- scrolls,
- opening and closing books,
- mouse clicks, and so on.
Often, implicit records are referred to as telemetry because they allow someone to measure or observe the reading activity at a distance or at another time (or both).
Reading to know what other people know
People want to know what other people know: in other words, they want to be in sync socially.
Sharing annotations
Although sharing annotations is something useful, many factors come into play regarding the ability/rights to share annotations.
Aggregating Annotations: The wisdom of crowds.
An interesting idea is to identify common annotations among multiple readers to mark important areas in a document based on the “wisdom of the crowds”. In other words, if a certain area of the book is widely annotated, or if a number of readers had added textual notes with some common keywords in similar pages, then these areas of the books or these notes must be of some specific importance.
Sharing encountered information
Sometimes the act of sharing is more important than the specific content that is shared. People share information for many reasons:
- to keep in touch or develop rapport;
- for mutual awareness;
- to educate the recipient;
- to strengthen social ties (usually by demonstrating knowledge of the recipient’s interests);
- for some combination of these reasons.
Sharing for mutual awareness is a common practice in the workplace, and
Sharing clippings to educate the recipient is also common.
It is important to remember that the recipient may give an entirely different account of why they think they have received something than from the reason the reader give for sending it.
Chapter Five: Studying Reading
Chapter Six: Content: Markup and Genres
Check http://www.openebook.org
Standard Efforts,
Open Publication Structure
Open Packaging Format Specification
Open Container Format (which wraps DRM info as well)
Chapter Seven: Beyond the Book
Check Wordle tool for content visualization (http://www.wordle.net/)
Search at the library collection level
Collection-level search may be used
· To locate a specific item,
· To re-find an item, or
· in service of an exploratory task.
Re-encounter
I found re-encounter to be a very interesting subject.
People deliberately put printed material (books, clippings, and so on) in places in the physical world so they will see them again without having to remember to look for them.
Sometimes one puts something in a specific place because he doesn’t expect to remember to look at it; rather, he fully expects to re-encounter it when doing a specific task (like looking into a briefcase, or looking at the fridge door)
Staging potential re-encounters with digital materials is more difficult than staging the comparable re-encounter with physical items. With digital technology you are more likely to find exactly what you want and are less likely to run into something you’ve left in a remote corner of your personal digital library.
Understanding the role of re-encounter, and the way re-encounter works in the physical world presents us with an opportunity to move beyond current metaphors for presenting and manipulating stored personal digital library content.
Gathering and Triage
Gathering is a counterpart to annotation. Annotations may represent within-document interpretation; gathering and triage (sorting according to more specific criteria) represent the interpretation of the relevant documents relative to one another.
It is important to record where the material that readers have gathered came from, and it is equally important for readers to be able to informally express why they have kept it. In other words, a reader should be able to say, “this is the most significant thing I found” or “I’m only going to read this if I have time” as easily as it is for her to say what the material is about.
The Visual Knowledge Builder (VKB - http://ensemble.tamu.edu/vkb/) and Tinderbox (http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/ ) are good current examples of applications designed to support gathering and triage.
Tools used to organize information shape the process in crucial ways. Studies found that given fewer organizing tools, participants read more; given a spatial overview and the ability to create hierarchies, they organized more.
Supporting browsing with computed visualizations
Students prefer “overview + detail” interfaces; they work somewhat faster using the fisheye overview, but as with other methods that put more information in front of a person without regard to how pleasant it is to look at, people worked quickly but were less accurate.
The best interface in terms of usability, performance, and reader satisfaction is one that provides a detailed look at the item in focus, presumably a page view, and an overview of the page’s position in the document structure. Similarly, extending this finding to a collection or personal library, the reader should be able to see the eBook in focus, coupled with an overview of the collection.
Metadata for personal digital libraries
Personal library visualizations may be enhanced by choosing techniques that make good use of records of reading and interaction in addition to other per eBook metadata. To do so, we can conceive of every interaction within a personal digital library as forming a persistent record. On its own, each record-each annotation, each clipping, each log entry-doesn’t have much value. But taken together, these records may form a personal geography of one’s own collection of reading materials.
