Related: How Publishers Should Prepare for EPUB 3

By Eric Freese, Solutions Architect, Aptara and member of the EPUB3 Working Group

EPUB is widely accepted as the defacto digital format standard for eBooks, with its signature reflowable text that can be read on the greatest variety of reading systems (including the iPad, nook/nookColor, Kobo, and Sony readers to name a few).

The much anticipated, upcoming revised edition, EPUB3, will include new features that promise to greatly enhance the reader experience, such as embedded audio, video, and interactivity.

Meanwhile, publishers hold out hope that the new and improved EPUB standard will rectify the frustration with EPUB 2.0.1 files behaving differently on different reading systems (which have led me and others, to stress the importance of testing your files on every intended device.)

With speculation abounding since the introduction of the spec in the spring of this year, publishers have been waiting to see what’s really possible with EPUB3 — and what reading systems will support it.

To help manage expectations and alleviate confusion, I’ve provided a brief snapshot of some of the spec‘s new features, as well as what publishers can do to start preparing for them, and notes of caution as to what may, or may not, be available in EPUB3 reading systems.

Related: How Publishers Should Prepare for EPUB 3

HTML5

There has been some confusion as to whether HTML5 and EPUB3 will work together. To set the record straight, HTML5 is the base language of EPUB3 (with some minor adjustments to allow for pagination and other reading behaviors). Since EPUB3 content is written in HTML5, the two will interact hand-in-hand.

EPUB3 reading systems must be able to process XHTML files written in HTML5. This doesn’t mean that web browsers will be able to display EPUB files, unless they are able to process the additional navigation information contained within the EPUB file. That being said there are some reading systems that are implemented within a browser environment.

CSS

The new baseline for style sheets is CSS2.1 with some CSS3 features added. This will provide much richer layout including multi-column layout, better font support, and directional printing, to name a few. Reading systems are NOT required to support CSS, but almost all of them do. One of the leading causes of frustration is the difference in CSS support between reading systems. In the current EPUB environment, many reading systems do not allow stylesheets within an EPUB file to override the system’s default settings. EPUB3 does not do anything to alleviate this situation and, in fact, might exacerbate it somewhat due to the additional capabilities that are possible. Reading systems also have the ability to implement their own proprietary CSS extensions, which would then be ignored by other reading systems.

Audio

Audio can be inserted into eBook files using the HTML5 tag. This is what Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon have been using all along to embed audio in enhanced eBooks. Now, it’s simply part of the EPUB3 spec. Reading systems are NOT required to support audio, although many do. If a reading system supports audio, it must support MP3. In addition, support of MP4 AAC and media overlays (explained later) is optional.

Video

Video can be inserted into eBook files using the HTML5 tag. Again, this is what has already been occurring. And again, reading systems are NOT required to support video. In fact, most of the e-Ink devices are not able to show video in a satisfactory manner.

One of my main bones of contention with the EPUB 3 spec is that there is no specified format that must be supported. If a reading system supports video, the spec recommends support of at least one of either H.264 (also known as MPEG-4 AVC) or VP8 video compression formats, but neither is required. Unfortunately, the spec also does not say that some other format is not allowed. Essentially, there is nothing to stop a reading system developer from implementing some other video format (Flash?). Whether that happens remains to be seen, but there is an opening available.

In the meantime, publishers are going to need to prepare videos in both formats to support the widest range of reading systems. As has been discussed in the past, this could lead to very large EPUB3 files, or different versions that target specific reading systems.

Media Overlays

Media overlay functionality was added to the spec to enable text and media to be presented in a combined manner. For example, highlighting text as it is spoken by the computer or as part of a soundtrack. In order to employ these overlays, special Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) files will have to be created.

Reading systems are not required to provide this functionality, but if they do, they should allow readers to skip or escape out of overlays. Overlays can also be used to provide text-to-speech functionality. The spec mentions the Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS) and the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) as the means for providing assistance in generating synthetic speech, but does not require reading systems to use that information.

SVG

Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) files have been allowed within EPUB files for some time. However, their use was limited, due largely to a lack of reading system support. EPUB3 now mandates that reading systems be able to process SVG within the eBook, including allowing users to select text and search within the content of the SVG files. The only portion of SVG that is not allowed is the animation capability.

MathML

MathML is part of HTML5, and therefore, it is part of EPUB3. Reading systems must be able to process the presentation form of MathML, but may also support the content form of MathML. I won’t go into a lot of detail here. But publishers that deal with mathematical and scientific content may be interested, as it will allow formulas to be included as part of the XHTML markup — rather than as images. This means the content will be scalable, among other things. It is still recommended that images of the formulas be included as fallbacks.

Foreign Resources

Foreign resources are pieces of content that are not a core media type. For example, PDFs might be considered foreign resources. I have seen cases where PDF files are incorporated into EPUB files. When this is done, at least one fallback (perhaps a plain text equivalent) should be included to allow reading systems that don’t support the resource to operate.

Scripting

Scripting and interactivity is another of the most hyped new features of EPUB3. Once again EPUB3 gets this functionality through HTML5. Usually this means JavaScript but this is not the only option. While scripting could blur the lines between eBooks and apps, it should be noted that reading system support for scripting is NOT required. Furthermore, reading systems have the ability to place additional limitations on the capabilities provided to scripts for a variety of reasons, including security and processing capabilities.

That being said, publishers should be thinking about possible ways that content can be made more interactive and beginning to plan for creating those enhancements. However, they should also make sure that the reading experience is not adversely affected if a reader decides to turn scripting off, or if a reading system does not provide it.

Linking

EPUB3 created a Canonical Fragment Identifier (EPUBCFI) specification for creating and accessing various locations within the content. This allows very fine grained access to the content, even at the word or phrase level. The use of this spec could allow indexes to link to the exact word within the content. It is also the basis of a future inter-document linking spec due out in the near future.

Publishers should consider how best to create additional target IDs within their content to speed the linking process. The good news is that reading systems are required to be able to process EPUBCFI addresses, making them more interoperable.

Accessibility

EPUB 2.0.1 actually consists of 2 schemas — EPUB and DTBook. DTBook was intended to provide content to assistive systems for visually-impaired readers through Braille readers and other technologies. Because of the accessibility features within HTML5, it was decided that DTBook could be deprecated and the functionality rolled into EPUB. So technically, EPUB3 files are accessible ‘by design.’

Publishers should do everything within reason to ensure that all items within their content are accessible. This includes descriptions of all images and alternative text for MathML and scripts.

Wrap-Up

Hopefully this quick dive into the spec provides enough context for you to at least know what to expect as we move into the new eBook formatting realm of EPUB3. Going forward, there will undoubtedly be lots of new capabilities as best practices get solidified and reading systems become even more advanced. So stay tuned. The final membership vote is expected in late August or early September, and I’ll be reporting back with updates.

Related: How Publishers Should Prepare for EPUB 3

Eric Freese is a Solutions Architect with Aptara, which provides digital publishing solutions that deliver significant gains in quality, time-to-market and production costs for eBook publishers.

Ed note: For part one of this ongoing series on eReader applications and their rendering of ebooks across devices, click here for more on annotations in Kobo, Google, Apple, Nook, and Kindle. For more on Ebook Design & Formatting, join Peter Meyers and Anne Kostick on Thursday, August 4th at 1 PM ET for an interactive review of ebooks across platforms.

