Looking for guidelines for the production of electronic textbooks

Abstract

This paper starts by reporting the results of two studies into electronic book production, the Visual Book and the WEB Book. The Visual Book study (Landoni, 1997) explored the importance of the visual component of the book metaphor for the production of more effective electronic books, while the WEB Book study (Wilson, 1999) took the findings of the Visual Book and applied them to the production of books for publication on the WWW. It was possible to extract from the two experiences a set of recommendations for producing electronic books. These are the starting point for a new project, EBONI (Electronic Books ON-screen Interface). EBONI focuses on the evaluation of electronic resources for teaching and learning in academia and it is going to expand our previous findings with the aim of producing a set of guidelines for publishing educational material on the Web

Evaluating the usability of portable electronic books

“…A set of issues related to reading books on portable devices was uncovered, and recommendations for responding to these issues through good design were derived. These recommendations have been added to those emerging from EBONI's other ebook evaluations to form a complete set of Electronic Textbook Design Guidelines [24].…”

Do animations in enhanced ebooks for children favour the reading comprehension process?

“…Landoni et al [11] proposed guidelines to design usable electronic books which minimize cognitive overhead. They affirmed that an electronic book should be consistent with some aspects of the book metaphor such as the page metaphor and the logical structure.…”

Realistic electronic books

“…Electronic documents can enhance comprehension by linking words and phrases in the main text to the glossary (Landoni et al, 2001). Readers who do not understand the meaning of a term in the text, can click its hyperlink, and are taken straight to the term's definition.…”

“…As a result, they can obtain a rough idea of the document's structure and content. Alternatively, a reader could press a button that automatically turned pages continuously (Benest, 1990;Landoni et al, 2001). The longer the button is pressed, the faster the page is turning.…”

“…According to Landoni et al (2001), the book metaphor should be respected. Indications of a reader's progress through the book should be accurate and visible.…”