Toward a Definition

Electronic Books: Reading and Studying with Supportive Resources

Lynne Anderson-Inman Mark Horney

This is a revised version of an article originally published in 1997 under the title " Electronic Books for Secondary Students" (Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 40 (6), 486-491); it is posted here with the permission of the International Reading Association. In addition to updating the text to reflect new developments in the field, the authors have taken advantage of the electronic environment to add a number of illustrative resources and links to supplementary information.

Introduction

The term electronic book means different things to different people. For some, it is software that talks; for others, it is a CD-ROM full of interconnected pictures, text, movies, and sound. Both images suggest the truth, but both provide somewhat superficial definitions. When is it appropriate to call a software program an electronic book? Why does the term book get applied to software anyway? In what ways is an electronic book similar to a traditional book? What are the advantages and disadvantages of having a book in electronic form? Are all electronic books equally useful to teachers and students? These are some of the questions we hope to answer in this column -- for, whether we like it or not, electronic books are here to stay.

Contents

The column contains the following sections:

• Toward a Definition
• Purposes
• Advantages and Disadvantages
• Types of Embedded Resources
• An Example: Edgar Allan Poe
• Evaluating and Selecting Electronic Books
• References

Author Information

Anderson-Inman (e-mail: lynneai@oregon.uoregon.edu) is director of the Center for Advanced Technology in Education and of the Center for Electronic Studying at the University of Oregon, Eugene, USA; Horney (e-mail: mhorney@oregon.uoregon.edu) is a research associate in the Center for Electronic Studying at the same university. At the time of original posting of this article, they were section editors of The Electronic Classroom.

Toward a Definition

We adopt a fairly stringent set of criteria for deciding whether a piece of software is or is not an electronic book. Not everyone will agree with the following four criteria, but they help to limit the domain to programs with at least a few features in common.

• Criterion 1 -- electronic text
• Criterion 2 -- book metaphor
• Criterion 3 -- organizing theme
• Criterion 4 -- multimedia text enhancements

1. An electronic book must have electronic text and that text must be presented to the reader visually. The delivery mechanism, however, is unimportant. In other words, the electronic text might be saved to a floppy disk, burned onto a CD-ROM, downloaded from the Internet, or built into a palm-sized " digital reader." Applying this criterion rules out software with only pictures (even if they are called electronic picture books), as well as prerecorded books on tape. The former has no text at all and the latter's text is not presented visually.

2. The software must adopt the metaphor of a book in some significant way. For example, the program might have a " table of contents, " screens of information might be referred to as " pages, " readers might be able to add " bookmarks" or make " margin notes." By adopting the metaphor of a book, the author or developer situates the program within a genre of reading materials that is familiar. The metaphorical language helps readers to use a program effectively because they are familiar with the nonelectronic equivalents to these features. In other words, we know what a bookmark is so when we see that the software allows us to insert bookmarks we can do it easily and intuitively. If the feature which allows us to mark pages were called a " text retriever" or " idea highlighter" we would not be so confident. More to the point, we would not feel like we were reading a book.

3. The software has to have a focus or organizing theme. Some electronic books replicate the organizing theme of an existing book or set of books. For example, The New Way Things Work (DK Multimedia) is an animated and interactive version of David Macaulay's bestselling book. The World Book Multimedia Encyclopedia (World Book, 1998) presents roughly the same information found in a set of their printed encyclopedias. Other electronic books do not have any printed equivalent, although they might cover topics found in books. A.D.A.M.: The Inside Story (A.D.A.M Internet Health, 1999) is a heavily illustrated and animated electronic book for teaching human anatomy, but it does not have a printed equivalent.

Criterion 3 rules out large networks of text-based information that do not have an organizing theme. Thus, the World Wide Web (WWW) as a whole is not an electronic book, even though individual websites can be. Although the WWW has adopted the book metaphor (e.g., its sites are called " pages" and one can insert bookmarks to more quickly locate desired sites), the web as a whole does not have a central focus.

4. When media other than text are available, they are primarily used to support or enhance the text. The growing trend in electronic books is to incorporate a range of multimedia text enhancements. It is more and more common for electronic books to be heavily illustrated with graphics and animations, some of which are highly interactive. It is also increasingly common for electronic books to have embedded speech -- either pronunciations of individual words or spoken versions of all or some of the text. In an electronic book, these other media generally support the text, making it more comprehensible or enriching the core document with supplementary examples and illustrations.

Although including supportive media is commonplace for electronic books distributed on CD-ROM, distributors of electronic books on the web have been slower to adopt these features. This can be attributed to the limitations of available web browsers and the need for additional software to access some types of multimedia enhancements. Current estimates suggest there may be as many as 20, 000 complete electronic books on the web (Krieger, 1998), the vast majority of them straightforward text with few or no supportive resources. Many of these have been pulled together into digital libraries or " e-text archives, " often with a specific topical or chronological focus. (A good list of these online repositories of electronic texts accompanies Krieger's article.) In the future, more web-based electronic books undoubtedly will be enhanced in ways that support readers' comprehension of the text and facilitate access to the information by multiple populations.

Applying these four criteria in the selection of software results in a library of programs or websites that share some important features. First, there is a strong textual thread and it is used to convey information or tell a story. Second, the program has the " feel" of a book because features are labeled with terms traditionally applied to printed books. Third, the focus of the book has some definable boundaries and a clear organizing theme. And fourth, other types of media, if available, are largely present to enhance and enrich the text. As one might suspect, not all electronic books meet the above criteria equally or in the same ways. This leads to considerable variety and the opportunity for developers to create novel implementations. Nonetheless, software and websites we feel comfortable labeling " electronic books" fit the above description in more ways than not.