The problem of defining electronic books

 

Contents

Introduction

The problem

Some definitions

Types of electronic books

Hardware devices

Ebook reader software/formats

Extended books

Web books

EBONI's field of study

References

 

Introduction

Arriving at a definition of “electronic books” has emerged as an important preliminary goal for EBONI.  This will provide focus for the evaluation procedure and enable the Project Team to work within set boundaries.

Below is a description of the issues that arose when arriving at a definition, with references to the relevant literature.

The problem

The “traditional” book represents a designated format: a physically distinct creation made of a collection of pages and presented in a bound volume.  However, in discussing the electronic book, the focus shifts from the form to the content:  whereas the content of a paper book takes the form of words on a page, digital content is not tied to a physical object [1].  Essentially, it is intangible, consisting of a series of 1s and 0s which go through many kinds and layers of encoding in order to be understandable.

The problem is documented by Desmarais in his comparison of the electronic book with the “horseless carriage”:

The principal concept underlying the electronic book is the book.  Where the horseless carriage at least continued to resemble a carriage, our electronic book looks and/or feels nothing at all like a book … The word electronic adds nothing to the concept, except that it uses electricity to operate.  It speaks in no way of its enhanced functionality, or its enhanced value over a book.  In this context, the “book” refers to the information content rather than the format or playback device [2].

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Some definitions

It is not surprising, then, that concepts of the “electronic book” vary wildly.  Some attempts to define the term include:

The Webopedia definition, focusing on portable devices:

An electronic version of a book. Currently there are two e-book products available, the Rocket eBook, from Nuvomedia (www.nuvomedia.com) and the SoftBook from SoftBook Press (www.softbook.com). Both are small computers -- the size of a paperback and a legal notepad -- with backlighted screens that allow a user to read, save, highlight, bookmark, and annotate text. Both can download books from a Web site, such as barnesandnoble.com (although the Rocket eBook requires another PC) [3].

Ana Arias Terry’s definition, which centres on texts with paper counterparts:

At its simplest level, an e-book consists of electronic content "originating from traditional books, reference material, or magazines" that is downloaded from the Internet and viewed through any number of hardware devices. These include PCs, laptops, PDA’s (personal digital assistants), palm PC’s or palmtops, or dedicated e-book readers [4].

The Visual Book Project definition, which concentrates on the preservation of the familiar paper book metaphor:

The result of integrating classical book structure, or rather the familiar concept of a book, with features which can be provided within an electronic environment, is referred to as an electronic book, which is interpreted as an interactive document which can be composed and read on a computer [5].

Indeed, the term “electronic book” is used throughout professional literature and popular culture to refer variously to hardware, software and documents.

As Tony Cawkell notes, the traditional concept of the book includes novels, dictionaries, telephone books, textbooks, anthologies, instruction manuals, proceedings of meetings, and directories.  The phrase “electronic books”, however, has been applied to some types of CD-ROM systems, palm-top CD players, on-demand text, electronic documents systems of various kinds, and nearly any kind of computer-based text system that needs “hyping up” for marketing purposes [6].

In the words of Walt Crawford, “When someone asks what you’re doing about e-books, perhaps your best response is: ‘What do you mean by e-books?’”

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Types of electronic books

The ebook arena is in a state of flux, and the concept of an ebook is not attached to one single medium in the way that DVDs or CDs are.  Therefore, it is useful at this point to introduce a classification of the various examples of electronic books.

Two authors have recently attempted to identify the various concepts, products and models.  In Part 1 of Don Hawkins’ ‘Electronic Books: A Major Publishing Revolution’ [7], the following implementations are discussed:

• Downloadable ebooks, in which the contents of a book are available on the internet for downloading to the user’s PC; no special reading device is required.  Major players who have compiled collections of such ebooks include Bartleby, Librius, Glassbook, and Gutenberg.
• Dedicated ebook readers, in which the contents of a book are downloaded to a dedicated hardware device with a high quality screen and special capabilities for book-reading.  Examples include Gemstar’s REBs and Franklin’s eBookman.
• Print-on-demand books, in which the contents of a book are stored in a system connected to a high-speed, high-quality printer, from which printed and bound copies are produced on demand.  These could be classed as examples of electronic-aided publishing, as opposed to electronic books in the purest sense of the term.
• Web-accessible ebooks, which are published on the provider’s Web site and can be accessed for a fee.  Readers can “purchase” the books to receive indefinite access.

