Fiction Electronic Books: A Usability Study

This paper focuses on fiction electronic books and their usability. Two complementary studies were drawn together in order to investigate whether fiction e-books can successfully become part of people’s reading habits: the Visual Book project, which found that electronic texts which closely resemble their paper counterparts in terms of visual components such as size, quality and design were received positively by users, and the EBONI Project which aimed to define a set of best practice guidelines for designing electronic textbooks. It was found that the general guidelines for the design of textbooks on the Internet that have been proposed by the EBONI project can also be applied to the design of fiction e-books. Finally, in terms of the electronic production of fiction e-books, this study suggests that concentrating on the appearance of text, rather than the technology itself, can lead to better quality publications to rival the print version of fiction books.