A new way of thinking about books

For ebooks to succeed, the creators of digital versions of books need to think about books in a new way.

I’ve been checking out the different ebook softwares that you can download to your PC to read ebooks, since my post the other day about ebooks generally. I professed then to be a fan of the MobiPocket reader and after testing out Adobe Digital Editions reader, my views have not changed - Adobe’s reader is miles behind in its concept and that shows in its lack of usability.

MobiPocket seems to have succeeded in thinking about books in a new way in order to offer a multi-faceted experience of reading books on a digital device. It uses reflowable text so you can control not just the font size but also the line spacing, the actual font itself and you can zoom in and out on both text and images. All of these functions are intuitively laid out on the navigation pane and you can also use the mouse to control the page movements - which means you can sit back at a distance with your laptop on a coffee table and use just the mouse on one arm of your armchair to control page turning and accessing the controls.

Adobe has its main strength in creating pdfs of print documents - what you get on screen with a pdf is a copy or replica of the print document. Its Digital Editions readers shows that heritage. You can increase the font size but not to such a great degree as in MobiPocket. And you cannot zoom. At all. You cannot choose the font and you cannot change line spacing. Essentially, you get a glorified replica of a print page. There is no easy way to get a full screen - you have to click a few times through a menu to get there - whereas on MobiPocket, a simple button gets you to full screen mode and you can easily get back to the dashboard by hovering your cursor at the top of the screen.

Unfortunately, there appear to be many more digital books in Adobe format than in MobiPocket format. This is bad news for the reputation of ebooks - if it’s clunky and awkward to read and maneovre round an ebook because of ill-thoughtout software, then people are not going to take to ebooks as readily as if the digital reading experience is a joy. For me, MobiPocket reading is a joy - because of the control I as reader have on the formatting of the text to make it the most ergonomically suitable for my personal comfort and of the ease of usability of the dashboard. Publishers of ebooks need to think in a new way about books - forget the old paper version and focus on how the content of the books can best be delivered to the consumer in a new medium.

We as consumers are becoming increasingly used to controlling our user experience. Think about movies, television and radio. At one time, it was expected that we had to go to the movie theatre at the specific time the movie was being shown, or organise our evenings around a TV show we wanted to watch at a certain time, or tune in to listen to our favourite radio program when the broadcaster decided to put it on. Now, we can choose where and when to watch via DVDs which we can pause, rewind and also personalise in terms of sound and colour etc. We can download podcasts of radio shows to listen to whenever we please.

With ebooks, we can be freed from the constraints of the font size, the layout, weight of paper, and choice of binding selected by the publisher and the reading experience can be transformed into a much more user-centred one, especially if embedded links and other additonal electronic data are included in the digital version of the book. For example, I was reading a physical book (p-book) the other day and it mentioned the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem - there was no accompanying photo and I could not remember what it looked like. Imagine if I had been reading an ebook version which enabled me to go online with a click on the phrase to see some photos and also to find out any other background information. As we all get used to reading blogs and online newspapers etc, that active way of reading - to follow links or go online to search for more information - is going to become an increasingly instinctive and natural response. If publishers want to tap into the digital book market, that is the way to go - rather than trying to replicate the experience of reading a p-book.

Photo: thanks to trishalyn.com