About the Authors

Looking for guidelines for the production of electronic textbooksndoni R.Wilson and F.GibbIntroductionElectronic books are designed to be interactive documents,which can be composed and read on a computer.Conceptually they are an attempt toovercome the limitations of paper books by adding a series of added-value features,which are made possible through the nature of an electronic environment.The main features of electronic books are that they are dynamic,reactive,can be made available in different formats and/or editions in a short time and,with the growth of the Internet,are accessible almost everywhere (Barker,1991,1996).However the translation from a paper to an electronic environment is not appropriate for every type of publication and for every type of reader.The process of reading and the tasks readers are attempting to complete have a central role in judging whether such atranslation is suitable.The cognitive overhead associated with a computer-basedenvironment is an important reason forcarefully considering the appropriateness and the method of realising this conversion (Barker et al .,1994;Benest et al .,1987).The fact that technology is able to represent documents on the screen is clearly not sufficient justification for converting every piece of paper into electronic format.It is important to consider both the subject matter and the intended usage of a particular paper book in order to decide whether an electronic version will be useful or not (Wilson,1997).The motivations for producing electronic books involve factors related to the market requirement for electronic books,as well as cognitive issues related to the ability of the reader to use,appreciate and prefer books in electronic format to paper ones (Catenazzi et al .,1993;Landoni et al .,1993).The quality aspect becomes crucial and for this reason the design process must be reviewed in order to create effective electronic books,i.e.communicators of electronic information that have additional value which paper cannot provide.This paper describes two studies into the design and production of electronicbooks,the Visual Book and the WEB Book,and then moves on to describe a new project,EBONI,the aim of which is to produce guidelines for the production of electronicndoni is a lecturer at the Department of Information Science,University of Strathclyde,Glasgow,UK.R.Wilson works at the Centre for Digital Library Research,University of Strathclyde,Glasgow,UK.F.Gibb is Reader and Head of the Department of Information Science,University of Strathclyde,Glasgow,UK.Electronic books,Internet,Publishing,Education This paper starts by reporting the results of two studies into electronic book production,the Visual Book and the WEB Book.The Visual Book study (Landoni,1997)explored the importance of the visual component of the book metaphor for the production of more effective electronic books,while the WEB Book study (Wilson,1999)took the findings of the Visual Book and applied them to the production of books for publication on the WWW.It was possible to extract from the twoexperiences a set of recommendations for producing electronic books.These are the starting point for a new project,EBONI (Electronic Books ON-screen Interface).EBONI focuses on the evaluation of electronic resources for teaching and learning in academia and it is going to expand our previous findings with the aim of producing a set of guidelines for publishing educational material on the Web.The research register for this journal is available at /research_registers The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at /ftRefereed article received 1December 2000Approved for publication 13February 2001Online Information ReviewVolume 25.Number 3.2001.pp.181±195#MCB University Press .ISSN 1468-4527resources for teaching and learning in higher education.Visual rhetoricThe Visual Book experiment was a study into the application of the book metaphor to the design and production of electronic books with particular attention being paid to the role of visual components.The findings were the starting point of the WEB Book study which could be interpreted as an application of the guidelines provided by the Visual Book experiment to the production of WEB books; that is,books to be published,distributed and consulted using WWW browsers.The aim of the WEB Book experiment was to measure the improvement in terms of usability of a textbook published on the WWW with respect to presentation issues and the overall appearance.The Visual Book provided the background and a set of guidelines for designing and producing scientific publications in electronic form,while a study on Web page usability by Morkes and Nielsen (1997,1998)provided the necessary methodology for studying the impact of design on reading and consulting material published on the WWW.This paper starts by discussing the importance of appearance and proper presentation style when creating an electronic book.The unique aspects of the Visual Book studies were the importance given to the visual components of the physical book when designing electronic books together with the interpretation of an electronic book as part of an electronic library intended as an informative system with specific and innovative features.A new object,the electronic book,was studied within the context of an electronic library by following a new approach,which highlighted and exploited the metaphor that relates the electronic book to its paper counterpart.The studies focused on a new aspect,which had not been exploited to date:that of visual