Katie Peek over at A Canary in the Data Mine: Explorations of Data Analysis and Information Display blog posted an interview with me on the topic of book design and the changing world of electronic publishing.

The day after. This is a book design blog, so you’d expect me to write about iBooks, the dazzling ePub reader built into the iPad. But I’m not. (Well, I will a bit). And I’m not going to write about what features are lacking in iPad (first generation, after all) or if there’s even a market for this type of device: duh. And I’m not going to waste time debating the backlight. There are a lot more important things to do, such as figuring out how to design content for this new device. Notice: I said designing content, not designing e-books.

iBooks is a response to the market-driven phenomenon of people wanting to read hundreds of pages of text on a computer screen. Is that the best we can do, read text on a screen? Personally, I want to use an ultra-modern computing device for engaging with content in ways not possible merely with text. (Of course, I’m talking primarily about non-fiction here. I love literary fiction & the interplay of words, sentence after sentence, though I still prefer my novels in print. But that’s just a personal preference.)

And I’m not talking about enhanced e-books, which often mean no more than just some multimedia tacked onto the end. Adherents of e-books are constantly stressing the importance of breaking away from the concept of the printed page. Yet, the ePub reader on iPad uses a page concept & strongly reinforces the concept of the physical book (transplanted to the screen).

I’m interested in breaking away from the concept of the page & the physical book. But I’m not too interested in a lengthy stream of re-flowing text. The page, the physical book, & even the re-flowing text are all great in their own ways if you want is to read 80,000 words on a topic. But I seldom have that much time. But I am interested in learning. And don’t we read non-fiction because we want to learn?

Maybe I only need a stimulating 10,000 words arranged in even smaller, bite-sized chunks seasoned with imagery for obtaining an overview of a topic. A multi-touch screen allows me to interact with the content, furthering my retention of ideas. A playful, game-like component pulls me further into the narrative. (Remember, narratives don’t have to be linear or even textual.) I would buy such a product, a content app that started me along the journey of exploring an unfamiliar topic. I love to learn, I love to read. So what’s next: I would then purchase a more in-depth book on the topic (either in print or as an e-book).

Listen up publishers: you just sold me two separate products. Think about that.

How can digital media aid in learning about a topic in a visually engaging manner? That’s the challenge we should address in designing for the iPad. The iPad gets us a big step closer.

As I think about designing content for the iPad, I’m not thinking so much about ePub. I want to breakout of whatever constraints & restrictions imposed by the ePub rendering engine. The iPad provides a robust canvas. When I think of paid content on the iPad, I’m not just thinking e-books. I’m also thinking apps.

The app development environment for iPhone is superb and is the basis for the iPad SDK. There’s an NDA around the iPad SDK beta. So, no specifics here.

Here at sorodesign we are working to develop some apps for the iPhone & the iPad that revolve around content but are not at all what one would think of as e-books or even enhanced e-books. We’re experimenting. Designing for the iPhone & the iPad requires creativity. That’s exciting.

And what is required from all of us for devices like the iPhone, the iPad, & similar products from other vendors that will come along: new ways of writing, editing, designing, publishing, & reading.

When people say the word e-book they don’t always mean the same thing. The distinction among types of e-books is very important when it comes to e-book design.

In the world of big commercial publishing e-books are nearly synonymous with Kindle. (And I’m including related formats such as EPUB in this category.) These e-books are designed for use on dedicated reading devices or other portable devices (e.g., iPhones). The key concept here is re-flow: forget about pages, as in printed books. The e-book is a stream of text that automatically re-shapes itself depending upon the width and length of the screen. And forget about design, at least for now. Currently, designing this type of e-book is all about making the e-book look as decent as possible within the severe limitations of e-book reading devices.

E-books based on re-flow are here to stay. But I’m betting within a few years that the design capabilities for this type of e-book will improve. That will happen in the same way Web design has improved over the years. Or, possibly, perhaps re-flow e-books always will be the bare-bones version of books.

As long as people are happy to buy that format, why should publishers spend the money to make the content formatted any better when there’s always the alternative of PDF and even print for those who want a more typographic experience. The good aspect of all this is that consumers may be able to read books in whatever format they prefer.

Actually, with all the announcements coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the capabilities for better looking e-books may be approaching even more rapidly than I expect. Then again, after working with technology for a couple of decades, I know that real change doesn’t happen as quickly as press releases are spit out by marketing departments.

The other common definition of an e-book is PDF, where what you see on the screen looks like the printed page. This works fine on a decent-sized screen (i.e., desktop, laptop, or even a netbook), but is painfully difficult on a small screen. From a design perspective, PDF offers the most flexibility and is the easiest to produce if you already have the book designed for print.