When I first decided to try reading an e-book on my iPod Touch, I assumed—since I’ve been designing and typesetting book interiors for more than a decade and have strong opinions about what makes text readable and appealing—that poor typography would be my biggest complaint about the e-reading applications I tried. It turns out that as with print books, I’m much more tolerant of ugly, poorly set text than I expected. Just as I’m capable of losing myself in the pages of a cramped, blurry mass-market paperback if the story is one I want to read, so, too, can I block out consciousness of the less-than-ideal typography of an e-book viewed on a small screen. In fact, though I haven’t tried to empirically test this theory, I believe I might read novels faster on my iPod than I used to do on paper. Or maybe I comprehend better, or remember more of what I read.

Still, I’d rather have the option of making the text look good, and if an e-book’s appearance seriously offends me, I’m batty enough to crack it open and change it. I now actually get paid to do this, which sometimes feels like I’ve hit upon the best scam ever. (Other times, not so much. See below under anchovies.)

As any text designer can tell you, there are entire degree programs, conferences, and libraries of books on the subject of typography. So I won’t try to explain the whats, hows, and whys in a late-night blog post; but take my word for it that in good print design, there is a balance between several elements, including but not limited to

• typeface style (serif or sans serif? old style, transitional, modern, Clarendon? geometric, gothic, grotesque?)
• type size (which, as you know if you’ve ever fooled around with typefaces when trying to hit a certain page count on a term paper, is about more than just point size)
• leading—the amount of space between lines of type
• measure—the width of the block of text
• alignment—is the text
  • centered, as in section headings and some truly terrible books of poetry?
  • fully justified, with the spaces between words squeezed or expanded so that they form a solid, sharp-edged text block?
  • rag right, aka left-justified?
  • rag left, aka right-justified—extremely rare in book-length texts but sometimes seen in advertising, to make things line up in a pretty but hard-to-read way?
• word spacing
• letter spacing
• margins

A print designer can also control whether and how words are hyphenated (for example, I don’t like to see a two-letter fragment before or after a hyphen; it’s ugly and, I feel, more likely to lead to misreading, so I always set hyphenation tools to keep a minimum of three letters on either side of a break), as well as when and how deeply the first lines of paragraphs are indented (for instance, we usually don’t indent the first line beneath a heading, because it’s already obvious that a new paragraph has started).

So how much of this can an e-book designer control?

Consistently across all platforms? Pretty much nothing.

You can present serving suggestions, as it were, but you cannot plate the dish. Some e-reading devices and software automatically add ketchup (if not freaking anchovies) to everything, some serve everything up on divided styrofoam plates, and the reader can nearly always at least add salt.

Welcome to the dark side of my job.

Still, whether it makes me sometimes want to fork my eyes out or not, I promised you a rundown of typographic options in an assortment of e-reading applications, so that is what you will get.

Picking the fonts

When layfolk think of typography at all, what they usually think of is picking the fonts. Fonts are fun. Who among us didn’t sit there trying out all those goofy typefaces, upon first installing Microsoft Word? (What? You are too young to remember life before Word? Sorry, I can’t hear you—let me turn my hearing aid up. Squeeeeeeek.) Changing the font changes the way a text feels; it can make the author seem nerdy or cool; it can keep you from getting lost; it can change how you rate a text. Or it can make you throw the book across the room in disgust. But, wait—if you’re reading an e-book, you no longer have to keep your pitching arm limber! You can just change the font. To what?

Kindle.app: 0 fonts

Kobo: 4 fonts

Nook.app: 5 fonts

All displayed in using the same font in the menu, so you’d better know what each one looks like.

iBooks: 6 fonts

Google Books: 7 fonts

Is more better? Not really. I use Georgia most of the time (sometimes Verdana, if I’m reading in night mode); couldn’t care less about the rest. YMMV.

Size matters

One of the big selling points of e-books is that each reader can adjust the size of the text to suit his or her preferences. There’s no longer a need to track down bulky, expensive large-type editions, or to use a magnifier to make conventionally sized text legible; you can just make the type larger, and everything will reflow to fit the screen.

How big is big, though, and how small is small? The following pairs of screenshots show the largest and smallest text in each app.

Google Books

iBooks

Kindle.app

Kobo

Nook.app

Attentive persons will note that the font displayed on the Nook.app is not Georgia, although that’s what I have the app set to use, and “use publisher settings” is off. Go figure.

Leading

Leading (rhymes with “heading”), also known as line spacing or line height, can have a profound effect on readability. Yet of the e-reading apps I’m looking at, only two let you alter this setting: Nook.app gives you four choices, and Google Books gives you three.

The screenshots below show the extremes of leading at the smallest and middle font sizes. The leading is proportional to the font size, so as the text gets larger, so does the spacing between the lines.

Nook.app

Google Books

Justification

One of the absolute worst things about typography on e-readers is that most apps, and most publishers, fully justify text by default. On a small screen, with primitive hyphenation algorithms, this is what most often makes me want to stab myself in the eye. At a very small font size, it can look okay—

—but full justification is not appropriate for every part of a book—

—and at large font sizes, it can look like a dog’s breakfast:

In my opinion, left-justified or rag-right text would be a much safer default, but that wouldn’t fit in with all the stupid “Look! It’s just like a real book!” chrome that software developers seem to think readers want. More on that in a separate episode.

Fortunately, both Kobo and Nook.app let you either force the justification to rag-right or use whatever justification settings the publisher has specified in the file. Unfortunately, neither app shows the publisher’s settings by default.

Margins

Nook.app is alone among those under consideration in letting the reader change the page margins.

Please check your InterWeb Guide to find out when the next exciting installment will air!

India Amos is Digital Production ePub QA Associate for F+W Media. She has been art director for the daily online magazine Nextbook.org (now Tabletmag.com), a book designer at St. Martin’s Press and Neuwirth & Associates, and managing editor of Seven Stories Press. From 1999 to 2001 she was webmaster of poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets. In 2008, she entered the Interactive Telecommunications master’s degree program (ITP) at New York University.

The DBW Roundtable

In this bi-weekly 1-hour WEBcast, the Roundtable offers insight into the greater book publishing ecosystem with actionable case studies from practitioners in publishing.

Join reading design mavens Peter Meyers & Anne Kostick on August 4th at 1 PM ET / 10 AM PT as they fussbudget their way through a bookshelf of titles. Their mission? Read as many ebooks as their eyes can bear—from different publishers, on different devices, and using different apps—in order to smoke out a top-10 list of common formatting and design mistakes.

From nitty gritty annoyances (botched smart quotes) to big picture no-no’s (TOC snafus), they’ll help authors, publishers, and ebook designers avoid the kinds of missteps that turn book lovers into ebook haters. And fear not: this session isn’t just an hour long complaint fest. For each gotcha, Anne and Peter discuss fairly easy to implement alternatives.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:

• Top 10 common formatting & design mistakes (and how to avoid them).
• What readers want to see in a quality designed ebook.
• How to fix persistent problems in your digital titles.
• Best practices for ebook design.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Ebook designers, authors, publishers, and anyone involved in digital publishing for today’s major platforms.

The Roundtable will be broadcast on August 4th at 1 PM EST / 10 AM PST.

Register For the Roundtable!

