From the Visual Book to the WEB Book: The Importance of Good Design

This paper presents the results of two studies into electronic book production. The Visual Book study [1] explored the importance of the visual component of the book metaphor for the production of more effective electronic books, while the WEB Book study [2] took the findings of the Visual Book and applied them to the production of books for publication on the WWW. Both studies started from an assessment of which kinds of paper book are more suitable for conversion into electronic form, and both identified as target publications those which are meant to be used for reference rather than those which are read sequentially and usually in their entirety by users. This includes scientific publications and textbooks which have been chosen for the Visual Book and the WEB Book experiments. In this paper we discuss the results of the two studies and the way they could influence the design and production of more effective electronic books.