Are E-books taking over your shelves?

Above: An example of an E-book (Source:Google.com)

Brace yourself because one of the effects of the rapid technology of the internet is electronic books! Also known as E-books which consist of text which eventually be classified as e-text as well. It is just your normal conventional book; you just see it digitally through a monitor or digital screen. E-books can be installed in specialized E-readers or PDA (Personal Data Assistant). However, today there are many critics about E-Book itself, from copyright law to copying issues, it still haunts the document designers. (James 2002)

Above: Example of conventional books (Source:Google.com)

The advantages and disadvantages

Well, on the personal note the best advantage would be hyperlinks. Inside, e-books you can have hyperlinks that can be give excellent cross referencing capabilities for the readers. (Doctorow 2004) Besides that, readers who have difficulty reading small fonts in the conventional book , would have the ability to increase font size to a bigger one in E-books. (Doctorow 2004) However, with great benefits would usually have their flaws. E-books generally need power, regardless if it’s being viewed on the personal computer or in E-readers it still needs power to operate. Second, there will always be different file formats, such as PDF, WDF, and etc that might not be applicable to future programs to read it. Basically, there is no standardization of format because technology keeps improving everyday

So how does it take on, in document publishing terms?

Well this is an electronic document, so according to Jacob Neilson many theories will have to be applied to ensure reader’s satisfaction. For example in documents, menu should usually be left justified so that user’s eyes can move in a straight line and don’t have to re acquire the beginning of each new line. (Neilson 2008) In addition to that e-books should have fitted doucmented that have hyperlinks and navigation menu to assist readers during read time. (Walsh 2006)Besides that, readers that read through monitors usually scan the documents for keywords, therefore document designers should plan their articles, journals or materials before writing them down in the document itself. (Neilson 2008)

References List

Walsh, M. 2006, Australian Journal of language and literacy, “The ‘textual shift’: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts”, Vol.29, No.1, pp.24-37.

James F , B (2002) ‘The Electronic Book and PDA’ Viewed at 9^th June 2008 at http://www.scinet.cc/articles/ebook/electronicbook.html

Doctorow, C (2004) ‘Neither E, Nor Books’ Viewed at 9^th June 2008 at http://craphound.com/ebooksneitherenorbooks.txt

Neilson, J (2008) 'Right Justified Navigation Menus Impede Scannability' Viewed at 9th June 2008 at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/navigation-menu-alignment.html