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Craig Mod thinks iPad could mean the end of ‘disposable books’
March 5, 2010 | 8:15 am
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By Chris Meadows
Yesterday we covered Penguin CEO John Mackinson engaging in a fair amount of hyperbole concerning the future of the e-book in a post-iPad world. “The definition of the book itself, as far as we can see, is up for grabs.”
Now blogger Craig Mod, a six-year publishing-industry veteran, goes into more specifics, at considerable length, about what the iPad might mean for the format of electronic books. This is a long and thoughtful article with plenty of illustrations that is definitely worth a read.
Formless vs. Definite Content
Mod divides books into categories of Formless and Definite Content. Formless Content is your average fiction book, or non-fiction without many illustrations and tables. The text is the all, and it does not matter how it is paginated or reflowed—it still reads the same on any device.
Definite Content is designed and formatted to be read in a particular way, with pictures and charts embedded in text at specific places. Textbooks are a good example. Devices such as the Kindle or iPhone, Mod says, have historically had trouble presenting works Definite Content due to the black-and-white nature of the Kindle, or the small screen size of the iPhone.
But the iPad presents new possibilities for e-book formatting, and not just in the tired old “add video to it” multimedia sense. Mod observes that the page-turning metaphor could be entirely abandoned. Books could scroll continuously horizontally or vertically, or scroll horizontally for new chapters and other divisions then vertically within that chapter or division.
Ending the “Disposable Book”
Mod thinks that, in the end, all Formless Content and some Definite Content will end up on the iPad or devices like it. He feels this could mean the end of the “disposable book”—
The book printed without consideration of form or sustainability or longevity. The book produced to be consumed once and then tossed. The book you bin when you’re moving and you need to clean out the closet.
—and a chance to make what printed books continue to be made afterward into well-crafted, aesthetically-pleasing works that are “built to last” and “exploit the advantages of print.”
I think this sounds like a laudable idea, but we are years, possibly decades away from seeing it come to fruition. E-books make up a very small percentage of book sales now, and it seems unlikely the iPad will work the kind of a sea change Mod is expecting.
Still, as pie in the sky goes, it is at least a tastier and more substantive pie than the continuous “add video to it” chant of people who think that just because e-books can be multimedia presentations, they automatically must. Maybe the form factor of the book is “up for grabs”, but the definition of it shouldn’t be.
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It’s an interesting and viable perspective. On one level, however, it only reinforces current paper-based formatting conventions that may not survive the transition to digital media… and, in fact, probably should not survive.
Every medium has its optimum design and formatting cues. Digital media has been around for only a short time, and those cues have largely been unexplored so far, primarily, because designers insist on imposing paper cues on digital screens.
Although devices like the iPad and other hardware should help to ease the transition to digital for those who are attached to paper, we should be designing interfaces that truly take advantage of the new medium, and not just mimic the last one.
A clear distinction between paper and screen is presented by their distinctive navigational prompts. The hands prompt the mind; with paper there are actions of device manipulation and page turning while touch screen prompts of sweep, flick and pinch are used. Both systems of navigation are different yet both suggest the role of hands and fingers prompting efficient book reading.
This factor of haptic function is important because of the more extensive and cohesive content associated with books. Although overlooked, such prompts are deeply embedded with examination and study of any kind of content. It is a legacy feature of bionic reading.
What is interesting is how the navigational prompts differ between paper and screen yet still suggest some kind of logic of their interdependence.
It’s a marvelous article, but I’d disagree with this: “Take something as fundamental as pages, for example. The metaphor of flipping pages already feels boring and forced on the iPhone.”
I read quite a bit on my iPod touch, and while I definitely get bored flipping those tiny pages, scrolling down (as Craig Mod suggests) would be much, much worse. At least with paging, a quick touch of the screen gives me the next bite of text. With scrolling (as now with longer webpages), I’d have to keep track of where I was as I scrolled down, taking care not to move too far. That’d be worse than boring. It’d be a distracting pain in the finger tips.
Whether we’re talking about paper or a digital reader’s screen, the ‘page metaphor’ isn’t a metaphor, it’s a physical reality. Both paper and digital devices have a fixed-size display The fact that the page size can vary between devices is of little, if any, more significance, than the fact that books can vary in page size. And the fact that digital readers can scroll rather than display in page-sized chunks doesn’t matter either. There was a time when books also scrolled and were even called scrolls. We disliked that so much we abandoned it and never looked back.