rhetoric,which is important to the design of both paper and electronic books.The definition of visual rhetoric is tied,at least in the first instance,to the concept of spoken and textual rhetoric(Landoni and Gibb,2000).Both are long established arts in which carefully composed and appropriately emphasised verbal constructs are used to improve communication.The idea behind visual rhetoric is to use visual clues in a similar way to identify or highlight those parts of a document which are more important for the comprehension of its meaning.Previous research has corroborated this view that a document can be interpreted as a visible representation of a text according to its semantic contents(Southall,1989).Thus visual rhetoric is simply the translation into graphical terms of textual rhetoric based on both the logical structure of the text and its pragmatic component.It provides the reader with a graphical mark up language,which is immediately recognisable on the basis of previous reading activity.Different graphical presentations suggest different readings and deeply affect the interpretation of the contents of the same text.These observations lead to the conclusion that visual rhetoric is a crucial aspect for both reading and browsing a document.In particular,when we move from the general class of electronic documents to the specific sub-class of electronic books,an additional concept has to be introduced:that of book rhetoric.Books are examples of the application of textual rhetoric as well as of visual rhetoric because of their physical nature and traditional presentation styles.Thus the term book rhetoric here stands for a combination of both visual rhetoric and textual rhetoric.The Visual BookThe Visual Book project focused on the importance and use of visual rhetoric when presenting information on a screen and in particular on the influence of visual rhetoric in the presentation and use of electronic books. The study started from the comparison of the effect of visual rhetoric on the paper book and its impact on the presentation of the same book when it was translated into electronic form.A further step was to consider whether visual rhetoric could also have an impact on the design and presentation of electronic publications which had no paper counterparts (Landoni and Gibb,2000;Landoni et al., 2000).The Visual Book project involved the design and development of a prototype,the Visual Book itself.As shown in Figures1and 2,this was a page turner electronic book,with information presented in two visual units(pages)open on the screen at the same time.It resembled the original paper version in its appearance as well as in the content,and its evaluation will be discussed in the following section.Visual Book findingsThe evaluation of the Visual Book (Landoni,1997)concentrated on aspects of the book metaphor when converting paper books into electronic format.In particular the importance of maintaining the sametypographical features,the design rules,the pagination format,and the paper appearance were considered carefully in terms of retaining the meaning of the original text.The physical aspects of the page are encapsulated in a set of presentation rules through which visual clues give the reader semantic information about the context.This primary feature of the book metaphor has been considered to beparticularly important and to be an original contribution to the future development of the electronic design process.The effectiveness of traditional typography in presentinginformation through visual clues such as a specific choice of font,style,typefaces,headers,footers,justification and spacing rules,can also be considered to be valid in an electronic environment.A number of criteria were extracted from other evaluations of the processes used when reading from a computer (Hansen and Haas,1988;Egan et al .,1991)and these were used as the basis for the Visual Book evaluation:.Sense of directness is the degree of feelingusers have that changes on the screen are the result of their actions.It is connected with the illusion users have that thedisplayed image is a physical object which can be manipulated in the same way as a real paper book.A sense of directness helps users learn and internalise the interface to a system because every response by the system reinforces their confidence and understanding.In a system with a high sense of directness users can concentrate on the task that is to be accomplished without subjecting themselves to the cognitive overload of understanding system reactions..Sense of engagement is the level of interestthe system induces in users.The result of a good level of engagement is a high level of concentration that makes users interested in their task.One source of engagement is the fun of seeing thesystem react and is related to the novelty of the system;tangibility andresponsiveness are also responsible for a good level of engagement.Papergenerally has a low level of engagementFigure 1The Visual Bookbrowser Figure 2The Visual Book browser:table ofcontentsbecause it is not interactive and is overly familiar to users..Sense of text is the feeling users may have of the structural and semantic structure of the text that is being read,i.e.its spatialdisposition.Readers are known to be able to recall the position of text on paper(Rothkopf,1971).This fact connects asemantic entity,the information,with aphysical one,which has visual and tactile cues.Factors which can influence thesense of text are the page size,legibilityand a low responsiveness while scrollingwhen looking for more text.The results