Introduction
lolololololol olo lo lolo lololololol olo lo lo lolo ette er en test. Lololol. YESS!
Table of Contents
With the ever evolving standard that is CSS, there has for a time been quite possible to create digital books using open web standards, but it has been hard, requires specialized tools (such as Prince and Antenna House).
Amazon ebooks, as well as the epub standard (in use by vendors such as Google and Apple, as well as the de-facto standard format for ebooks in Norway) both uses CSS as their style sheet language for rendering text. An alternative to this approach is to create digital texts using standard web technologies and displaying the text in a web browser. Nellie McKesson points out{title: Building Books with CSS3} presents an informal study of how this can be achieved with today's technologies, mostly based on the CSS Generated Content for Paged Media Module.
Oppgavetekst
This thesis aims to explore the possibilities of using modern web based digital typographic techniques to enhance the experience of prolonged reading of digital texts, using a university compendium of texts and digital typography best-practices gathered from available litterature.
WHY?
Liste opp fordeler jeg ser med digitale bøker
- Environmental
- Portable
- Searchable
- Usability - svaksynte, etc.
Background / motivation
Ever since the introduction of the home computer, more and more information is being consumed digitally. Music and photographs have been digitized for years already, with movies slowly joining its cousins. One type of medium has however has, even though the format is easy to store and reproduce (especially compared to the husky video files) has eluded digital consuption: the long form text book.
The idea of reading books digitally is not at all new, with the availability of digital books on the Internet predating the world wide web by decades. The world's largest digital library, Project Gutenberg has for instance been around since 19711.
Still, studies show that most people prefer to read texts in a physical format, citing various reasons to why this is the case. The issue is not a lack of availability of text online, but rather something else entirely. Studies has tried to ....
This thesis will through the development of a prototype book, using a set of emerging web technologies, try to create the "perfect book", by alleviating the pitfalls that the studies points out and by implementing all the features deemed neccessary to create a pleasant reading experience of digital text.
There is some evidence that the perception of digital text is changing. The Amazon Kindle and the Apple iPad has with their impressive sales figures proved that people are starting to purchase books in digital form, which can suggest that people do in fact read digital texts.
Additionally, the studies describing the problems with digital texts are beginning to show their age, evident by them pointing to the limited screen real estate and costant flickering of antiquated CRT displays as being among the detrimental factors of digital text consumption.
Studies does however point to evidence suggesting that there are fundamental differences in how texts are being consumed digitally compared to equivalent physically printed texts.
There are today several ways of consuming digital texts, the most obvious being the Internet – a truly mammoth repository of interlinked, mostly textual, documents. Other methods of digital reading includes specialized devices for reading texts, devices with special screens optimized for legibility. An example of such a device is the Amazon Kindle with its eInk screen. Handheld tablet computers, such as the Apple iPad are also a popular type of device for reading digital texts. Tablet computers are often equipped with screens and hardware capable of displaying non-textual content. What these devices have in common, is their way of presenting long form texts – paginated and in general typographically pleasing texts.
With maturing web standards and web technologies, new modern typographic techniques are made possible, realizing a possibility to create web based digital long-form texts potentially rivalling the ones made possible by the specialized reading experiences created by the specialized devices mentioned above.
Thinking out loud
Kan være et poeng å nevne at mange mener at vi ikke har tid til å lese lenger. Det kan nesten synes som om det skrevne ord er mindre og mindre verd....... Kan hende det er tilfelle for det å lese for moro skyld, men mengen pedagogisk litteratur som kun finnes i tekstlig form er mange ganger flere enn det som finnes i andre formater. Skal man forvente at i framtiden vil alt finnes i mange formater? Skal en spille inn lydbok av alle verdens (lære-) bøker? Mindre sannsynlig. Er noe sannsynlig at fremtidens verktøy automatisk kan lage digitalt oppleste versjoner. Er dog såppas langt inn i fremtiden at det ikke er noe hensikt å ta høyde for dette.
There are however pundits that claims that people read less, and have do not have the time to sit down and read longer text anymore (Steve Jobs, Jakob Nilsen). Why is this? What can we do to fix this? Are there alternatives (Digital Natives, etc.)? There are little reason to believe User created content... Prodcuction costs. Material already available.
