The Digital Book: Design, Structure and Annotation

A white-paper on digital publishing

The Creative Media & Digital Culture program’s Digital Publishing Initiative (DPI) seeks to model a digital academic press in all areas of publishing: peer review, editing, design, production and distribution.

As part of DPI, the summer undergraduate course “DTC 338: Digital Publishing” focuses on the theories, production workflows, design strategies and distribution practices of multi-format digital publishing. Students learn how to turn a text file into an HTML file, an ePub file, a Kindle file, a PDF and a printed book. Research is guided by questions from class readings and discussions, as well as from student projects that explore strategies and software. Class topics include media integration, design for multiple devices, reading interfaces, social networks, file formats, copyright, open source, digital promotion and hybrid (digital/print) workflows.

The final project, The Digital Book: Design, Structure and Annotation, is a collaborative publication about some aspect of digital publishing. This year (summer 2015), students wrote, built and published a multi-format book about design strategies, book structure and annotation tools in the creation of digital books. The publication is a material demonstration and artful distillation of the ideas explored in discussions, blog posts, readings and creative projects. Students designed the various formats of the book, using the Adobe Suite and the Scalar platform, contributed content and ideas, collected outside quotes, image examples and resources. The thinking behind the text is future-oriented and visionary, but, at the same time, it is a practical and useful guide for the emerging field of digital publishing.
 

DTC338: Digital Publishing
Professor Will Luers
Summer 2015
Washington State University Vancouver

Student Authors/Designers:

• Dan Asbridge
• Daniell Beyrooty
• Caleb Carroll
• Suhaily Erkkila
• Natalie Hendren
• Warren Marshall
• Kyle McGee
• Cody Moncur
• Lindsey Parker
• Sarah Thurman
• Jason Wendland

Creative Media & Digital Culture 
Digital Publishing Initiative
Nouspace Publications 
Washington State University Vancouver