of the evaluation of the Visual Book were supported by the findings of a similar project:The Hyper-Book(Catenazzi, 1994).This ran in parallel with the Visual Book and involved the design and implementation of another page turner electronic book which had the added feature of allowing the readers to customise the final display to suit their needs.The main difference between the two projects was their degree of similarity to the paper counterpart. The Visual Book adhered as closely as possible in appearance to the original paper book with the aim of maintaining familiarity, facilitating navigation and minimising cognitive overheads.The Hyper-Book,on the other hand,sacrificed page numbers in order to be more flexible in terms of page formatting and overall pagination,enabling readers to customise the electronic book to fit their screens.The Visual Book and the Hyper-Book findings showed that,overall,the book metaphor was both accepted and understood by both sets of evaluators.In particular,readers missed the presence of page numbers in the Hyper-Book and appreciated their inclusion in the Visual Book,showing that familiarity plays an even stronger role than flexibility.The overall results also highlighted the necessity for a new role in electronic publishing,``the designer of electronic books, as the person in charge of the final appearance of the electronic book''.This is a person competent not only in the technological aspects of producing electronic documentation but with an understanding of the importance of presentation issues such as pagination and the general format and appearance of the electronic document,which can collectively be called electronic typography.This means that typographical rules are essential components of the cognitive model of a book and hence relevant to the translation of the metaphor of the book into electronic form.The importance of electronic typography has been proved by examining the state of the art in electronic publications,and the reasons for their relative lack of success,and comparing them with the history of the paper book.All these issues have been summed up in the concept of visual rhetoric.The results of the evaluation of the Visual Book system showed the importance of visual rhetoric as its application to the book image facilitates extraction of its logical structure and thus provides essential information to the designer of visual books. It was clear that evaluators preferred the index tool as being more book oriented(i.e. with a higher sense of text and engagement), and overall more satisfying than the table of contents(ToC),However the ToC scored better in the sense of directness because of its relative simplicity when compared with the index.It is important to point out that the ToC and the index have very different roles in the book metaphor,even if both are navigational tools.In particular the ToC is mainly used for skimming the content of a book when readers do not know what can be found inside,i.e.as an explorative tool.The Index on the other hand has been designed to help readers find something they know about and wish to find inside the book,i.e.it operates as a searching tool.The preference for using the index tool can be interpreted as a tendency to use more sophisticated tools especially when they are fully supported by the electronic medium. Even though the ToC was,as shown in the case of the sense of directness,rated understandable and easy to use,the information contained in it is not sufficient for readers looking for a specific topic.This demonstrates that a good interface design and a successful mapping between the electronic book and the book metaphor are not enough to satisfy the reader.Access to information is still the main requirement and future design of electronic publications will have to consider this primary need.However,the presentation issue is also very important,as the comparison of the sense of directness shows:the fact that the index is not as natural as the other tools for browsing makes it less direct to use.The same happens with paperbooks,where the index is usually hidden atthe end of the book.In the case of the VisualBook the evaluators were more interested in the index functionality as the medium makesit a powerful and realisable tool,theimplementation of which should be seriouslyconsidered during the production ofelectronic publications.Here was a case where the use of visual rhetoric was shown to improve the usability and effectiveness of tools,which were already available in paper books.For example,the index was moved from its normal location at the back of the book to the front and made interactive, thereby increasing its visibility and ease of use.Visual Book potential developments The evaluation method that was applied to the Visual Book was the cognitive jog-through (Rowley and Rhoades,1992).This task-based evaluation entailed two sets of experts being presented with two books to suit their different areas of expertise.One of these books was Information Retrieval(van Rijsbergen,1979),which would be used later as the material for the Web Book evaluations. With this approach,users were free to express,in written or verbal form,their comments and suggestions.One of the results of their positive evaluation of the Visual Book system was a list of recommended future developments.In particular the evaluators felt that the Visual Book Browser should be expanded to incorporate more sophisticated features related to the capability of the ers were happy to interact with an object that resembled a book and appreciated that its