The Digital Book: Design, Structure, and Annotation

Book Design for the Digital Reader

By Daniell Beyrooty & Sarah Thurman

“As students move deeper into the mode of hyper attention, educators face a choice: change the students to fit the educational environment, or change the environment to fit the students.”
-N. Katherine Hayles, "Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes"

Digital publishing creates new and expedient ways to read and absorb texts. Many publishers continue to embrace the pre-digital design of the traditional book while others have moved forward and realized that books can be multimedia experiences. This section will focus on some key elements of designing digital books:

Hyper vs. Deep Reading

Traditional printed books are designed for deep reading, but what about digital texts?  On the web, skimming rather than deep reading has become the norm, with videos, images, and hyperlinks acting as the pause points during a reader’s experience. This type of hyper-attention allows the reader to cover more ground, but with the possibility of very little specific information being retained. Instead, the reader gets a very quick and general understanding of the topic as a whole and perhaps knows where to go for the specifics.

“... hyper-reading on digital devices does come in handy, especially when time is limited. My mobile phone has proven to be been useful in reviewing study material before an exam, or skimming through the latest headlines to kill some time. Beyond basic reading tasks, I do believe that there is a potential for digital environment to provide immersive reading experiences—perhaps ones that do not resemble anything we’ve seen elsewhere. As Ferris Jabr highlights, we may very well need to change our entire approach. Instead of trying to mimic the tried-and-true techniques of print, why don’t we refocus our efforts and transform digital texts into an entirely new medium?”
-Caleb Carroll, Screen versus Print

Creating digital texts that capture both this type of hyper-attention and deep attention should be the focus of authors and publishers. It is far easier to remember an article that is a well-designed interface of text, image and other media, than an article that is 40 pages of text.

Typography

Typography is considered to be a type of art, which involves technique of arranging type to make written language readable and appealing. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point size, line length, line spacing (leading), letter spacing (tracking), and adjusting the space within letters pairs (kerning)

Butterick writes about how there are five key components to what makes something look good when it comes to type:

"The first is the way the body text looks, because there is more of it than anything else. If the body looks good, “then don’t worry about the rest.” The second thing is the point size of your letters. Traditional print books kept you at 10-12pt fonts, and web publishing is now making 15-25 pixels acceptable. The third key is line spacing, which should be about 120-145% of the point size. Fourth, your line length should be an average of 45-90 characters per line. The final tip is picking a font that matches with the theme of your words, while still being easy to read."

Imagery

Imagery helps a reader understand a text by:

  1. Illustrating and reinforcing the meaning or points of a text
  2. Breaking up the flow of reading into “chunks” or segments
  3. Helping the reader navigate by creating visual anchors. If there’s a point to get across, there is no better way than to draw a picture

Digital Publishing has the advantage of not being limited to just publishing black and white photos in order to keep costs down. You can publish full color pictures, along with maybe even some animated or moving imagery. You can also create vivid imagery with typography and other graphic elements.

“I think that design is important in increasing readability. Breaking up flow with images and graphics can help to make a text more useful to the reader.”
-Natalie, Virtual Codex

Chunking

Chunking is a method of presenting written information that splits concepts into small pieces (chunks) that make the information easier and faster to read. It’s especially useful for material presented on the web, since it allows readers to scan for information they need with more efficiency.

Chunked content usually contains (but is not limited to):

Graphic Elements

Graphic elements are the parts of design that are not the content. These elements include whether or not the text is bolded, the white-space of the pages, the margins, the gutters, arrows, page numbers, color markers, background color, icons, separators, borders, shadows. All of the things that help guide the reader through the text. Over use of any of these elements, however, can cause clutter and make it hard to read, as well as interrupt the flow and rhythm of the work.

Multimedia Placement

Multimedia is a very large part of how we, as a student body, learn and understand material. However, as stated before, there is a right and a wrong way to do things. An even balance of multimedia is key; which means equal amounts of images, graphics, sound bites, and video throughout a text. Graphics and sound bites tend to work well with long text, but short informational videos, about either the chapter topic , or specific subsections is also beneficial.

“I believe that multimedia may also greatly benefit not only comprehension of content but potentially aid in readability as well. Breaks in texts with informative videos and images may help make reading easier, while also providing useful content that furthers understanding of the plain text. Ultimately, I think that good and somewhat minimalistic design is an advantage of eBooks. Spacing and links between sections would also be advantageous.”
-Natalie, Virtual Codex

Multimedia works wonderfully in educational texts, but it remains to be seen in what ways long-form fictional texts, like novels, integrate media such as sound and video with deep reading. Currently, novels have experimented with multimedia elements, however, they seem to detract more than they encourage deep reading.

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