There are instruction books that sprinkle their books with additional digital content, such as illustrative videos and animations, lectures, etc. The main content is still textual. There are reasons to find what one can do to create a digital text that people will read. To do this, I will have to:
- identify why we hate to read digital texts
- identify what makes the kindle, ipad, such text readable (as it turns out, we can read if we want to)
- look at specific metaphors (espc. pagination vs scrolling)
- drink inhuman amounts of coffee
- make a modern digital text with quality content
- compare this text to traditional digital text
- ???
- Profit
Other areas
- Identifing the catalysts behind the digital boom. Why are people reading digitally when studies finds that peple hate it.
- This might provide some insight into how to create the perfect book
- Identifying related, competing products
- Why use the web as a platform when there are a plethora of competing products?
- Open and stuff
DO THIS TODAY!
The ever evolving CSS standard has recently introduced a proposed standard dynamic pagination of content, emulating how one would navigate a physical book.
Why is this done?
- it might be some reasons to do this. There should be. Apple iBooks, Kindle does this. Is this just because of technical
- Richer typography.
Has been possible with heavy amounts of JavaScript before
Tror ikke jeg har skrevet ned "historien" til paginert innhold på nettet noe sted. Er muligens litt for mange ubegrunnede antagelser her, men skriver det allikevel ned
Some kind of history
Pagination started as:
- a way to chunk information (there is data on why this is a smart thing to do)
- save bandwidth (especially in older browsers, where nothing was shown until the page in its entirety was loaded)
Now it is used to:
- mostly for more ad impressions
- probably to chunk information
- nag-ware, to force people into a paid subscription to see entire articles on one single page
Today's paging is done rather poorly, as the bandwidth-reason of yesteryear does not apply anymore. Due to different screen sizes (not as much the issue earlier as it is now), there is a mix between the scroll and paging metaphor. In-browser search is broken – you cannot search an entire article for key words, only a screen worth of text.
Paging mostly used for pictures, slideshows.
The amount of information consumed digitally is ever increasing, and with the introduction and increasing popularity of tablet computer devices in education, this trend does not seem to stop, with teachers highly endorsing the use of such devices in school.
At the time of writing there are multiple initiatives that aims to digitize the world's information to make it accessible to the human population in both time and space, with notable projects including Project Gutenberg and Google Books. With the introduction of new technologies such as the tablet computer and designated reading tablets making reading digital text no longer as painful as it used to be, we seem to be headed towards a future where text is consumed predominantly digitally. Yet there has been little conclusive research on how text is consumed and reflected upon when read digitally.
Goals of this study
Primary goal
Research how a text produced using modern typographical techniques is percieved by a group of students, compared to an equivalent text produced through traditional means.
Why? Because the probability of Maximize the usability of digital texts.
Dyson and Haselgrov (2000, 2001) points to how digital text is traditionally laid out as a long continuous scrolling page might affect how readers comprehend the text, In physical books, a reader is able to keep a mental map of where important information is located, in reltaion to the physical book and page itself (approximations to where in the book a chapter is, where on a page an important chunk of information is) This is lost in
STUDY X has found that the students who spent more time in between navigation , as in instead of continually scrolling, they read an entire screen worth of text and then scrolled to reveal a new screen of text
resulted in better retention.
Reflection FTW!
This can be related to STUDY Y, where rats where shown to remember better if they had time in between stimuli, providing them time to reflect on what was learned. (ohoy, dette er tynt).
Most academic texts available on the Internet today are available in PDF format, a format time and time again deemed unsatisfactory when consuming text digitally.
PDF is great for one thing and one thing only: printing documents. Paper is superior to computer screens in many ways, and users often prefer to print documents that are too long to easily read online.
For online reading, however, PDF is the monster from the Black Lagoon. It puts its clammy hands all over people with a cruel grip that doesn't let go.
Jacob Nielsen
While studies continue to show that people prefer to print and read long form texts, the success of devices such as the Kindle show us that text can in fact be presented in a format that users would like to use. In other words: can be consumed digitally if the text presented fits the format. With increasingly sophisticated web browsers and web standards, and better screens, is it possible to create texts that are pleasing and usable for digital consumption? What effects on the user, in terms of retention and recollection has texts created using new technologies compared to the "old" way of presenting digitally? What effects do such texts have in comparison to the "traditional" printed page?