THE ROUNDTABLE

Peter Meyers, Author and Digital Book Producer
Anne Kostick, Partner, Foxpath IND

THE MODERATOR

Matt Mullin, Community Relations Manager, Digital Book World

Join the Roundtable for provocative discussions every two weeks that set the tone for another exciting year in the publishing industry!

• Register to participate LIVE
• Subscribe to the audio podcast
• DBW Members can access the on-demand video archive of The Roundtable

AUDIO

Should Facebook Worry About Google+?

There’s just no avoiding Google in the news this week, what with Google+ vying for top position in the social networking world. Founder of Ancestry.com Paul Allen, using a compelling surname-based statistical analysis of Google+, expects that Google+ will hit the 10 million users mark today, and there might be 20 million Google+ users by the weekend. To put those numbers in context, it wasn’t that long ago that Facebook announced they had over 750 million users (and shrugged it off).

With a combination of social networking and social sharing features like Circles, Hangouts, and Sparks, Google+ is a real contender to go after Facebook’s longstanding dominant market share, even as Facebook recently rolled out new features such as integrated video chat. Technobombs has a decent infographic summarizing the feature differences between Google+ and Facebook, while Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols over at ZDNet asks, “Can Google+ Be a Facebook Killer?” Prognostications in the Google vs. Facebook debate fall under a few general themes, especially of course privacy policies, with the added issues of public Google profiles and gender privacy.

But, should Facebook worry about Google+, really? Entrepreneur Vincent Wong doesn’t seem to think so, emphasizing the software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud computing features of the whole Google suite, which would make Google+ more a threat to Microsoft than to Facebook or Twitter.

Opinion about Google+ is rather polarized (not unexpectedly). Some points of contention center around user interface and usability, ease of adoption, and clarity of purpose, Yet, news organizations such as MSNBC.com’s Breaking News, seem to have no hesitation in integrating Google’s offering as a means of disseminating news. Others, however, question the small business applications of Google+ and even the raison d’etre of Google+.

Ultimately, users will let their “fingers do the walking,” but the learning curve is somewhat steep and the interface may not be completely intuitive to all users who’d like to decide for themselves. Luckily there are already a few useful how-tos and cheat sheets available, and no doubt there will be many more.

But Didn’t Google Announce an E-Reader Too?

Actually, yes, and with the Google+ tidal wave garnering the most attention,buzz about the iRiver Story HD pales in comparison. But Google is noticeably late to the e-reader device game: Will this standalone e-reader - set to go on sale exclusively at Target stores this weekend at a price point of $140 – result in major shifts in the e-reader market? Will the competitive advantage of integration with Google eBooks make it stand apart? An early review of the iRiver Story HD E-Reader from PCWorld is somewhat unenthused, while still appreciative of the higher resolution (XGA 768×1024) of the 6-inch e-ink display.

The e-reader market is such a crowded field, after all: the Nook Color is leading e-reader sales for the first time, while several reports indicate that tablet sales are lagging (see below). Then, also this weekend, the field is about to get even more competitive, with the new AT&T-sponsored, ad-supported Kindle 3G at $139. From ZDNet’s first look:

The biggest difference between the two Kindle 3Gs is in content. For the slightly cheaper ad-supported Kindle 3G, you need to put up with “money saving offers,” advertisements as screensaver (as pictured above), and a small banner ad on the bottom of the home screen. You can also interact with the banner ads by selecting them in the menu to visit the advertiser’s website for more details, but you are not required to do so to earn your Kindle’s keep.

Like the ad-free Kindle 3G also available from AT&T, the owner does not have to pay for data service or sign a contract (Amazon picks up the tab on your 3G service with AT&T), plus the device works in other 100 countries and territories thanks to AT&T’s partnerships with carriers around the world. So it’s a good option for frequent flyers who don’t want to deal with international data roaming rates every time they fly.

However, it’s not just getting devices in readers’ hands – and this is really where the competition between Google and Amazon gets interesting – it’s also about getting ebooks into reading devices, and the overwhelming dominance of Kindle store offerings is rather stark, especially now that Kindle Singles are gaining traction and media outlets like The Guardian release Kindle “apps.”

And let’s not scratch Kobo out of the e-reader race either, especially as Kobo launches Germany’s largest ebookstore, with a catalog of 80,000 German-language titles Amazon’s offering there. From PW’s Calvin Reid:

In an interview at the PW offices, Serbinis said Kobo has been growing steadily, from about 3 million users during the BookExpo America in May to more than 4 million users today. He also emphasized the “localization” of Kobo’s thrust on the international market and said the German Kobo was being managed by a Kobo team of about 12 based in Germany. “We’ve had people in Germany for the last six months getting this set up and our team will be overseeing German-language merchandising and marketing.”

Serbinis said, “We believe our country-specific launch into Germany as well as our upcoming entries into Spain, France, Italy and The Netherlands will be embraced by the European eReading community as consumers seek to build their lifetime digital libraries, reading over multiple devices, whether eReader, smartphone, tablet, desktop or netbook.”

And to finish with the racing metaphor: What about the dark horse devices, like the Sony e-reader coming out next month or 3M’s library-centric e-reader? The field is only going to get more crowded as the year continues, and it’s getting harder and harder to figure out who is a good bet.

Amazon Is Releasing Three Devices This Fall?

Turning now to the latest (and ostensibly most significant) device development from Amazon, it turns out that the rumors are true: Amazon is releasing an Android-based tablet as well as, not just one, but two new Kindle models this fall. One of the Kindles will feature a touchscreen, but both will be black and white. What does this mean in terms of device competition (both in the e-reader realm and the tablet realm)? The New York Times has a rundown of the tablet’s stripped-down specs and its prospects, while The Wall Street Journal‘s coverage of the Amazon tablet looks more closely at the retail angle:

The introduction of a tablet poses a conundrum for Amazon on how to keep from cannibalizing sales of its popular Kindle. Amazon has long said the Kindle is its best-selling device, though it has declined to disclose sales.

A person familiar with Amazon’s thinking said it still figuring out how to market the tablet computer. One issue is whether customers will want to buy both the tablet and Kindle, which is viewed as a dedicated-reading device for bookworms….

Amazon is better-positioned than other companies to go up against Apple, said [Sarah Rotman] Epps, the Forrester analyst. Part of the reason is because Amazon already has a digital-content store with a significant selection and following. Amazon has heavily promoted its digital offerings this year. It launched a streaming video service in February. And in May, it undercut Apple’s iTunes store by selling an album by pop singer Lady Gaga for 99 cents.

Amazon is also in a position to offer a cheaper alternative to the iPad, said Ms. Epps. It could sell the tablet for a loss while hoping to make money on sales of movies, music and books.

Meanwhile, Matt Brian, the Mobile Editor for The Next Web, believes that Amazon’s “portfolio of services” has shown a long-term strategy of incremental service expansions all leading up to a tablet that can rival the iPad:

Analysts have already issued reports suggesting Amazon will sell 2.4 million tablets in 2012. Whilst that figure doesn’t even compete with the 10-12 million iPads that Apple is expected to sell in its third quarter alone, Amazon has time on its side. By subsidising its devices, it can heavily reduce its offerings to get customers investing into its technologies, hitting them with the upsell once they are onboard. Amazon can push its value-added services to boost revenues, whilst slowly building sales of physical devices….

