The eReading Experience

What Product Wraps a Book and Why is it Important

8 February 2013

AJ Renold, MIMS ’14arenold@ischool.berkeley.edu

The Future of eBooks @ UC Berkeley School of Information

Use Cases to get us started!

• Reading a print book

• Reading an ebook in an eReader

• A group of students reviewing articles together

• Students listening to a college lecture and taking notes

What is a Wrapper?• A Wrapper provides a set of

features that enable a reader to interact with a document

• iBooks App, Inkling App, Kno App, CourseSmart, Kindle Interface(s) - eReaders are a type of Wrapper

• Wrappers are not just eReaders

• What about Evernote? Zotero? - Personal Information Management Tools are a type of Wrapper

• What about Course Management - Course Management Tools are a type of Wrapper

Wrapper

DocumentText

Document Collections• Wrappers contain collections of

documents that are presented to readers in a library and reading interface

• Key questions:

• Where does a reader access or import documents?

• Who controls the document collection?

• Is a document collection shared?

Anatomy of Annotations

Inkling Annotation Anchor and Offset

Annotations are a broad description for highlights, notes, or external markup that denote important pieces of a document

Annotations

• Most Wrappers have annotation features and can aggregate annotations into a notebook

• Readers use a diverse range of personal annotating systems

• 83% Only highlight (no body/marginalia) v. 9% anchor and body

• Privacy is expected

• Readers value existing annotations if they know the author’s credibility

Annotations Key Questions

• What are new types of annotations that a wrapper can facilitate? - Questions, Polls, YouTube, Voice Notes?

• Are notes made outside of the text considered annotations?

• Can authors or publishers access these annotations?

Navigation• Movement - how do readers move

from page to page? between links in a document? or from a summary of annotations back to the text?

• Orientation - how do readers know where they are in the book? chapter? section?

• Search - eReaders only and variety of search methods possible - full text, collection level, structural (ie only section headers), annotations, semantic

Inkling Navigation

Navigation Key Questions

• Do aggregated annotations offer a new navigation tool?

• What innovations can be made beyond full text search?

• Semantic search in a document or at collection level?

Clipping• Extracting portions of a

work

• A ubiquitous activity - 43% social, 28% reference, 14% reminder

• Wrappers support clipping in a variety of ways

Clipping Key Questions• How to facilitate re-encountering Clippings

(Physical v. Digital)?

• Does DRM interfere with clipping in eReaders?

• Why I love Evernote! - but major gap between note taking and eReaders

Evernote Web Clipper

Collaborative Reading• Asynchronous or Synchronous

• Co-located or Remote

• Features are driven by purpose

• Shared annotations, a professor’s key points (professor to student)

• Annotations as the starting point for marginalia discussion (student to class)

• Annotations shared within a study group (student to student)

Collaborative Reading Key Questions

• What is shared how and with whom? - Important privacy implications

• What about clippings?

• Other experimentation? - place finding feature for locating the same point in a text - from - Co-Reading: Investigating Collaborative Group Reading - Pearson, Owen, Thimbleby and Buchanan

Convenience Features• Offline reading

• Device Sync

• File Formats and Content Portability

• Key questions:

• What devices support the Wrapper? How do we offer better cross-device solutions?

• Can we move away from proprietary formats to give documents more portability?

Segmenting by Purpose• Understanding the underlying purpose of reading

helps us segment wrappers into categories

• Interactive - how much the reader interacts with the text

• Immersive - how focused the reader is on the ideas and concepts of the text

Interactive

Answering an email, taking notes in class

academic/law research

Interactive Magazine TextbookInteractive

Skimming a newspaper Reading a novel

ImmersiveImmersive

Categories of Wrappers

Interactive

Immersive

General Reading

Note Taking

Education

Annotation Apps

Web Technology• The Problem: Many Wrappers provide features for

different purposes and these features are often useful together, but do not work together

• Approaching a Solution with Web Technology

• Can Wrappers be better integrated or combined in a useful way?