Another hurdle to digital consumption is that SOMEONE, while investigating how people learn from texts, points to how digital texts are missing an easy way to take notes, compared to physical texts. On printed pages a reader is able to take notes in margins of the text and highlight text if deemed important. There are tools available for digital texts, but compared to pen and paper they are cumbersome.
How does a text laid out with new hypertext typography techbnologies and techniques compare with equivalent texts laid out with traditional means?
Secondary goals
Related to how people experience and how pleasing a digital book is perceived, there are a few quantiative data points that might be interesting to study.
Reflection
maybe
Speed of reading
The litterature is not inconclusive on the effects of reading speed on the comprehension and rememberability of texts, but seems to point in the direction that for texts read on screens, faster reading speeds results in better comprehension.
Reading at extreme speeds seems to affect incidental information recall, but not the comprension of the text as a whole.
A lower reading speed might be an indication of something.
Retention rate
There might be a difference in how much the respondents retain the information extraced from the read text.
Comprehension
maybe this too
A technical comparison
Since the late 2000's the popularity of ebooks has soared, much thanks to the Amazon Kindle ebook reader and accompanying store. These books are however released in a locked down format (DRM), where a user is forced to use the formats, devices and in some cases even bookstores owned by the content provider. While controlling the entrire experience from start to finish can make for a great user experience (as well as being economically lucrative for a manufacturer and content provider), this may create problems when a user wants to switch content provicer. New books may not work the old reading device (forcing a user to buy a new reading device), and/or the old content store's books may not work with a new device (rendering previously bought books useless). A secondary goal of this study is thus to explore the feasability to deliver content in an open format which is readable wherever a modern web browser is available.
Academic papers are in most cases delivered in PDF documents, which are designed for printing. From a usability perspective, such formates can be cumbersome. See chapter X for a discussion on usability. Another secondary goal of this thesis is to explore the increased usability resulting from use of a text responsively formatted compared to their equivalents formatted as paged PDF documents.
Context
The context in which this thesis is done ... Yeah.
The thesis is done in cooperation with Opera Software.
Research questions
What are the questions you are answering with your project? Normally, you specify a main question and related sub-questions. Remember that at the end you have to demonstrate you have answered to the stated questions. It is not uncommon that the questions are changed during the project, but it is important to be as explicit as possible and as early as possible with research questions since they help you to focus.
The litterature in general suggests that physical texts are preferred to digital counterparts, but both the amount and ratio of text read digitally are rapidly rising. There are some hypotheseses and theories on why this muight be the case, this thesis is to examine these to see if students respond positively to this by measuring the usability of a text produced based on best practices and centuries of ...
The text will be compared to text stylized in a more traditional manner, to see what format the respondents prefer. The respondents will be interviewed to unveil
The usability is to be assessed using the System Usability Scale(SUS) developed by John Brooke.
What is different now, some literacy experts say, is that spending time on the Web, whether it is looking up something on Google or even britneyspears.org, entails some engagement with text.
The prototype
To assess the usability, a working prototype text is to be produced. The creation of this prototype constitutes a secondary part of the thesis. This is to get an indication of how hard it is to create a text using the new standards, either from scratch or converting an existing text. This will help assess difficulties and the feasability of the conversion in future projects.
Furthermore, this thesis will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using HTML as a publishing platform for long form textual content, both from the respondents' perspecitives gathered through the user tesing and perspecitves gathered from available litterature.
The content of this prototype is to be a compendium of articles to be read as part of the course IT1301 – Datastøttet læring at the IDI faculty of NTNU. A set of articles are to be converted inot
Compared to competing products, especially the Apple iBooks Author, the tools for creating web pages are more intended for developers and programmers, making the process harder for non-programmers to do.
There does exist so-called What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editors that makes it possible for people with no programming experience to create web pages. These editors lets a user desing a web page by writing text directly on a canvas, dragging and dropping pictures to where they want them to be – the code required to actually render the web page is automatically generated by the tool. This compared to the rather intimidating plain text editors and command line tools present in "regular" web developers' tool boxes, where the design of the page is reduced to lines of code. Examples of popular WYSIWYG editors available for use at the time of the writing of this is Adobe's Dreamweaver and Museand Realmac Software's RapidWeaver.
The WYSIWYG editors in use today might not be up to the task, as there might be a different set of best-practices that designers need to adhere to compared to traditional web pages that the "standard" WYSIWYG editors catering to tradtional web masters are simply unable to do.
