Electronic Books (eBooks)
Select one of the subject areas in the navigation bar to view recommended readings. The genre of electronic books is quite extensive and spans topics ranging from hypertext theory to comparisons of reading paper books versus electronic books. Please note, while we include citations from resources available only from the Internet, we try to use only those sources that are written by an author who has published in a referred publication. Simply put, we rely on "brand" names that are recognizable experts in the field of hypertext and electronic book design. The topic eBook Opinions and eBook Glossary as well as the list below were written by Harold Henke. The eBook Articles and Books topics provide suggested reference material.
Spiraling Up and Down the Spiral Development Staircase. IPCC 1994 Scaling New Heights in Technical Communications, Banff, Alberta, Canada, IEEE Professional Communication Society. This article describes how documentation design and the publication team was integral to the development process of a software solution. (An interesting note was in addition to online help, the deliverables included a fully hypertext linked online book.) Available from IEEE which is located at: www.ieee.org.
Managing Intranet Web Pages: Issues
and Techniques.
Article written in 1996 with some good references and
many predictions by authors and experts about the growth of the Intranet and
even the beginnings of Business to Business (B2B) commerce.
Are Electrons Better Than Papyrus? (Or Can Adobe Acrobat Reader Files Replace Hardcopy?) This article discusses a usability test conducted to validate if a paper book could be replaced by an electronic book. The article is available online from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) digital library, which is located at www.acm.org. The article was presented at the 1998 SIGDOC ACM Conference, Quebec City, Canada, September, Scaling the Heights: The Future of Information Technology.
Paper Book Metaphors in the Design of
Electronic Books.
Brief position paper written by Harold Henke and presented at the 1999 SIGCHI ACM
Conference as part of the Designing Electronic Books Workshop.
Books on Demand. and ePublishing: A Natural
Progression
Originally published by Future of Print Media for the Winter, 2001 edition. This article was
excerpted from Electronic Books and ePublishing and
describes how print on demand fits in very well with electronic publishing.
The Global Impact of ePublishing. ACM SIGDOC 2001: Communicating in the New Millennium, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, October, 2001. This article describes how electronic books may be distributed globally including the use of cell phones as reading devices. The article is available online from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) digital library, which is located at www.acm.org.
The pBook on eBooks: An Author's Journey. National Institute of Standards and Technology, Electronic Book 2001, Authors, Applications, and Accessibility Conference. Washington, DC, USA, November, 2001. This presentation describes some key points about publishing an electronic book in conjunction with a paper book.
Survey on Electronic Book Features. The survey represents feedback from a variety of people -- ranging from authors to publishers to consumers -- and provides data on a survey where users ranked 48 features they wanted included in an electronic book. As well as the "top ten list", the ratings and rankings for all 48 features are presented in the report with an extensive discussion of the results. Available online at http://www.openebook.org/doc_library/surveys
Retirement Plans for the Self-Employed and Tax Planning for the Self-Employed are available from www.bwa.org/articles/tax_planning_for_the_self-employed.htm and www.bwa.org/articles/retirement_plans_for_the_self-employed.htm. Though these are not related to eBooks, these are articles I wrote for the Boulder Writers Alliance in November, 2002, on managing taxes as a self-employed person. Worth a look if you are self-employed.
Consumer Survey on eBooks. This survey represents feedback from "regular" paper book readers about their attitudes towards ebooks. You can read a summary of the survey at http://www.openebook.org/doc_library/surveys
Consumer Acceptance of eBooks Grows by Warren Chiara, BookTech Magazine, January/February, 2003 discusses the survey I published for the OeBF on Consumer Attitudes Towards eBooks. I am quoted in the article. Article is available from www.booktechmag.com
eBooks by the Numbers: Open eBook Forum Compiles Industry Growth Stats: Report Points to Solid Growth of Electronic Publishing, Open eBook Forum, July, 2003 is a press release on the first publishing and retail statistics gathered for the eBook publishing industry. I was the author of the methodology used to gather and present the data. I also wrote the first report which was described in the press release which you can view at www.openebook.org.