A few thoughts about e-books

Joe Wikert, a VP and publisher at Wiley and Sons, just started his own blog (Scoble made him do it). In the comments to one of his first posts, I asked Joe what he thought would make electronic publishing take off. His answer was thought-provoking:

…until we get past the notion of just porting a tree-book to an e-book, we’ll probably never see enormous adoption rates.

The biggest barrier I see is this recognition that an e-book needs to be developed with the delivery platform in mind. Wouldn’t it be great if you could introduce the concept of a hyperlink to a printed book so that someone could just touch a phrase they don’t understand and they’re magically taken to a definition of that phrase or the first place it appears in the book? Instead, you have to flip back to the index, look it up, and then jump to that page. Oh, and while you’re doing that, you need to keep a thumb on your original page so that you don’t lose your place. That capability obviously already exists in the electronic world, but it’s not something that’s generally built in to e-books. Plus, I believe you have to construct the material in more bite-size chunks in an e-book, allowing users to read just the essentials, then drill down further (with links) if they want.

Imagine how fast you could get through the last book you read if it was constructed this way. I’m not just trying to save time though — since we’re all different, this model would allow us to dip in and out to different levels on any given topic, depending on how far you want to go. What would enable you to do this? It would be possible because the author constructed the book this way. That’s not so easy in a printed book. It’s this sort of layering of the content that I believe needs to be taken into consideration to build a truly effective e-book.

I think Joe’s on to something here. Most of my recent books are available in electronic editions, either as PDF files or in Windows compiled Help format. The electronic versions are useful because they offer the capability to search the entire text instead of just relying on decisions that an indexer made. You can search for a word that appears in a dialog box or error message and have a pretty good chance of finding some relevant content, which may in turn suggest other words or phrases to search for.

But the experience of reading a book in Acrobat or in a Help window is pretty poor, and even if we used every advanced feature in the Adobe toolkit we couldn’t make it nearly as interactive as Joe’s vision. The cool features he describes require three things that don’t currently exist:

• Some sort of standardized handheld device (the size and weight of a paperbook book) that can read e-book files and deliver them in a digestible format on the screen, complete with jump points and graphics and “drill down” functions. I don’t think any hardware device like that exists yet, although people have been envisioning them for as long as I’ve been in the computing industry, which is a long time.
• Software tools to create these intricately linked, discoverable, expandable, deep storehouses of information. Somehow, I don’t think Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat are going to get the job done.
• An economic structure that rewards authors for doing the hard work of creating these e-books. It’s already difficult and time-consuming writing a linear manuscript that steps through these complicated technologies with clear explanations and accurate information. Would it be easier to create one of these e-books? Could I do it faster? I don’t know, but I sure hope that the economics would work.

It’s fun to speculate about this stuff. If anyone out there is working on projects that can get us closer to this new format for delivering information, add something in the comments.