Walt Crawford, on the other hand, identifies nine varieties of ebook [8]:

• Proprietary ebook devices: portable hardware devices such as Gemstar’s REBs or Franklin’s eBookman, to which text is downloaded in proprietary formats locked to a single reader.
• Open ebooks: the XML-based standard that allows any text to reside on any reader, but also protects publishers’ interests.  Potential reading devices include PCs, notebooks, palmtops, and even proprietary ebook devices.
• Free books: digital copies of books already in the public domain or texts placed in the public domain for various reasons, such as those available through the Internet Public Library.  These are free for downloading, printing, and circulation.
• Pseudobooks: titles bought by libraries or consortia and loaned out to users to download to their own PCs.  Only one user can “borrow” a title at a time, unless the library has paid for more than one copy.
• “Instabooks”: books printed and bound on-demand from fully marked up digital texts or scanned page images stored digitally by companies like Lightning Source or Replica Books.
• Not quite a book: mid-length texts (novellas or novelettes) such as Stephen King’s Riding the Bullet, which are awkward to publish in print media, can be converted to PDF, packaged, e-published and e-distributed by the likes of Mighty Words.
• E-vanity and self-publishing: books published by individuals on the Web.
• E-books before the Web: books on CD-ROM or disk.
• Extended books: published on CD-ROM or the Web, these go beyond printed books in a number of ways besides offering searchable text, for example through hypertext, multimedia, and interactive elements.

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Classifying these manifestations of electronic books can be made meaningful by distinguishing between which aspects of the original paper book have been considered as most important.  For example, some electronic books try to simulate mainly the logical aspects of the original paper book, while others are more concerned with simulating the physical components or a specific aspect, such as portability, of the paper book.  By studying which aspects of the paper book metaphor have been adhered to, the following classes of electronic books emerge:

Hardware devices

Much of the activity in the ebook arena centres around the emergence of electronic handheld devices which imitate the book as a portable tool for providing information.  Some of these are dedicated solely or primarily to the function of book-reading, others are Pocket PCs or PDAs for which ebook reading is an added functionality:

·         Dedicated ebook readers.  These are built especially for storing and reading books, incorporating special features to make book reading simple and easy, and modems that dial directly into the ebook publisher’s server to download books.  Typically, they are small, lightweight devices with backlit screens and embedded dictionaries.  Usually they enable searching, bookmarking, and the creation of erasable annotations.  They are available now with monochrome or colour screens.  Examples include:

Gemstar’s REBs;
Franklin’s eBookman;
The goReader;
Cytale’s Cybook; and
The Korea eBook.

·         PDAs/Pocket PCs and Palm Pilots.  These devices are usually smaller than dedicated ebook readers and primarily function as personal organisers.  Often they will also offer Internet access and word processing, spreadsheet, and MP3 playing capabilities.  Increasingly, as content and ebook reader software for these devices become available, they are now being used additionally to read books.

Further developments in the ebook technology world could lead to an even closer approximation of the experience of reading a print book.  “Electronic ink”, invented by physicists at the MIT Media Lab, creates letters or images by exposing tiny capsules of blue dye and white pigment to an electrical charge.  Similar technology is being developed by Xerox.  With specially coated, reusable paper, a “book” could thus consist of a single page with the microelectronics stored in the binding and called up as needed.

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Ebook reader software/formats

Early ebook producers simply scanned books, converted them to text using optical character recognition (OCR) and made them available in ASCII text.  However, ASCII is unappealing to read, does not preserve formatting, and cannot handle graphics.  As a result, a variety of formats have been developed, designed to make electronic texts easier to read by preserving the logical structure of the paper book and some of its visual features such as typefaces, colour images and page layout.  With this software, no special hardware is required; it can run on any laptop or desktop PC and is often intended for use on handheld devices, such as the PDAs and Pocket PCs described above.

Adobe’s PDF, for example, is available for downloading at no cost, and is becoming widely used for delivering ebooks. Other, more recently developed, software includes:

Microsoft Reader
Glassbook Reader
eRocket
TK3 Reader
Adobe Acrobat Reader

The Microsoft Reader in particular attempts to recreate the look-and-feel of ink on paper through use of ClearType technology.  This claims to triple the resolution of previous computer screen text by using sub-pixel font-rendering to improve the screen by addressing the microscopic space between the pixels on a computer screen, and smoothing the characters.

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Extended books

This category borrows Walt Crawford’s term to describe books which are often published on CD-ROM and add value to electronic texts through multimedia, hypermedia and interactive elements.  As Matthew Barlow, marketing vice-president for Versaware notes, “A book is a book, but if it’s going electronic, let’s enhance it”.  The company has published 18 textbooks on CD-ROMs, enhancing the original text with everything from audio and photographs to hyperlinks to Internet sites and other books.

Such extended books represent a step away from the paper book; it is no longer possible to keep this sort of enriched form of information inside the physical border of a classical book.  That is why the electronic environment is the natural one for this class of book.  They still borrow essential features from the book metaphor by either imitating its physical appearance or keeping the same logical structure.  The metaphor is enlarged to consider this new form of information as generic book contents and to organize it in the new book container according to new needs and presentation paradigms.  An example of a multimedia book, mainly aimed at education, is the one produced by the HCI laboratory at Teesside Polytechnic (Barker et al, 1994; Barker, 1996).