The same will be true, I suspect, of digital books. Pages will remain. We just need to find a way to make them work well with what he calls Definite Content-meaning books where the placement of objects like graphics matter.
For that, we’re currently in pitiful shape. Standards like ePub need to be dramatically improved and tools to create digital books in those new standards created. Two options need to be built into the standards.
1. A smart reflow mode. This would let book designers designate that a graphic be displayed in some way, i.e. at the top right of the next page, and in some size, i.e. keep the same size whenever possible or resize to fill 1/3 the page width. A book designer needs to have the same ability to dictate layout in a digital book that he now has with print versions. Without design, digital books will look ugly.
2. A defined page-break mode. This would let a digital book exactly mirror a printed counterpart, in part because page references are very useful, as are headers or footers that tell you where you are in a book. This isn’t as hard as some are assuming. Both the Kindle and the upcoming iPad have the same screen size, a size that’s as big as or bigger than most books. Mapping a digital page to match that of a printed one wouldn’t be that hard to do. We shouldn’t get caught up in the idea that, because a digital book can look different, it must look different.
I might add that, on smaller displays and for those who need large print, a book normally read in defined page mode could display in smart reflow mode.
Don’t take my criticism too seriously. This is an excellent article, marvelous laid out and beautifully illustrated.
–Michael W. Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle
Michael, We already have an open format that supports both reflowable and defined page-break modes: PDF. It seems to be forgotten in all this, but IMO the iPad finally makes PDF ebooks an attractive option.
what mr. perry says. i can imagine that header and footer information, as well as page numbering, could be handled much as headers and footers are handled in microsoft word, except that like ‘notes & annotations’ they would be a separate, associated file that would just repeat at the top & bottom of *whatever* display. and there’s probably a real solution that an actual programmer could come up with.
an aside, re. textbooks: if there’s a move to ipad adoption by higher ed institutions for textbooks, what will the visually impaired do? are those touchscreen devices in any was adaptable for the blind? and — will there be anything like the kind of uproar about that that there was with the kindle?
Perhaps eBooks could also be the opportunity to recapture the wonders of real books–inscribed on clay tablets the way writing is supposed to be done.
I have a hard time understanding why anyone still thinks that traditional paper books will have ANY role at all moving forward. They’re a transitional technology on the way out.
Is formless vs. definite a useful distinction? I’m not really sure. It’s certainly easier for all-text books to conform to the varying dimensions of reading devices (and the varying dimensions of fonts needed for those of us whose aging eyes make small print unappealing). As far as textbooks, etc., however, how hard would it be to use thumbnails hyperlinked to larger images, just as is done with typical websites?
Sure, color is wonderful. In the long term, color beats black and white because it sometimes adds capability and the cost difference goes to zero (when I started in computers, most monitors only had two colors (green and black) and people wondered why anyone would need color. Of course, ‘need’ was the wrong word.)
Certainly page ‘flipping’ is a weird metaphor to carry forward to eBooks. But screens are screens. Moving from one screen to the next could be via scrolling (think an old-fashioned side-scrolling video game) but what does that buy you? One choice that might make sense–for eBooks to learn your reading speed and automatically scroll downward at the speed of reading, eliminating the need for user intervention except where the user wants to stop.
Again, this is interesting but I’m not sure how it’s useful or operative.
Rob Preece
Publisher
As much as the iPad fires up the creative juices of book designer’s for definite content or extended books and the publisher’s craving for revenue there is the worry about persistence. Will I be able to read such a book in 5, 10, 50 years? Or will it end up in limbo like those great HyperCard stacks or Voyager-CD-ROMs of yore? Marrying creative output to one single platform, a platform that is controlled by an unpredictable and secretive company looks like a guarantee for oblivion. Don’t get me wrong: it might well be profitable but it won’t endure. It is a shame that ePub – having made great progress in the last two years – doesn’t seem to care much about book design or definite content. It is a “least common denominator”-like solution and it’s being left in the dust by the progress on the hardware front.
We might well face a lost generation of books if there is no extension to ePub or the emergence of some other open standard.
Came across something this morning
i think Chris Meadows who knows Craig Mod’s posts will like this’
http://craigmod.com/journal/ebooks/
It’s being discussed on a LinkedIn Group called Future Trends.