The retailer’s portfolio of services suggests that it has had tablet plans for a number of years with every new launch building towards an all-out assault on the tablet market. The company hasn’t rushed a product to market, instead it has carefully thought through its options and planned accordingly. I expect the company won’t just try to compete, it will give everything to tempt consumers away from Apple and its “magical” iPad.

No doubt this will be a lively competition: Will Amazon’s wide-ranging and industry-agnostic retail portfolio give Apple a real run for its money, especially given that, according to some reports, the average Apple user already has $100 worth of content on every Apple mobile device? Will Amazon’s entree into the tablet market finally convince iOS users to switch to Android?

What Do the Numbers Say About E-Reading on Devices?

With all this discussion about dedicated e-readers and tablets (both currently in the market and anticipated releases), it is worthwhile to change course a little and look at some of the mid-year numbers that have come out recently. For example, Wired’s Gadget Lab describes a recent survey by Resolve Market Research that looked at mobile device purchases:

A recent survey shows that the portable and console gaming industry has little to fear from the tablet revolution. E-readers, netbooks and laptops, on the other hand, should watch out.

Resolve Market Research looked at consumers’ mobile device purchases and intentions in July 2010 and now, and found that 53 percent of consumers do not plan to buy an e-reader after purchasing a tablet, and 42 percent don’t plan to purchase a netbook or laptop after getting a tablet. Both were an increase over similar sentiments from a year ago.

Similarly, Laura Hazard Owen over at PaidContent.org contextualizes a recent forecast about e-reader usage from eMarketer:

The number of people in the U.S. who own an dedicated e-reader (not an iPad or other multi-function tablet) has quadrupled since 2009, to 8.7 percent of the population (20.6 million people), new research from eMarketer shows. By 2012, the company predicts that 12 percent of U.S adults, or 28.9 million people, will own an e-reader, up from 1.9 percent in 2009.

The estimate is quite a bit higher than previous predictions: Last year Forrester predicted that 15.5 million people would own e-readers by the end of 2011, and that the 12 percent benchmark would not be reached until 2015.

These numbers are confirmed by a recent Pew Internet report about e-reader ownership in the past six months:

The share of adults in the United States who own an e-book reader doubled to 12% in May, 2011 from 6% in November 2010. E-readers, such as a Kindle or Nook, are portable devices designed to allow readers to download and read books and periodicals. This is the first time since the Pew Internet Project began measuring e-reader use in April 2009 that ownership of this device has reached double digits among U.S. adults.

Tablet computers—portable devices similar to e-readers but designed for more interactive web functions—have not seen the same level of growth in recent months. In May 2011, 8% of adults report owning a tablet computer such as an iPad, Samsung Galaxy or Motorola Xoom. This is roughly the same percentage of adults who reported owning this kind of device in January 2011 (7%), and represents just a 3 percentage-point increase in ownership since November 2010. Prior to that, tablet ownership had been climbing relatively quickly.

All this competition in the device space, however, doesn’t translate completely to prospects for the book publishing industry. For that, we need to look at more focused numbers about reading habits, purchase behaviors, and unit sales. Jim Milliot over at Publishers Weekly has a useful comparative summary of mid-year unit sales statistics from Nielsen BookScan, Bowker, and the Association of American Publishers.

Meanwhile, a bit off the beaten track, Phillip Jones over at the FutureBook reports on an informal survey about ebook readership conducted by fantasy and sci-fi author Stephen Hunt:

[With 836 respondents, Hunt] found that 71% of his audience were now reading e-books, but in a much more diverse way than the brand wars between Amazon, Apple, Sony suggest; using multiple devices and software apps to read novels. Of those who don’t yet read e-books, 69% are planning on getting one. The survey highlights Amazon’s success is pushing its Kindle format forward on different e-book devices: only 35% have Kindle hardware, but 53% are buying e-books from them. It also found that publishers have an opportunity to sell more direct: 39% are currently buying direct from publisher web sites, and 25% from authors.

That’s just a taste of what you may have missed this week. To stay on top of the most interesting news, commentary and tweets related to publishing, keep in touch via our RSS feed, follow us on Twitter, join your publishing colleagues in our LinkedIn group, and connect with the broader DBW Network.

About two weeks ago, in a fit of pique, I posted some gripes about my current e-reading application of choice, which is Kobo for the iPhone/iPod Touch. I was pressed for time, so I didn’t provide any context, such as why Kobo’s is my favorite e-reading app, which apps I’ve chosen it over, and whether the things I find awesome and annoying about it are unique to Kobo or are universal across the e-reading–on–iOS world right now.

Here, finally, is the first in a series of posts providing that context. Specifically, I’ll be walking through five of the e-reading applications I’ve used on the iPod Touch, explaining what I see as the pros, cons, and OMFG-what-were-they-thinkings of each.

Reading preferences are personal

Two assumptions I encounter often when talking with people about e-reading are

1. the only e-reading devices that matter are relatively large-format devices—e.g., Kindle, iPad, or Nook; and
2. one type of screen, whether e-ink or LCD, is inherently better for reading—all types of reading, for everyone—than the other.

And then I tell then I do most of my reading on an iPod Touch, and they look at me like I’m in-freaking-sane.

Because we’re not used to having choices about how we read, beyond hardcover vs. trade paperback vs. mass-market vs. large print, most people haven’t thought much about what makes reading comfortable for them. If they enjoy one book more than another, they usually credit the content, not the presentation. Partly that’s because, if everyone at the publishing house is doing his or her job¹, the reader shouldn’t notice the physical nature of the book at all once they get into it. All the attention should be on the content. But if each reader could choose how his or her books look and function, we might see a much broader variation in fonts, layouts, paper, bindings, and so on. With the explosion of e-reading devices and applications, we’re starting to get some idea of that variety.

So the preferences I’ll be expressing here are merely that—preferences. My preferences. Having worked with books for most of my life—selling them, producing them, designing them, and, of course, reading way more of them than the average citizen—I’m in no way an average reader. And I’m wicked nearsighted, and I like to read in the dark. I don’t expect my preferences to match anyone else’s. I’m also atypical as a reader of e-books because I read on a smaller device than most people find comfortable (or think they’ll find comfortable; when I ask people if they’ve tried reading on a small device, the answer is nearly always “no”), and I don’t expect most people to follow my example.

But I think it’s important not to let the discussion about e-books and e-readers get too tied up with dedicated reading devices, such as the Kindle, and large multifunction devices, such as the iPad. Various companies have reported that moste-books are still being read on laptop and desktop computers, and there are a lot of people who aren’t going to be able to afford to buy a new gadget anytime soon—among them, myself. I also think it’s important not to assume that everyone who uses the iOS has an always-on Internet connection. The digital divide is real, and it’s growing wider, not narrower, as far as I know. I’d hate to see books fall into it and not make it back out.

How this series is organized

I debated for some time whether to organize this analysis by application or by function, and I’ve ended up choosing the latter. If you are a reader, you’ll have your own set of priorities about how you want software to behave—I mark up my e-books constantly, so I’m obsessed with annotation tools—the subject of this first installment—while you may not care about markup at all but have wonky vision and therefore be more concerned with what font sizes and color schemes are available in different apps. And if you’re reading this because you’re an interface design person, I figure you’ll probably want to compare how different apps handle the same functions. Some of these issues are evergreen, though the individual apps will change—during the past week, as I’ve been working on this article, I’ve winced every time I’ve synced my iPod, hoping there wouldn’t be a round of application updates that would require me to retake all my screenshots and revise some of my comparisons. I got lucky. We got new devices from Kobo and Barnes & Noble last week, but no new software. Hooray for slow development cycles!

