The WEB Book experiments in electronic textbook design

Abstract

This paper describes a series of three evaluations of electronic textbooks on the Web, which focused on assessing how appearance and design can affect users' sense of engagement and directness with the material. The EBONI Project's methodology for evaluating electronic textbooks is outlined and each experiment is described, together with an analysis of results. Finally, some recommendations for successful design are suggested, based on an analysis of all experimental data. These recommendations underline the main findings of the evaluations: that users want some features of paper books to be preserved in the electronic medium, while also preferring electronic text to be written in a scannable style.

Not on the Same Page: Undergraduates' Information Retrieval in Electronic and Print Books

“…This "sense of place" can easily be lost in the transition to e-book reading. 35 Such tangible characteristics of print books are difficult to simulate in electronic formats.…”

“…37 Wilson, Landoni and Gibb also noted that tables of contents were sometimes not enough when seeking very specific information, and advised that indexes should always be provided along with hyperlinks to the e-book content. 38 Although the e-books used in this study provided an index, they were not hyperlinked to the content.…”

“…This kind of information retrieval task is known as "fact searching." 28 Such tasks approximate the tendency of students in the sciences to skim through texts in search of such discrete pieces of information. Each participant completed four tasks using e-books and four with print books.…”

“…Researchers concluded that a successful e-book can be produced by combining good web design with aspects of well-designed paper books: users reacted positively to e-books that visually resembled print books, but also expected web functionalities such as searching and hyperlinks. 16 The objective of these experiments was ultimately to produce a set of best practice guidelines for designing electronic textbooks for the academic user. The guidelines of Electronic Books ONscreen Interface (EBONI) discuss numerous e-book usability issues related to on-screen design and hardware design.…”

Overview of the INEX 2010 Book Track: Scaling Up the Evaluation Using Crowdsourcing

“…The goal of the investigation is to derive user requirements and consequently design recommendations for more usable tools to support active reading practices for eBooks. ART is based on the evaluation experience of EBONI [16], and adopts its evaluation framework with the aim to guide participants in organising and running user studies whose results could then be compared. The task is to run one or more user studies in order to test the usability of established products (e.g., Amazon's Kindle, iRex's Ilaid Reader and Sony's Readers models 550 and 700) or novel e-readers by following the provided EBONI-based procedure and focusing on INEX content.…”