E-books based on PDF are here to stay.

A variation on the PDF e-book is the screen-oriented PDF: the content is designed to fit the screen and resembles a fantastic PowerPoint presentation more than a book. These screen-oriented PDFs are more like a brochure, usually less than 50 pages, and often given away for free. As with any type of PDF, the screen-oriented PDF offers a lot of options for the designer. Commercial publishing houses are not too interested in this format, but Internet marketers make a lot of requests for it.

Enhanced e-books are yet another category: text-based e-books supplemented with visuals and additional features such as audio or video interviews with the authors and other background information. Commercial publishers seem very interested in enhanced e-books for the value-added features, which in turn can result in a higher price for enhanced e-books. Of course, all that material also simply could exist on a Web site. But how do your charge for a Web site? Hence, back to e-books where there’s an easily recognizable price model for consumers.

And what about e-books and magazines that follow a cloud model? That’s worth exploring in a post all its own.

The Frankfurt Book Fair is coming up next month and one our clients, Ellen Bryson, will have her debut novel promoted at the fair.

Ceci did the illustrations for the novel (and, yes, it’s adult literary fiction with illustrations). We’re also in the processing of building Ellen’s website. Her novel will be released by Henry Holt in the summer of 2010. I’m going to have more posts about the developing of Ellen’s author website, but for now you can look at the preview page at ellenbryson.com.

Publishers Weekly has a great list of books promoted by publishers and literary agencies at this year’s fair. Here’s the brief on Ellen Bryson’s novel:

On the adult fiction front, Foundry has the debut novel The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno by Ellen Bryson (Holt, 2010); set in 1865 New York, the book follows the titular character—he performs as the “living skeleton” in P.T. Barnum’s American museum—whose life is changed after being hired by Barnum to be the showman’s personal detective.

Usability authority Jakob Nielsen has a very good article about Kindle Content Design & identifies that “Kindle works poorly for non-fiction books that have many illustrations or that require users to frequently refer back and forth between sections. Even if Kindle had a color screen, heavily illustrated books would still be better in print because moving around in Kindle is awkward.”

Nielsen believes that “the ability to inspire deep thinking is why non-fiction books still have value compared with websites….”

Relationship to book design? Designing a non-fiction book is much more stimulating to a book designer than designing a book of fiction since non-fiction offers many more elements for engaging the reader, e.g., diagrams, images, block quotes, pull quotes, captions, sub-headings. These elements all add a level of interaction with the content that changes the way a person reads a book.

Yet, this enriched interaction with a text does not translate smoothly to reflowable e-book formats (e.g., Kindle, ePub, etc.).

To compensate Nielsen advises, and I think this is a very important statement in his article:

“For Kindle, it’s certainly unacceptable to simply repurpose print content. But you can’t repurpose website content, either. For good Kindle usability, you have to design for the Kindle. Write Kindle-specific headlines and create Kindle-specific article structures.”

Read this part again: “But you can’t repurpose website content, either.” There’s an irony behind that since the underlying format behind Kindle & ePub is HTML & CSS.

Well, this should certainly keep writers, editors, and designers busy. But is it cost-effective for a publisher?

Or are lower-cost, mostly automated, quick-&-dirty conversions good enough for users that prefer mobile devices and reflowable text? Or, good enough for now until this market shakes out over the course of the next few years and we all see what device and formats are really going to dominate? In 5 years perhaps the Kindle will be nothing more than a netbook, and in that case we’re back to using PDF and/or designing for Web browsers and creating a stylesheet for mobile devices.

Is This Insanity?

From a strategic standpoint the difficulty of a publisher designing for the Kindle is that in the mid-1990s we entered an age of continuously redesigning content. Or as Nielsen says, “It’s simply the 1995 lesson updated to a 2009 device.” And I’m only referring to digital content, not the porting of print to digital. But what happens with the 2010 device, the 2011 device, the 2012 device? Evolving technological capabilities have kept Web designers gainfully employed for years now.

As a person running a design firm I should be an enthusiastic champion for specifically redesigning books for Kindle. But just as Web sites are often redesigned every few years to incorporate new features offered by advances in technology, will we see e-books redesigned every few years? Or should the focus be elsewhere, such as thinking about how to create original digital content that doesn’t have a corresponding print component? Or perhaps the print component of digital content is a deeper, more engaging examination of the topic? Or any of several other possibilities. But continually redesigning the same material into different formats isn’t progress.