enhanced functionalities were consistent with the original paper version.The main request was for an intelligent search function to simulate and enhance the way readers search in paper books.Such a function should combine the precision provided by paper visual clues in defining the context of the search and by index terms compiled by a human indexer, with the higher recall provided by full text search which can be performed very efficiently using mainstream information retrieval software.In addition to the comments from evaluators a number of future developments were identified by the research team based on their experiences.In particular the influence of the Internet on the presentation of information in electronic format should be studied in order to understand whether modifications to the book metaphor and the related concept of visual rhetoric have to be considered to make it compatible with the Internet paradigm.Alternatively,the book metaphor may have to be imposed on the Internet paradigm in order to provide a consistent model with a cognitive background for the growing number of electronic publications available online.It is this issue that the WEB Book investigated and which is described in the next section.The WEB Book projectThe WEB Book was based on the central hypothesis of the Visual Book project:that appearance is an important factor in the effective presentation of information on screen,and applied it to the production of books on the WWW.The aim was to study whether focusing on the appearance of the content when preparing a scientific textbook for electronic publication has a positive impact on its usability.A series of studies by Morkes and Nielsen (1997,1998)on how to write for the Web provided the basis for a methodology which would enable any improvement to be measured.They proposed that the usability of a text on the Web could be greatly increased by altering the presentation of the information to make it concise,scannable and objective. Their definitions of these terms are as follows: .Concise text is where less important information is edited out to reduce thepage length..Scannable text is written to encourage scanning,or skimming,of the text forinformation of interest.For this purposebulleted lists,boldface text to highlightkeywords,photo captions,shortersections of text and more headings,etc.are used..Objective text presents information without exaggeration,or makingsubjective or unsustainable claims.The advantages of using these modified versions are that:.concise text contains less information to process;.scannable text calls attention to key information;.objective text avoids questioning the credibility of promotional statements that seem to distract users from processing the meaning.When applied in their own experiments to a tourist information site and technical white papers site(i.e.papers in progress),these changes led to increases in usability of124per cent and159per cent respectively.The WEB Book project adhered to their procedure (Morkes and Nielsen,1998)as closely as possible,and replicated the content of the questionnaires from their third study,using Chapter Five(Search Strategies)of van Rijsbergen's Information Retrieval(1979)as the material for the experiment(permission to use this material by the author is gratefully acknowledged).This textbook is one of the fundamental readings of IR,and a relatively plain machine readable version of the book already exists on the Internet.Some modifications to Morkes and Nielsen's original procedures were necessary to suit the purposes of this research.Because a scientific textbook is primarily objective in nature,and cannot be made concise without either breaching copyright or compromising the meaning of the text,the emphasis in the WEB Book was simply on reworking the chapter to make it scannable by improving/ redesigning its logical and physical layout. Certain items were omitted from the questionnaire,such as those asking users to rate how``entertaining''or``fun to use''they found the site,due to their inapplicability in assessing the usability of a textbook.Further, the study was carried out entirely over the Internet and so the``exam''used in the original became impractical,as did measuring the time taken for participants to complete the search tasks.As the experiment was being conducted on a different type of material its objectives varied from those of the original studies,so that browsing rather than searching for information in the text was encouraged,making measurement of the time taken to complete the tasks less central to the purpose of the study.The resulting methodology was used to test three hypotheses:H1:Users of the revised,scannable version of the chapter will make fewer errors ontasks than will users of the originalversion.H2:Users of the revised version will report higher subjective satisfaction with the site than will users of the original.H3:When measures from the first two hypotheses are combined into an overallusability score for each version of the site, the scannable version will have a higherusability score than the control version(i.e.the original electronic version). The WEB Book experimentEach stage of this experiment was carried out over the Internet.Participants consisted of18 respondents to emails sent to two mailing lists for the IR community and to a group of postgraduate students who had studied IR in the Department of Information Science at the University of Strathclyde.By focusing on the IR community the intention was to target users familiar with the general subject matter of the textbook