Additionally, by not iterating as fast as the HTML standard is today, these editors might not have the features needed to create the experience that we wish to create in this thesis.
It is plausible that there will exist specialized applications capable of creating beautiful book styled web pages in the future, making it possible for non-programmers to create books in the same way that iBooks Author does.
Primary Research Questions
- How does a text created using HTML technologies compare to a text using traditional typography techniques?
- How does the user experience of using HTML technolgies compare to the user experience from using competing epublishing formats?
- What does students feel about prolonged use of a digital text authored using new HTML typographic techniques?
Secondary Research Questions
- How hard is it to create a digital text using HTML technologies?
- What advantages and disadvantages exists in the creation, compared to relevant alternatives?
Advantages
- Linking to external sources
- Embedding of external media
- Ease of sharing (potentially just a link)
- Portability
- Longevity
Research Method
How? By creating Clementine.
Clementine
As part of this thesis there is to be created a working prototype, henceforth dubbed Clementine
Below are the most important features included in the prototype.
A prototype showcasing what is possible using new web authoring techniques will also be produced in the course of this project. The text will adhere to normative typographic convensions as much as possible.
Metaphors
Traditional web pages are read from top to bottom in a way reminicient of the ancient papyrus roll. What is then lost is thousands of years of development and evolution of the book.
Studies show that the form of the text are greatly influencing how users feel about the readability and something about the text.
Web typography revived and stuff. A wish to present the web in a more modern and readable (legible?) format?
The web has long been stagnated in the idea of the long scrolling text. Previous studies showing that "people won't" scroll. Paginated content, where the content is split into more surmountable "chunks". Also, older browsers not showing content before everything is loaded. Today regarded as useless. Long loadning times. Browsers showing content as soon as it is ready. Newer studies showing that people do indeed scroll. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, whathaveyounot, offering the new UI concept of endless scrolling. Actually paginating in a way, but dynamically loading the next page, providing an endless page. Shorter loading times. Does not solve the problem of skimming text, the benefits of chunking content.
Pagination should solve this, maybe.
This technique makes it possible for a web author to stylize content in a way that resembles the classic book look and feel, as seen in virtually all other ebook reader software and hardware.
With the ongoing evolution of web standards, the ability to use custom fonts, paginated and columnize content has been introduced, among other stuff.
While it has been possible to dynamically paginate web pages in the past, this has required JavaScript. This JavaScript being implemented slightly different in all browser rendering engines, creating bugs and incompatibilities. (case in point – Treesaver, a JavaScript library enabling pagination of web articles, not being available in all browsers). * limits who can create, as JavaScript is harder than CSS
The introduction of the pagination module in CSS makes it possible for web authors to implement paginated web pages with comparative ease – one line of CSS (overflow: paged-x;
), instead of hundreds of lines of JavaScript.
With this in mind, there seems to be a generally accepted view that a paginated view is the best way to consume long form textual content. This study will examine the validity of this statement by examining relevant literature, and by testing a functional prototype against alternatives to assess the validity/accuracy of this stuff.
Pagination
Introduced with the proposed Generated Content for Paged Media Module web standard, the possibility to dynamically paginate web pages are being introduced to web browsers.
Note that at the time of the writing of this document, only the latest versions of the Opera and Chrome browsers have some implementation of this proposed standard in place, with the Opera browser implementation being the most complete.
User surveys, interviews, stuff like that
TBD
Result
The results expected from this study is
from interviews with a selection of respondents an overview of how the technology is percieved to perform in a real world setting is expected to be produced.
... using the industry standard tests and forms and stuff that exists.
Prototype
The prototype itself in a usable manner
This report
Hopefully viewable in the prototype
Data gathered from the tests
Outline of the report
- Stuff
- More stuff
- Stuff
- Stuff
- Yep, more stuff
Mindre ting, tror ikke jeg skal bruke dette.
The growth of the web as a platform, and the revived interest in creating an open web standard that is available to all has together ... .... provided designers tools for creating a beautiful reading experience with standardized methods for embedding custom fonts, column based layouts, paginated navigation and more. The web is gradually gaining the tools and techniques needed to provide a truly beautiful reading experience.
Marc Prensky notes that children today, haven grown up alongside the new technologies are so-called digital natives, and that most if not all research today has been done with a digital immigrant mind frame, using traditional psychology standards that might* be invalid. (dette er tynt)
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