The areas I’m planning to discuss are

• Annotation
• Typography
• Colors and themes
• Wayfinding
• Metadata
• Social Media

And the apps are

• Google Books
• iBooks
• Kobo
• Kindle
• nook

Because I’ll be covering a lot of ground, and because I have been known to wax rambly, I’ll also create a sort of index for the series, in the form of a hyperlinked matrix of applications versus features. It’ll be located at the end of each post, and I’ll included little markers like this [#] throughout the series so you can skip to the grid from wherever. I’ll update it as I post each section.

There will be a lot of screenshots, which I’ll embed as thumbnails to keep the loading time reasonable. Roll over any image to see a caption, including which app it’s from. You can click on any thumbnail to see the full-size screenshot (and caption) on Flickr, or you can just go to the Flickr collection, which is a bit messy right now but is growing tidier, and which I’ve tried to tag in ways that will correspond to the app/feature grid.

Geek on.

Part 1: Annotation

SPEED
One of the biggest changes to my reading behavior since I switched to e-books is that I highlight. Constantly. Because I can. Mostly typos. Sometimes I add notes, to clarify why I’ve marked something—e.g., “Sb” for space break, “Run up,” “Italic,” or the expressive “!!!” and “<3 <3 <3″—but mostly I just highlight a couple of words to show where a piece of punctuation is either missing or misplaced.

On a well-edited e-book, I’m capable of reading quietly, just like a normal person, but . . . apparently I don’t read very many well-edited e-books. So until Kobo wooed me away with its shiny Reading Life toys a few months ago (to be discussed later in the series, under metadata), the killer e-reading application feature for me was fast annotation. And my favorite reading app, therefore, was the one called simply eReader—which is owned by Barnes & Noble and, as I understand it, provided the core of what’s now the nook iOS app.

The eReader and nook applications have diverged in the last year, as one is updated and the other is not, but they still share the most efficient, least frustrating interface for highlighting text among all the apps I’ve tried. To select a word or phrase, you drag your finger across the text from where you want the selection to start to where it should end. When you lift your finger, the option to highlight or add a note comes up. It’s rat-simple, and very fast. Even if you highlight on every other screenful, as I sometimes do, it barely interrupts the flow of your reading.

I’ve yet to discover an e-reading application that lets you highlight text spanning more than one page, except for those that snap to whole-paragraph selection.

PRECISION
OF SOFTWARE
So, what can you mark up? Not always quite what you want.

In iBooks, Kindle, and nook/eReader, you can select any text that fits on the screen—for example, from the middle of one paragraph into the middle of another. As long as you can run your finger over it, it’s yours.

In Kobo’s app, however, you can select text from multiple paragraphs only if you grab the entire paragraphs—um, maybe. If one of those paragraphs runs over to the next screenful, your selection might end up including just part of it. Or you might get all of both paragraphs. Or, as I mentioned in my gripe to them and the Interverse two weeks ago, sometimes the area you’ve selected ends up not being what gets annotated at all—you get some random word from elsewhere on the screen, no matter how carefully nor how many times you select the desired text. And then, when you finally get the text selected and try to add a note, the app crashes. To quote a song by my friend Lucy Foley,

Oh, it’s a tangle, oh, it’s a gamble
Oh, it’s a gamble, oh, it’s a handful

Maybe Kobo could license it as a jingle . . . This kind of buggy mayhem is why, until they added those Reading Life gimcracks, Kobo’s reader was my dead-last choice. Behold the power of colorful data!

OF SQUISHYWARE

So much for the precision of the software. Now how about the precision of the user?

Another reason I prefer the eReader/nook interface is that all other reading apps use what I gather is the iOS-standard method of text selection:

1. long press to enter selection mode, which by default selects the entirety of the nearest word, then
2. drag the tiny selection handles if you want to choose more than one word.

That’s all fine and nice if you have small, steady fingers andthe app developers have taken care not to overlap those tiny selection handles with the selection toolbar. Seems like a big duh, but the latter condition is not always met: in this screenshot of Kobo’s app, the toolbar overlaps the bottom selection handle. Good luck expanding that selection further down the page . . .

I happen to have an intermittent hand tremor—might be hereditary, or might have been brought on by brain damage in graduate school; exacerbated by lack of sleep, caffeine, slow creep toward death, etc. Whatever the cause, on a bad day, I can’t tap those handles to save my life. I’m sure that sometimes other people on my subway car assume I’m playing some kind of game on my iPod, because I keep tapping the screen, dragging, tapping, dragging, tapping, dragging, and looking more and more frustrated, as I try repeatedly to highlight the words I want. It’s not a very disability-tolerant interface.

COLOR

What if you’re an even more obsessive annotator than I am? What if, when you mark up your e-books, you want to flag different parts of the text in different colors, like you used to do in college, with your pile of multicolored highlighter pens? I honor you, my dorktastic friend. Perhaps try iBooks.

So far, iBooks is the only e-reading app I’ve seen that lets you choose the colors of highlights and annotations. By default, all highlights are the canonical yellow (with a wavy edge and uneven opacity, so it looks just like you used a real highlighter pen! one of the few instances in which I find iBooks’s kitschy emulation of paper books sweet rather than annoying), but once you have highlighted a passage, you can tap the text again to choose the color. If you’ve attached a note, that note also takes on the color of the highlight.

Your color preference then sticks for all subsequent highlights and notes, until you change it again.

The nook app allows you to change the color of your highlights, but only on a document-wide basis; it’s among the theme options. Better than nothing.

BOOKMARKS

Most e-reading apps allow some kind of screenful-level bookmarking, typically styled as a dog-eared page. Not very interesting or useful, in my opinion—I use it only when I want to skip back in a book I’m in the middle of and am afraid I’ll lose my place; as soon as I return to where I left off, I delete the bookmark.

If you use this kind of marker, I’d love to know what for. Leave a comment!

ANNOTATION MANAGEMENT

Once you’ve marked stuff up, how can you access your notes, highlights, and dogeared pages?

Ha! What a ridiculous question! Why would anyone want to do that?!

Right now, every e-reading app except Kindle follows the Roach Motel Model of Annotation: the notes check in, but they don’t check out.

In iBooks, Kobo, and nook, you can view your annotations only when you have that particular e-book open. You cannot print them, nor can you copy them out to paste them into another application.

Amazon.com is the exception in the area of annotation retrieval, allowing you to view your notes and highlights on the Web at https://kindle.amazon.com/your_highlights, from which you can cut and paste them anywhere you want. Of course, they also do annoying things like show perfect strangers each other’s annotations (you can turn it off but shouldn’t have to), and limit the number of highlights you can make within a given book (or, rather, publishers set the limits, and then Amazon implements those limits in what I think is a boneheaded way). Not every highlight is meant to be shared.

In iBooks, you can delete annotations from the overview screen.

	In Kobo’s feckless app, you can delete notes by editing the note and tapping the trashcan icon, but you can’t delete a highlight once you’ve added it. It’s with the book forever. Which is particularly annoying given the app’s previously mentioned tendency to highlight the wrong text.

