Realistic electronic books
Highlights
► We describe a novel electronic book whose form is far more realistic than others. ► It provides an unprecedented range of reading, browsing, and annotation facilities. ► It incorporates a unique incremental search that simultaneously searches synonyms. ► It incorporates automatically created encyclopedia cross-referencing and subject index. ► User studies compare performance with alternatives (HTML, PDF) including physical books.
Introduction
The electronic book industry is burgeoning. Libraries and other content providers are digitizing documents to allow readers around the world to access them online. The Open Content Alliance and Google are creating collections of tens of millions of volumes accessible through the Internet Archive and Google Books respectively. Manufacturers compete to produce reading devices that are light and mobile, with high resolution displays and many other features—Barnes and Noble's Nook, Amazon's Kindle, and the Sony Reader are typical examples. However, neither the underlying document representation nor interaction with electronic books has evolved significantly—apart from a few superficial visual effects. As a result, although users are increasingly willing to read documents sequentially on-screen, most still prefer to print them when they want to study them intensively (Nicholas et al., 2008, Gorman and Crawford, 1995, Crawford, 1998).
The use of books to store knowledge has a long tradition—books are arguably the most mature user interface ever devised for presenting information. People have acquired a variety of strategies and manipulation techniques, such as using fingers as bookmarks or riffling through pages while browsing (Severinson et al., 1996, Kerr, 1986). Compare a medieval book with a modern one: the same principles are still at work. Readers need only learn these conventions once, and can use them for the rest of their lives.
Current electronic document systems offer great added value over paper books: authors can revise information quickly and incorporate hyperlinks and multimedia, and readers can locate words or phrases through full-text search. However, electronic book applications fail to provide adequate cues about the reader's location in a document, and do not support interactions that are readily achieved with physical books without disrupting the ongoing reading activity (Dillon, 1992, O'Hara and Sellen, 1997, Conklin, 1987, Edwards and Hardman, 1989, McDonald and Stevenson, 1998). These interactions are exactly the features that physical books have evolved to support.
Opinion on the importance of emulating the appearance of printed books in the electronic environment is divided. Some researchers argue that it is unnecessary to paginate documents or maintain their printed page layout (Rowland et al., 1995, Nielsen, 1998, Kol and Schcolnik, 2000, Shneiderman, 1998, McKnight et al., 1991). They believe that with training and practice, users will no longer rely on the book model to locate information. Others contend that users are dissatisfied with digital document systems because they do not embed familiar book metaphors (Benest, 1990, Henke, 1998, Landoni et al., 2000, Crestani and Ntioudis, 2001, Barker et al., 1994). Their studies show that all participants, regardless of computing experience, find the book metaphor easy to use and understand, and that people can utilize their familiarity with paper documents to navigate and obtain information from digital text.
In order to investigate whether digital books can capitalize on reader experience with physical documents to enhance electronic reading, we have developed a software model called Realistic Books that is designed to combine the advantages of physical and electronic documents, and implemented a way of creating such books automatically from any HTML or PDF file. We have also compared performance using the new interface with existing electronic reading interfaces, and with the original physical form itself—the humble book.
Over nearly three decades, researchers have developed various electronic document representations, such as Book Emulator (Benest, 1990), XLibris (Schilit et al., 1998), and 3Book (Card et al., 2004, Card et al., 2004). Most are claimed to have glowing potential, but their proponents rarely make objective empirical comparisons of user behavior and performance with conventional representations. Because these new representations are not available for others to use, we cannot compare their performance with that of Realistic Books, nor with HTML, PDF and physical books.
After defining the scope of the investigation, this paper reviews the historical development of document systems and their effect on reading strategies and behavior, in order to identify, in Section 4, aspects of both printed and electronic documents that might enhance reading performance. Section 5 describes how documents are presented as Realistic Books, and the functions that are supported. Section 6 explains how Wikipedia can be used as an encyclopedic knowledge base to automatically identify key terms and phrases in book text, provide on-demand definitions, and search related pages in the book. Finally, we evaluate system responsiveness and present the results of user studies that compare people's browsing, searching and annotation performance and behavior in simulated books with the HTML, PDF, and physical representations.
Section snippets
Scope of the investigation
Despite its quotidian familiarity, reading includes a range of activities, is done for various purposes, and is embedded within many other document-based activities. People read for different reasons and in different ways: locating information, checking facts, acquiring new knowledge, analysing text, recreation. Studying a textbook is not like reading a science fiction novel.
Adler and van Doren (1972) and Schilit et al. (1999) characterize reading along two dimensions: the reader's engagement
Evolution of the book form
Are books adequately represented by their content, independent of their form? The book form conveys abundant information using well established conventions that everyone is accustomed to and can interpret intuitively. The conventions for book layout and design are the legacy of a long period of evolution. Their familiarity renders a book's graphical elements and functionality practically invisible. The “codex”—a book with pages that turn rather than a scroll that is read by unrolling—is one of
Design considerations
Navigation and personalization in digital reading both present many usability issues: accessing and opening the book; knowing where one is in it; providing and accessing supplementary information; navigating within it; locating information by full-text searching or an index; and personalization with annotation or bookmarks. This section briefly reviews research findings on these—findings that are often contradictory.
Realistic books
To investigate whether book models with realistic page turning offer measurable advantages over physical books and other electronic forms, a lightweight Adobe Flash-based application, called Realistic Books, was constructed. Flash was chosen because it is widely installed, and minimizes both download time and compatibility issues (Millburn Survey, 2010). Realistic Books communicate with a PHP application server to save the reader's annotations.
A key challenge when simulating physical books is
Enriched document representation
The information explosion powered by the World-Wide Web has led to a huge increase in skim-reading (Goldsborough, 2000). People scan documents for keywords, tables and illustrations in order to obtain a quick overview of their contents, and only read in depth when something catches their attention.
The background material that a document should provide obviously depends on the reader's prior knowledge (Shneiderman, 1989). To allow people with different backgrounds to understand a book, authors
System responsiveness
Responsiveness is the speed with which a system responds to a user's action, and significantly affects user satisfaction, engagement and reading performance (Hansen and Haas, 1988). To investigate the responsiveness of Realistic Books, we recorded the average time required to load a document, turn a page and perform a text search on 25 books with 500–2500 pages (with no blank pages), and 1100 words per page, at two different screen sizes (800×600 and 1440×900). To display an open book with
Usability studies
One way of determining whether electronic books actually improve people's reading is to compare their performance with commonly used document representations, and with physical books, on tasks that represent likely situations in which the system will be used (Gould, 1988). The typographical features, logical structure and page layout of the electronic text should all be equivalent to the paper material. Moreover, evaluations should be designed not only to show whether the new system improves
Conclusion
People rarely read books linearly; they skip around. They may search for things they have seen before and for things they have not, browse for new information, and assess a book's quantity and coverage of information without regard to the details (Canter et al., 1985). They rely on orientation cues provided by the document interface to know their current position, the size of the document, where to go next and how to visit parts that are not in view. Although much of a book's physical design is
Acknowledgments
We acknowledge the entire New Zealand Digital Library Project team for their unstinting work in providing an environment that makes this kind of research meaningful—and fun. This research is funded in part by Google.
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