they would be asked to read, so that they could concentrate on browsing the site for information rather than being distracted by entirely alien content.Although mailing list respondents inevitably comprised a greater number of experts,similar numbers in each group had consulted van Rijsbergen's book before and the students were considered to have sufficient background in the field to be valid subjects in the experiment.Two electronic versions of Chapter Five were used in this study:the original as shown in Figures3and4(/ Keith/Chapter.5/Ch.5.html),and a revised version,written for the purpose of the experiment as shown in Figures5and6 (/msc/index.htm). Of the18participants in the experiment,eight looked at the original version of Information Retrieval,and ten looked at the revised version.The choice of van Rijsbergen's book was due to various reasons:.it was the same book used for the Visual Book evaluation so comparison of results would be easier;.it is a textbook and as such,according to the Visual Book study,it belongs to acategory of publications which suits being translated into electronic format;.it is quite a popular textbook,which meant it was already familiar,possibly inFigure3Original prefaceFigure4Original Chapter5:IntroductionFigure5The revised Chapter5:table of contentsFigure6The revised Chapter5:Introductionits paper format,to a community ofreaders easy to target;.the author agreed with us to make changes to the already existing electronic version published on the WWW morethan five years ago;.there were no copyright issues since the author owns them in full;.it covers a subject which is by nature interdisciplinary(by involving bothelements of computer and informationscience)and in this way it allows for anextra dimension to the study,which willbe expanded in EBONI.Design issuesIn the original electronic version only minor concessions had been made to the new medium.Each chapter is allocated a separate ``page''(i.e.a Web page)and text is organised in a linear way so that users have to keep scrolling down until they reach the end of the chapter.The hypertext functions of Web browsers are used to provide certain basic structural links,such as moving from one chapter to the next.There are links from citations to bibliographic references,and links from the table of contents to the beginning of chapters have been inserted.Otherwise,it does not provide any more effective functionalities than those provided in the paper book.The revised version of this chapter was prepared for this study by the research team and followed Morkes and Nielsen's guidelines for improved scannability.The chapter was divided into ten separate files(Introduction, Boolean search and so on)according to the sub-headings in the original text,so that each sub-section occupied a separate page.In addition,a chapter contents page was created to list and provide links to each section. Hyperlinks were exploited in order to aid navigation.At the top of each page,links were inserted to enable the user to jump back to the previous section,forward to the next section or back to the table of contents for the chapter.At the foot of each page there was a list containing hyperlinks to each section in the chapter.Extra headings,coloured and sized,were inserted in the text in order to divide it into smaller,more digestible chunks. For example,the section headed Boolean search was allocated the additional sub-headings,What is Boolean searching?, Implementation and Modification.All diagrams were centred to give the pages a neater,more symmetrical appearance,so that they could be easily distinguished from the text.Key words and phrases were coloured red to call attention to important pieces of text,and lists were indented,their numbers or bullets also coloured red.These changes were intended to make the chapter more easily scannable by giving it a design that exploited more fully the functions of the Web as a medium.UsersStudents and mailing list respondents were asked to look in their respective sites for the answers to three search tasks.These tasks,the same for each group,were designed to involve participants in hunting through the chapter in search of specific facts;it was important to choose questions to which respondents were unlikely to know the answers automatically, but rather to encourage them to search in the text.Participants were specifically asked not to use their Web browser's find command in order to discover the answers to these questions,as the purpose of the study was to compare the usability of the two versions of the chapter according to the users'experience of browsing visually through the text. CriteriaAfter completing these tasks,participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire(see Appendix)about their experience that was intended to measure their subjective satisfaction with the site.Some questions asked about specific aspects of working with the site,and other questions asked for an assessment of how well certain adjectives describe the site.Following Morkes and Nielsen's(1997)guidelines,all questions were measured on ten-point Likert scales,and consisted of the following four criteria: (1)Quality of the site.This contained threeitems:helpful,useful and concise. (2)Ease of use of the site.This included thequestions:.How easy is it to work with the text in this Web site?.How easy is it to find specificinformation in this Web site?.Compared to what you expected,how quickly did the tasks go?.How hard was it to concentrate on searching for information(because ofdistractions)?(This item was reverse-coded.)。