In the nook app, you must jump to each individual annotation to delete it.

The roaring silence

At the beginning of this post, when I listed the applications I’d be examining in this series, I included Google Books, yet I haven’t mentioned it once since. What gives?!

Well, Google Books doesn’t have any annotation tools whatsoever.

So there.

To be continued . . .

Index

Watch this space!

Colophon: The book shown in the screenshots throughout this post is Bella Andre’s Ecstasy, which I chose partly because it’s free on multiple platforms (Kindle, iBooks, Sony, Kobo) and partly to annoy @muttinmall, who asked me to write this piece.

1. Note that I don’t just say, “If the designer is doing his or her job,” because sometimes the designer is asked to adhere to nasty size and page-count specifications.

This article was originally posted at India, Ink, and has been reprinted with Ms. Amos’ permission.

India Amos has been art director for the daily online magazine Nextbook.org (now Tabletmag.com), a book designer at St. Martin’s Press and Neuwirth & Associates, and managing editor of Seven Stories Press. From 1999 to 2001 she was webmaster of poets.org, the website of the Academy of American Poets. In 2008, she entered the Interactive Telecommunications master’s degree program (ITP) at New York University.

Impelsys’ flagship offering is iPublishCentral, which provides online content delivery services for publishers. iPublishCentral recently expanded its product management, ecommerce, and infrastructure solutions in a way that encompasses both print and digital books as well as new frameworks to support the creation of enhanced ebooks for the iPad, such as the recently launched Sesame Street e-bookstore iPad app.

I caught up with Impelsys Founder and CEO Sameer Shariff to get his insights about the publishing ecosystem from the point of view of an infrastructure and delivery solutions provider:

In the short time since iPublishCentral’s launch in 2008, what do you think are the most significant changes in the publishing landscape?

The digital revolution has engulfed the publishing industry across the globe. While we observe that publishers are now more aware of the trends in digital publishing and have gained a lot more clarity on the kind of digital strategies they want to adopt, I would like to highlight two significant changes in the publishing landscape.

For me, the most significant change has been the device innovation. A few years ago, the Kindle—the pioneer portable eBook reader, triggered the revolution in how people read. The innovation bred many more eReaders coming into the market and the availability of more devices spurred the demand for further innovation. Then in 2010, Apple swung its magical wand and introduced the iconic iPad. The launch and cult of iPad really enabled books to be consumed in eFormat. All of this is just the first stage of this revolution. As we go further, more innovation will take place as the weight of these devices comes down. That will really be the tipping point where content consumption on devices will compete head-on with print.

The other substantial change I have seen over these years is the proliferation of availability of content in eFormats. Google set the trend with Google books which was then caught on by the industry and that the trend got keenly noticed and embraced by the publishing sector. Now, every publisher is creating e-formats. Availability of content is top on the must-have list for them. With various devices crawling into the market and a range of formats that accompany them, publishers are constantly adopting measures to ensure that their content is widely accessible. This has opened streams of innovation in the publishing ecosystem. Not only is content availability critical, offering rich content is soon becoming a game changer.

Enhanced eBooks are gaining popularity as they are adding valuable richness to content. If enhanced eBooks offer content plus more, readers wouldn’t mind paying extra, would they? Another aspect is that not only content availability has evolved over the years, content availability through retailers has also changed over the times. There are eBookstores across the world and with retail eFormats like the iStore, the Kindle Store, NOOK store, Kindle store, etc. that have transformed the way content is made available to as many readers across the world as possible.

iPublishCentral has integrated support for both print and digital sales. Where do you see print books going?

The answer to this question depends on which segment of the publishing market and what kind of content we are referring to.

The transition from print to digital formats of books is an accelerating growth. It is gradually being accepted by various segments of the publishing industry. Certain segments of the publishing ecosystem will respond nimbly whereas some sections will slowly wake up to this change.

However in my opinion, print books will succumb to the digital revolution and will confine itself to a very small section of the industry over the years. Though one will not preclude the other, the balance may shift over the years as print books will gradually lose its foothold to eBooks. The ultimate consumption of books that consumers will demand is to have their content in all digital devices. Books on the cloud will become a norm in the industry. Publishers will need the infrastructure to enable and support this opportunity.

We envisioned the inevitable blending of the strategies for both print and digital sales for publishers and that’s why for their convenience, iPublishCentral does have a built-in feature in the system that supports the print book trade.

In what sectors of the publishing industry do you see the largest growth potential for digital publishing?

While all segments of the publishing industry are waking up to digital exploration, some industry segments have responded early and fast.

As of today, the biggest growth potential for digital publishing lies in the STM sector. It is a very stable industry and mostly remains unaffected by economic fluctuations. Not only were the end-users of this industry the early adopters of ePublishing, they are also the ones who recognized the fact that offering valuable information through technology is a sure-shot remedy to reach out to a wider audience and increase sales. I would say this is reflective of the heavy involvement of ancillary content and the use of technology to deliver the content to enhance the teaching experience significantly.

Another segment of the market is enhanced eBooks in the Children’s publishing sector. Enhanced eBooks is a more interactive and appealing art which is making learning an enjoyable experience for children throughout the world. The children’s publishing market is expected to grow up to around US$9.66 billion in the next four years. In fact, if you look at the sheer facts, majority of the top ten book apps on the iStore are children’s books!

There is so much that you can do with the versatility of multimedia. Publishers are constantly thinking of ways to offer quality content with design investments that can be consumed by children in any form, on any devices! The growth horizon is massive, especially with the emergence (and dominance) of devices such as the iPad make this sector the most exciting and growing sector for digital publishing.

Sameer Shariff is the founder and CEO of Impelsys Inc., which provides online content delivery for the global publishing market. The flagship product of Impelsys, iPublishCentral™, helps publishers deliver content online quickly and cost effectively.

What Do the Numbers Say About Ebooks?

Two of the Big Six–Simon & Schuster and Hachette Book Group–have released their 2nd Quarter earnings reports, indicating strong growth in digital sales.

On Simon & Schuster, from Publishers Weekly:

With digital content generating 18% of total revenue in the first quarter of 2011, Simon & Schuster reported that profits more than doubled and sales rose 2% to $155 million. Adjusted operating income rose to $5 million from $2 million, while adjusted operating income before depreciation and amortization increased to $7 million from $3 million.

“We got out of the gate faster than usual,” said S&S CEO Carolyn Reidy led by sales of e-books that doubled in the quarter and accounted for 17% of revenue with digital audio adding the other one percent (about $28 million). The steep increase in profits was attributed to lower shipping, production and returns costs as well as the “painful” belt-tightening that S&S has implemented over the last 18 months plus the higher sales, Reidy said.

On Hachette, from the press release:

E-book sales momentum was considerable (up 88% compared to Q1 2010), accounting for approximately 22% of revenue in the United States and 5% in the United Kingdom. This development is the result of very brisk sales of e-book readers at the end of the year.

As more and more publishers release their Q2 reports, the numbers will likely validate some of the industry reports that have come out in the past month. The numbers have been impressive, with a 202.3% spike in ebook sales in February 2011 (vs. February 2010), as reported a few weeks ago in the Association of American Publishers’ February 2011 Sales Report.

