The Visual Book and the Hyper-TextBook: Two Electronic Books One Lesson?

This paper presents the results of two separate studies into electronic book production. The Visual Book (Landoni, 1997) which explored the importance of the visual component of the book metaphor in the production of “good” electronic books, and the Hyper-TextBook (Crestani and Melucci, 1998a) which instead concentrated on the importance of hypertext models for the automatic production of functional electronic books. Both studies started from similar considerations on what kinds of paper books are more suitable for being translated into electronic form and both identified as target publications which are meant to be used as references more than sequentially read by users. The result of these two research strands is critically presented in this paper, with the aim of integrating them in a more general research work aimed at providing a complete methodology on how to produce electronic books in a cheap and fast way, so that they are visually appealing and at the same provide the user with a set of desirable searching and browsing functionalities.