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 has created a new and expedient way to read and absorb literature in the modern era. Many publishers have continued to embrace the pre-digital design of the basic book while others have moved forward and realized that books can be multimedia experiences. This section will focus on several key factors of publishing for the digital era including:

• Hyper- vs. Deep-reading
• Typography
• Imagery
• Chunking
• Graphic Elements
• Multimedia Placement

Hyper- vs. Deep-reading

Print lends itself to deep reading fairly easy but what about digital. Skimming rather than actually reading articles has become commonplace in the digital era with videos, images, and hyperlinks as the pausing points during reading. This type of hyper-attention allows the individual to cover more ground however, very little specific information is retained, instead, the reader has an understanding of the topic as a whole.

“Still, 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 literature that captures this type of hyper-attention should be the focus of authors and publishing agencies. It is far easier to remember an article that implemented multimedia, then an article that was nothing but text for 40 pages.

Typography

It 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 is a great way to help a reader in the understanding 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 advantages as well, 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 as well. 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):

• Bulleted lists.
• Short subheadings.
• Short sentences with one or two ideas per sentence.
• Short paragraphs, even one-sentence paragraphs.
• Easily scannable text, with bolding of key phrases.
• Inline graphics to guide the eyes or illustrate points which would normally require more words.

Graphic Elements

Graphic elements are the parts of design that are not part of 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 the things that help guide the reader through the text. Over use of any of these elements can cause clutter and make it hard to read, as well as interrupt the flow and rhythm of the work.

Multimedia Placement

Multimedia makes up a very large part of how we as a student body learn and understand material today. However, as stated before, there is a right and a wrong way to do things. An even balance of multimedia is a key; which means equal amounts of images, graphics, sound bites, and video. Graphics and sound bites tend to work well in long text, but short informational videos either on chapters as a whole, or specific information is also beneficial.

“As I’ve written in other blog posts, 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 reading to be 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 an educational text, but what about a recreational text such as a novel. Currently, some novels include multimedia elements, however, they seem to detract more than they encourage deep reading.