Similarly, last week, the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) published new findings from its Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading survey, which showed that:

… the percentage of print book consumers who say they download e-books jumped from 5% in October 2010 to nearly 13% in January 2011. In addition, fully two-thirds of survey respondents said they have moved exclusively, or mostly, to e-books over print. Finally, despite declining sales of pricier hardbacks, overall spending on books shows an uptick over the past six months, with 44% of respondents reporting higher unit purchases and 34% reporting higher overall spending on a combination of print books and e-books.

A more tempered set of findings about book buyers and digital readers comes from the Codex Group’s “Book Publishing Digital Transition Report: 1st Quarter 2011,” which recently surveyed over 9,000 book buyers.

From a summary of findings by Publishers Weekly’s Jim Malliot:

Despite the jump in both the number of digital readers and book buyers with devices, the percentage of book readers who said they only read digital books remained below 1% in February, while the percentage of readers who said they will only read print books stayed at 40%. Peter Hildick-Smith, president of Codex, said he expected to see an upward shift in the number of people only reading digital books and a decline in book buyers who said they intend to stick solely to print.

Thirty-three percent of book buyers said they read both print and digital books, and 26% said that while they only read print books now, they are thinking about reading a book on a digital device. The high percentage of readers who want to read only print books combined with the majority of digital device owners who read both e-books and print books makes it all the more important for publishers to preserve as much retail space as possible or risk losing print readers altogether, Hildick-Smith advised.

Finally, outside of the North American market, The Publishers Association released its 2010 annual report of sales figures across the UK publishing industry and reported that total consumer digital sales grew by 318% from £4m to £16m.

Are Ereaders Wrecking the Publishing Industry?

But, the impressive numbers in digital book sales and earnings has been somewhat tempered this week by discussion over competing ereader devices and forecasts. This week, Eweek.com summarizes a report from the market intelligence firm IHS iSuppli under the provocative title, “Are Ereaders Wrecking the Publishing Industry?”

From iSuppli’s press release:

Book revenue for U.S. publishers, including both e-books and paper books, will decrease at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3 percent from 2010 to 2014. This marks a shift from the previous period of 2005 to 2010, when revenue grew slightly.

The overall weakening will be spurred by a 5 percent decrease in the CAGR of physical book sales from 2010 to 2014. While e-book sales will soar by 40 percent during the same period, such an increase won’t be sufficient to compensate for the contraction of the larger physical book market.

Total book revenue will fall to $22.7 billion in 2014, down from $25.0 billion in 2010.

Turning to devices, iSuppli forecasts that “Dedicated e-reader shipments will fall short of some expectations partly because of encroachment from media tablets, which many consumers will use to view e-books.”

However, other reports indicate that, at least presently, tablet users aren’t reading ebooks. Charlotte Williams over at The Bookseller summarizes a report from Simba Information, a media forecasting firm:

… the firm’s “Trade E-Book Publishing 2011″ showed that 40% of iPad owners have not read a book on the device, with 45% of survey respondents saying they instead read e-books on the PC or Mac.

Senior analyst and author of the report Michael Norris said: “A lot of people equate the sale of a new sale gadget with the creation of a new reader, and it just doesn’t happen. In both the offline and online world, there are a lot of independent factors and distractions that will keep a person from discovering and enjoying a book.”

As ereader devices become more like tablets (see, for example, updates to the Nook Color and rumors about Amazon joining the tablet fray), will these sobering numbers about iPad readership transfer over to the new tablet-style ereaders?

Can Readers With Devices Keep Up With Reading on Devices?

Leaving aside the conflicting data and forecasting about ereaders versus tablets, there is no doubt that ebooks are changing the way we read and, by extension, affecting how we fulfill whatever goals we pursue in reading. So, drilling down to more specificity, how are ereaders doing with specific kinds of readers?

For this, institutions, especially in higher education, rely on test groups and pilot programs, institutions like the University of Washington, which tested out the Kindle DX on a few dozen first-year computer science graduate students. Summarizing the University of Washington’s results, Ariel Schwartz at Fast Company suggests that technology is simply “getting ahead of what our brains actually need.” Using the device for schoolwork was not widely adopted among the group (only 40%), but it wasn’t just because the Kindle has poor annotation and note-sharing functions.

From the University of Washington, quoted by Fast Company:

The digital text also disrupted a technique called cognitive mapping, in which readers used physical cues such as the location on the page and the position in the book to go back and find a section of text or even to help retain and recall the information they had read.

Schwartz goes on to comment:

Are we getting excited about a future that our brains aren’t ready for? Could books have developed not simply because they were the available technology, but because they actually convey information to our brains in a more efficient way?

Aside from sentimental reasons, is this disruption of our cognitive processes another reason why we hold on to certain print-only features, like flipping pages, and recast those physical movements into a digital interface? Author and book UX expert Peter Meyers recognizes the value of skimming and the kind of page flipping that we like to do with the glossies. But, still, he warns against rendering the print page too faithfully:

Print-based page flipping is how we readers solve what is, at heart, an information architecture problem: most magazines order their contents in a way that doesn’t match our preferred reading path. So we flip to find the juiciest, most satisfying bits. In an app, then, swiping through page icons isn’t the best way to aid that quest.

Tweet of the Week

That’s just a taste of what you may have missed this week. To stay on top of the most interesting news, commentary and tweets related to publishing, keep in touch via our RSS feed, follow us on Twitter, join your publishing colleagues in our LinkedIn group, and connect with the broader DBW Network.

That doesn’t sound so bad. In fact, customers don’t seem to be as upset about the incursion of ads into their e-books as you might expect. After Amazon announced their new, lower-priced and ad-supported Kindle, most complaints seemed to be either that the $25 price cut on the reader isn’t anywhere near enough, or that Wi-Fi delivered advertising separates the reader even more firmly from his purchased product: “When will I actually own what I have bought?”

Amazon even displayed sensitivity to the subject of this column, when Kindle director Jay Marine said, “We think the response is going to be positive because it doesn’t touch the reading experience.”

We’ve Been Here Before

Ads in books are really nothing new. As Jennifer Schuessler described in the Times Arts Beat blog last week, advertisers have been trying to use books as an ad medium since Dickens was alive and writing. The practice had waxed and waned, but mostly waned. Still, we have come to accept ads—as long as they are about books, and perhaps come from the same author or at least the same publisher—in the front and back of paperbacks. Just leave that reading experience alone.

We take in ads in every other reading and entertainment medium—really, in almost every other moment of our lives. We’ve learned how to deal with ads—either to absorb them or to block them out. Remember the introduction of ads at nytimes.com? We can barely recall how annoying and intrusive those ads seemed when they were introduced. Now, we accept them passively. Mostly, we don’t even see them.

As long as the medium is felt to be transient, we believe, the ads will disappear along with its carrier—the magazine, television show, radio wave, and web page. But we still consider something labeled (and felt to be) a book to be permanent. And a permanent ad is bad.

More Ads Are Sure to Come

Is Amazon’s ad program simply the thin end of the wedge? Certainly it is, but it is also a wedge that will alter our perception of digital books; they, too, will finally be seen as a transient medium. Then we’ll find a way to deal with e-reader ads the way we do with other transient media: look away, walk away, remove it, mute it, or block it. I see some new-product opportunities on the horizon: electrostatic screen covers in your choice of colors; note pads that stick to and, coincidentally, cover the screen; something in a spray bottle, named (of course) Ad Begone.