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Web books

Electronic books are accessible via the Web in a number of forms.  Generally, they are texts that have been scanned or typed and either published on a Web server or made available on the Web for downloading.  These can be free, “borrowable”, or may require payment.  Examples include:

• “freebooks”, or digital copies of books in the public domain.  Such texts have been digitised and collated by Project Gutenberg, Bartleby.com, and the Internet Public Library.
• “ebooks-to-buy” can either be made available for downloading to a user’s PC, or remain on the provider’s Web site and be accessed for a fee.  Examples include Books24x7, ibooks.com, and Glassbook, Inc. which, in addition to delivering ebook reading software to users’ PCs, offers a collection of ebooks for sale from its Web site.
• “borrowable” ebooks, which are bought by consortia or institutions and “loaned out” to users.  NetLibrary, for example, can provide libraries with “anytime, anywhere” access to thousands of electronic books for their users, while saving on shelf space and reducing acquisition costs.  This system allows one patron at a time to use a book, which they can “borrow” online but not download.
• self-published ebooks.  Self-publishing vendors give authors space on their server to disseminate their work, provide help with graphic design, promotion, etc. and provide a Web site where readers can purchase the works.  For these services authors pay a nominal fee and receive royalties.   Examples include 1^stbooks.com, fatbrain.com/ematter, nightkitchen.com, and onlineoriginals.com.

• educational texts.  Universities have played a key role in developing and using the Internet since its beginnings, and now they are responsible for a large proportion of the material available on the Web.  In addition to the texts published commercially, academic institutions are increasingly producing learning and teaching resources such as tutorials, lectures, textbooks, and guides online, free of cost.  Many of these are not “books” in the strictest sense of the word, since they often have no print counterparts.

“Web books”, therefore, assume a number of forms and vary in their adherence to the paper book metaphor.  Some are simply plain pages of ASCII text; some incorporate paper book features such as tables of contents, indexes, and page numbers; others exploit Web technology and features of HTML through hyperlinks and frames, and by incorporating search facilities.  Arguably, as users become used to browsing and searching the World Wide Web and reading text on screen through their browser windows, their expectations from electronic books will change, with their familiarity with the paper book sitting beside their familiarity with Web technology.

N.B. Print-on-demand books are excluded from this classification since they are examples of electronic-aided books as opposed to ebooks in the purest sense.

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EBONI’s field of study

EBONI is concerned with the last of these classes, Web books, and in particular the educational texts produced on the Internet by UK universities.  This is free material published by lecturers and academics to aid the learning and teaching of students at all stages and in all disciplines.  Because it is produced by individuals, groups or departments, this material is characterised by its diversity: different types of resources can be found in a number of subjects exhibiting a variety of styles and techniques. 

An initial survey of the range of educational resources available on the Web uncovered the following:

• articles
• books
• courses
• dissertations
• essays
• guides
• lectures
• notes
• plays
• poems
• textbooks
• tutorials

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Further, each of these resource types employed one or more of the following techniques or styles for presenting the material:

• animation
• bullets
• coloured background
• coloured text
• diagrams
• formulae
• frames
• glossary
• hypertext
• images
• indexes
• interactive
• navigation icons
• page numbers
• scrolling text
• searchable
• sound
• tables
• tables of contents
• video

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In addition, some resources were available in PDF, and some in other languages.  The results of this survey are available in the form of a small catalogue at http://eboni.dis.strath.ac.uk:8080/search.

Inevitably, material which displays so much diversity in its presentation will also vary in the success with which it provides help to students.  EBONI’s aim is to identify those styles and techniques which maximise information intake by users, in order to provide the creators of online learning and teaching content with guidance on how to produce usable, effective material.  This will be achieved by selecting examples of educational Web books from the aforementioned catalogue which are representative of the techniques listed above, and carrying out user evaluations.  A methodology for assessing the usability of the selected material is currently being developed.  EBONI will also test the applicability of its guidelines to portable electronic books such as Gemstar’s REBs and a handheld device. 

Clearly, the limits we have set to the “electronic books” considered for evaluation are very specific to this project, and would need to be adapted for application to other contexts.  However, we feel that our field of study, as defined here, is at once broad enough to achieve the evaluative goals of the project, and focused enough to be meaningful within the specific context of learning and teaching material.

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Ruth Wilson

14 November 2000

 

References

[1] Desmarais, N.  Models of the electronic book.  CD-ROM professional.  8 (5).  May 1995.  p114.
[2]  Desmarais, N.  An electronic carriage … or a horseless book?  Audiovisual librarian.  20 (4).  November 1994.  p287.

[3] Internet.com Corp.  Webopedia.  http://webopedia.internet.com/TERM/e/electronic_book.html.  Last visited 28/9/00.

[4] Ana Arias Terry.  Demystifying the e-Book - what is it, where will it lead us, and who’s in the game?  Against the grain.  November 1999.  Available: http://bibliofuture.homepage.com/demyst.htm.  Last visited 28/9/00.

[5] Landoni, M. and Gibb, F.  The role of visual rhetoric in the design and production of electronic books: the visual book.  The electronic library.  18 (3).  2000.

[6] Cawkell, Tony.  Electronic books.  Aslib proceedings.  51 (2), 54058.  February 1999.

[7] Donald T Hawkins.  Electronic books: a major publishing revolution (Part 1).  Online.  July/August 2000.

[8] Crawford, Walt.  Nine models, one name: untangling the e-book muddle.  American libraries.  September 2000.

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