The eReading Experience
- 1. The eReading Experience What Product Wraps a Book and Why is it Important 8 February 2013 AJ Renold, MIMS ’14 arenold@ischool.berkeley.edu The Future of eBooks @ UC Berkeley School of Information
- 2. Use Cases to get us started! • Reading a print book • Reading an ebook in an eReader • A group of students reviewing articles together • Students listening to a college lecture and taking notes
- 3. What is a Wrapper? • A Wrapper provides a set of features that enable a reader to interact with a document Wrapper • iBooks App, Inkling App, Kno App, CourseSmart, Kindle Interface(s) - eReaders are a type of Wrapper Document • Wrappers are not just eReaders Text • What about Evernote? Zotero? - Personal Information Management Tools are a type of Wrapper • What about Course Management - Course Management Tools are a type of Wrapper
- 4. Document Collections • Wrappers contain collections of documents that are presented to readers in a library and reading interface • Key questions: • Where does a reader access or import documents? • Who controls the document collection? • Is a document collection shared?
- 5. Anatomy of Annotations Inkling Annotation Anchor and Offset Annotations are a broad description for highlights, notes, or external markup that denote important pieces of a document
- 6. Annotations • Most Wrappers have annotation features and can aggregate annotations into a notebook • Readers use a diverse range of personal annotating systems • 83% Only highlight (no body/marginalia) v. 9% anchor and body • Privacy is expected • Readers value existing annotations if they know the author’s credibility
- 7. Annotations Key Questions • What are new types of annotations that a wrapper can facilitate? - Questions, Polls,YouTube,Voice Notes? • Are notes made outside of the text considered annotations? • Can authors or publishers access these annotations?
- 8. Navigation • Movement - how do readers move from page to page? between links in a document? or from a summary of annotations back to the text? • Orientation - how do readers know where they are in the book? chapter? section? • Search - eReaders only and variety of search methods possible - full text, collection level, structural (ie only section headers), annotations, semantic Inkling Navigation
- 9. Navigation Key Questions • Do aggregated annotations offer a new navigation tool? • What innovations can be made beyond full text search? • Semantic search in a document or at collection level?
- 10. Clipping • Extracting portions of a work • A ubiquitous activity - 43% social, 28% reference, 14% reminder • Wrappers support clipping in a variety of ways
- 11. Clipping Key Questions • How to facilitate re-encountering Clippings (Physical v. Digital)? • Does DRM interfere with clipping in eReaders? • Why I love Evernote! - but major gap between note taking and eReaders Evernote Web Clipper
- 12. Collaborative Reading • Asynchronous or Synchronous • Co-located or Remote • Features are driven by purpose • Shared annotations, a professor’s key points (professor to student) • Annotations as the starting point for marginalia discussion (student to class) • Annotations shared within a study group (student to student)
- 13. Collaborative Reading Key Questions • What is shared how and with whom? - Important privacy implications • What about clippings? • Other experimentation? - place finding feature for locating the same point in a text - from - Co-Reading: Investigating Collaborative Group Reading - Pearson, Owen,Thimbleby and Buchanan
- 14. Convenience Features • Offline reading • Device Sync • File Formats and Content Portability • Key questions: • What devices support the Wrapper? How do we offer better cross-device solutions? • Can we move away from proprietary formats to give documents more portability?
- 15. Segmenting by Purpose • Understanding the underlying purpose of reading helps us segment wrappers into categories • Interactive - how much the reader interacts with the text • Immersive - how focused the reader is on the ideas and concepts of the text Answering an email, academic/law taking notes in class research Interactive Magazine Textbook Skimming a newspaper Reading a novel Immersive
- 16. Categories of Wrappers Note Taking Annotation Apps Interactive Education General Reading Immersive
- 17. Web Technology • The Problem: Many Wrappers provide features for different purposes and these features are often useful together, but do not work together • Approaching a Solution with Web Technology • Can Wrappers be better integrated or combined in a useful way? • Can users be allowed to customize their Wrapper for a more personal purpose-focused experience? • Can books be published in a more portable format? • Web apps are becoming better suited to cross-device solutions and experimentation is easy
- 18. APIs • Not just Evernote, but many applications integrate via APIs • Using similar standards (document type, annotations, clippings) is important and can help with meaningful API uses • Wrappers should not be closed systems
- 19. Parting Thoughts • Understanding wrappers and their purpose is important to authoring, teaching, and designing new and better products for reading • Diverse reading purposes demand a diverse set of features and UX is very important, giving wrappers many useful features presents a UX challenge • Textbooks and instructional books must be reinvented, not just ported to electronic versions - Test Prep Websites • Experimenting • The Future of eBooks @ UC Berkeley School of Information • Experiment, Test,Validate!
- 20. Sources • Reading and Writing the Electronic Book - Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services - Marshall • http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/ 10.2200/S00215ED1V01Y200907ICR009
- 21. Appendix: Wrappers & Gaps Wrapper Categories Course eReaders Note-taking Apps Annotation Apps Management Notes, but not Purpose General Reading PDFs Education necessarily eBooks Annotations Can a variety of annotation types be supported? Navigation Collection level search, structural search and semantic search? Clipping Clipping is not well supported, yet social activities drive it Bookmarking Can annotations replace bookmarking? Collaborative Sharing and collaborating is done in many different ways across wrapper categories Reading Convenience Cross-device Comparability needs to improve and can more open formats be adopted? Features Good UX is a must, features cannot distract from reading activities, yet the features demanded by UX categories are diverse Browser based products have better cross-device capability, web technology lend themselves to Web Tech better understanding user activity (behavioral data mining)
- 22. Appendix: Survey of eReaders Sharing Course Features: File Formats Purpose Search Tagging Device Sync Features Management Proprietary iBooks General Reading Full Text Share Clippings No Yes iTunes U PDF Yes (by friending iPad and Web (Apple Instructor can Inkling Inkling store Education Yes No another user) Devices) bootstrap Kno Kno store, PDF Education Yes - Collection Level Oriented by Course No App and Web Yes Course Proprietary Education Yes No No Yes No Smart Annotations shared, Instructors manage Many (epub, pdf, doc, Education / Group Subtext Yes user chooses privacy Yes iPad only groups and doc google books) Oriented level collections *there are many!!!