• Can users be allowed to customize their Wrapper for a more personal purpose-focused experience?

• Can books be published in a more portable format?

• Web apps are becoming better suited to cross-device solutions and experimentation is easy

APIs

• Not just Evernote, but many applications integrate via APIs

• Using similar standards (document type, annotations, clippings) is important and can help with meaningful API uses

• Wrappers should not be closed systems

Parting Thoughts• Understanding wrappers and their purpose is important to authoring,

teaching, and designing new and better products for reading

• Diverse reading purposes demand a diverse set of features and UX is very important, giving wrappers many useful features presents a UX challenge

• Textbooks and instructional books must be reinvented, not just ported to electronic versions - Test Prep Websites

• Experimenting

• The Future of eBooks @ UC Berkeley School of Information

• Experiment, Test, Validate!

Sources

• Reading and Writing the Electronic Book - Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services - Marshall

• http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00215ED1V01Y200907ICR009

Appendix: Wrappers & GapsWrapper CategoriesWrapper CategoriesWrapper CategoriesWrapper Categories

eReaders Note-taking Apps Annotation Apps Course Management

Purpose General Reading Notes, but not necessarily eBooks

PDFs Education

Annotations Can a variety of annotation types be supported?Can a variety of annotation types be supported?Can a variety of annotation types be supported?Can a variety of annotation types be supported?

Navigation Collection level search, structural search and semantic search?Collection level search, structural search and semantic search?Collection level search, structural search and semantic search?Collection level search, structural search and semantic search?

Clipping Clipping is not well supported, yet social activities drive itClipping is not well supported, yet social activities drive itClipping is not well supported, yet social activities drive itClipping is not well supported, yet social activities drive it

Bookmarking Can annotations replace bookmarking?Can annotations replace bookmarking?Can annotations replace bookmarking?Can annotations replace bookmarking?

Collaborative Reading

Sharing and collaborating is done in many different ways across wrapper categoriesSharing and collaborating is done in many different ways across wrapper categoriesSharing and collaborating is done in many different ways across wrapper categoriesSharing and collaborating is done in many different ways across wrapper categories

Convenience Features

Cross-device Comparability needs to improve and can more open formats be adopted?Cross-device Comparability needs to improve and can more open formats be adopted?Cross-device Comparability needs to improve and can more open formats be adopted?Cross-device Comparability needs to improve and can more open formats be adopted?

UX Good UX is a must, features cannot distract from reading activities, yet the features demanded by categories are diverse

Good UX is a must, features cannot distract from reading activities, yet the features demanded by categories are diverse

Good UX is a must, features cannot distract from reading activities, yet the features demanded by categories are diverse

Good UX is a must, features cannot distract from reading activities, yet the features demanded by categories are diverse

Web Tech Browser based products have better cross-device capability, web technology lend themselves to better understanding user activity (behavioral data mining)

Browser based products have better cross-device capability, web technology lend themselves to better understanding user activity (behavioral data mining)

Browser based products have better cross-device capability, web technology lend themselves to better understanding user activity (behavioral data mining)

Browser based products have better cross-device capability, web technology lend themselves to better understanding user activity (behavioral data mining)

Appendix: Survey of eReaders

Features: File Formats Purpose Search Sharing Features Tagging Device Sync Course

Management

iBooks ProprietaryPDF

General Reading Full Text Share Clippings No Yes iTunes U

Inkling Inkling store Education YesYes (by friending another user)

NoiPad and Web (Apple

Devices) Instructor can

bootstrap

Kno Kno store, PDF Education Yes - Collection Level Oriented by Course No App and Web Yes

CourseSmart Proprietary Education Yes No No Yes No

Subtext Many (epub, pdf, doc, google books)

Education / Group Oriented

YesAnnotations shared, user chooses privacy

levelYes iPad only

Instructors manage groups and doc

collections

*there are many!!!