We don’t need to speculate on Amazon’s direction with ads. The idea may have been seen as a way to drop the price of the hardware below that of competitors. But if successful, the program will probably expand to more versions of e-readers. And why not? As long as customers don’t object, more ads will always come their way.

NOTE: DBW has launched an Editorial Forum on LinkedIn, a sub-group for editors and others working in trade publishing to discuss standards, workflow, best practices, and the general Qs that most print people feel when confronted with terms like “workflow.” The Forum is moderated by Anne Kostick and David B. Schlosser. Anne’s weekly column, Digital Reading, discusses the field of User Experience and explores what it offers to trade publishers.

Anne Kostick is a partner in Foxpath IND, a digital-print-web consulting and services company specializing in the transition to and from traditional content development, management and publishing. She is also the editor in chief of Dulcinea Media, an online publisher in the educational market, and is the current president of Women’s Media Group.

Panelists Whitney Quesenbery, Brett Sandusky and Todd Toler talked at length both before and during the webcast, identifying areas for e-book improvement, putting some things at the top of the priority list, and making those wish lists. Here are just a few bullet points from the hour as well as the run-up to the hour; there was much more. I hope they’ll turn out to be a preview of continuing conversations on the subject.

•  The digital reader experience isn’t just about the container, but also about the content. Publishers can, indeed, add unique features to the content that enhances the experience, even short of producing highly “enhanced” e-books.

•  Readers should be able to control their own digital reading experience. One way is by being able to turn off certain features. Someone said, “UX can’t be controlled but it can be instigated”; I like that.

•  Choose the right platform for the right content. Yes, we all know that novels are different from travel guides, but putting this knowledge into practice when developing digital products is another mental bridge to cross. For new books, digital product development must begin at the beginning, as part of the total book development process.

•  Think about the experience through the lens of the medium. What’s important in print may not be important in digital. Instead of trying to emulate the print book in all ways, try to anticipate what the reader wants to experience at different moments in the activity of reading.

•  “The future arrives early” in some segments of the industry. Look to textbook and academic journal publishing for lessons in how to integrate digital and multimedia components, online access, and community engagement with printed books.

•  Workflow must change. There’s a long way to go before print and digital design converge and work together, but publishers may have a deeper skill set and more enthusiastic in-house staff for this change than they realize. In five years, the idea of publishers using only a print designer for a book may be passé. Book production workflow will more closely resemble digital product and software development. Publishing staffs will be more interdisciplinary than before.

•  E-books have actually restored interest in a good reading experience. Now, both publishers and readers are aware of the difference between good and less-good interactions. Unfortunately, HTML coders have been “laggards” in good design. Although we hope that HTML5 and EPUB 3 will solve all our problems, we’ll still need to apply intelligent digital design in the creation of e-books.

•  Stay open to change. Working in digital is an iterative process; that means we can get and implement feedback and fix errors immediately and repeatedly. The possibility for product improvement is continual.

•  A feature wish list from Whitney: A beautiful, uncluttered reading experience; the ability to jump easily to learn more (not necessarily within the book); the ability to mark and cut text to save things.

•  What makes for great user experience? Among other things: data collection and reaction (getting information/giving information); open boundaries; acknowledging and allowing the emotional factor in reading.

NOTE: DBW members enjoy full access to the audio archive of DBW WEBcasts, including this one on “Reader Experience and E-books: What UX Experts Can Teach Publishers.” Plus, get exclusive access to DBW conference video and audio archives and discounts on Intensive WEBCasts by becoming a DBW member today.

Anne Kostick is a partner in Foxpath IND, a digital-print-web consulting and services company specializing in the transition to and from traditional content development, management and publishing. She is also the editor in chief of Dulcinea Media, an online publisher in the educational market, and is the current president of Women’s Media Group.

Then I realized I’d already crowdsourced a beginning wish list through responses to earlier columns on user experience. Best of all, this self-selected batch of comments blended those from experts and those from non-expert, but passionate, readers: those who knew what they were talking about by training and those who knew what they wanted by experience! Perfect.

Many who are disappointed with digital reading’s progress so far just say, “Call me when you’ve perfected it; until then I’ll stick to print…” leaving us to figure out how to perfect it. That’s one of the topics we’ll touch on during an upcoming webcast, “Reader Experience and Ebooks: What UX Experts Can Teach Publishers.”

So, here are responses and reflections from my accidental survey. Publishers and developers, take note.

1. It should be very much like a book, but better.

“It would have to be really different from a real book, like very lightweight, pocket-size, extremely long battery life, yet seem a whole lot like a book while reading it. And include all illustrations and diagrams!”

(I love this one—it sums up the wishes of those who want digital reading to be just like a book and those who want it to be just like the Web.)

2. Visually connect to my place in the book (through a graphic or spatial reminder).

“I want to be able to easily find what I’m looking for.”

3. Include marginal notes.

“Marginalia is the reader’s conversation with the book!”

“I love the solitude of a great read. But I’m fascinated by the possibilities of a mash-up.”

4. No, don’t include marginal notes.

“I prefer my neural net-making not to be distracted by another’s marks.”

“It’s distracting in the Kindle. Why did someone highlight that? It reminds me of Yossarian censoring the mail in Catch-22.”

“I think it’s invasive. I just want to be alone with the author. “

“I want and need some time in the intimate space where it’s just the writer’s words and me. Talking with others during that time would be like commenting while a movie or TV show you’re riveted to is going on.”

(The obvious answer to this dilemma is under #8—make it optional.)

5. Include relevant multimedia.

“Background music: an author’s suggested faves, sampled and looped, available when you scroll over a certain paragraph or click a button?”

“Add audio accompaniments and it would be a small and valuable jump to turn e-readers into multimedia museum/gallery guides.”

6. Incorporate dynamically served features, such as GPS for travel books.

7. Better graphics.

“The ability to display non-text elements, possibly as a thumbnail that expands to a more detailed scrollable view if the element is too large to display full size on my device’s screen.”

8. Make features optional.

9. Easy transfer of purchased books across platforms / easy and broad sharing.

“Almost all the [tourists] here on the beach in Costa Rica have Kindles, which makes it very hard for me to trade books with them. Bummed…”

10. Better bookmarking, navigating and clipping.

“It would be great to more easily scan back to certain passages without remembering the line count prospectively”

“A UI that will let me select what I want to read, and allow me to easily navigate within it once I have, jumping to particular spots via either a Table of Contents, Index, or user-created bookmark.”

11. Buy a book once and read it in all formats.

12. Be able to carry a library with me wherever I go.

NOTE: DBW has launched an Editorial Forum on LinkedIn, a sub-group for editors and others working in trade publishing to discuss standards, workflow, best practices, and the general Qs that most print people feel when confronted with terms like “workflow.” The Forum is moderated by Anne Kostick and David B. Schlosser. Anne’s weekly column, Digital Reading, discusses the field of User Experience and explores what it offers to trade publishers.

Anne Kostick is a partner in Foxpath IND, a digital-print-web consulting and services company specializing in the transition to and from traditional content development, management and publishing. She is also the editor in chief of Dulcinea Media, an online publisher in the educational market, and is the current president of Women’s Media Group.