Results from the visual book experiment

The objective of demonstrating the validity of the book metaphor as the basis for the design of electronic publications has been supported by the favourable results obtained in evaluating the visual book (Landoni, 1997). Users who were familiar with the paper version of the book appreciated the features inherited by the visual book. The same happened for users who were non-computer experts in general as they already felt familiar with the representation of the object on the screen and could use their previous cognitive background to guess how the object would react to their actions. They also found the representation to be consistent with their mental model of a book (the majority of the evaluators indicated this in their comments which were attached to the evaluation sheet) and this helped in learning and remembering how to use the system.

In particular users were quite happy to interact with an object which resembled a book and appreciated that its enhanced functionalities are consistent with the original one on paper. Following the philosophy of the cognitive jogthrough (Rowley and Rhoades, 1992), users were also free to express their comments and suggestions. This resulted in a number of proposals to add computer related features to those already available as well as to make the ones already in place more sophisticated. The main request was for an intelligent search function to simulate and enhance the way readers search in paper books. Such a function should combine the precision provided by the paper clues in defining the context of the search, and by the index terms compiled by a human indexer, with the high recall provided by full-text search which can be performed very economically by using widely available and fully tested information retrieval software.

In this way they showed how the visual book experiment can also be used to propose and test new kinds of electronic book which start from a visual interpretation of the book metaphor. In general the visual book system proved to be not just another electronic book but a valuable tool for testing a full range of ideas on electronic publication and how to represent electronic information on screen. The architecture of the system is very flexible and can therefore be adapted and used to demonstrate different interpretations of the book metaphor at different levels.

The fact that the visual book generator system and the visual book viewer are two separate objects has been an advantage in at least two ways:

• (1) the visual book generator can be used to build and to test different interpretations of electronic books which need not be visual, being very simple and flexible with no strict requirements about the format of the data as input for the book;
• (2) the visual book viewer has been used to collect feedback on the way users would like to see the electronic book of the future look. This feedback can be easily passed over to the visual book generator so that the production and testing process can continue.

In this way the visual book system should not become an obsolete example of an electronic book but rather the basis for a set of experiments on how to produce “good” electronic books (Landoni, 1997). At this point it is worth re-emphasizing that a specific set of paper books was taken as a model for the extraction of features to be translated into electronic form, these being scientific books for readers with a scientific background, already familiar with a computer environment but not necessarily computer experts; different user groups and book classes may require different features and treatment. Also it is worth pointing out that one of the main issues proposed by this research is that the Paper Book metaphor can be profitably used as a starting point and not necessarily as the only direction in which to go.

In this context the visual book experiment has been shown to work and has given good indications as to the future steps to be taken to make electronic publication popular, useful and widely used by a scientific audience. In fact particular attention has been paid to the design, analysis and use of some classic components of scientific paper books, such as the Table of Contents and indexes, and the results of this study, which are supported by the results of the Hyper-Book evaluation (Catenazzi, 1994), have shown that users appreciate the use of those tools when they are appropriately translated into electronic form. Other clues users are familiar with in the paper version of a book have also been preserved, such as headings and page numbers, different styles and pagination. Their role in guiding the reader was evaluated in a very favourable way by the users during the evaluation process.

The model used has been an expanded version of one originally proposed by Barker (Barker and Manji, 1991; Barker and Giller, 1991), and is completely compatible and consistent with the one used for a similar system, the Hyper-Book (Catenazzi, 1994). The reason for this choice was the necessity of having a flexible model which could include paper book related attributes together with non-textual information. This is a model which is suitable for modelling the set of features extracted by the paper book metaphor and for producing objects of various complexity from the quite plain visual book to futuristic cyberbooks. The version used for the design of the visual book system has shown all these characteristics but also some meaningful drawbacks when it comes to its use for real life production of general electronic publications. This model, which is able to cover different kinds of interpretations of electronic publications, appears too complex to be effectively used by a wide number of designers of electronic books and also it is too intrinsically linked to the concept of the paper book metaphor to keep it as a paradigm if technology and trends in publishing should take different directions. For this reason a set of observations have been collected as an output of the visual book experiment with the hope of helping future development in the production of “good” electronic books (Landoni, 1997).

These observations fall into two broad categories. The first category is concerned with establishing whether a book should be produced in electronic form:

1. (1) Reasons for producing books in electronic form: if somebody is going to read it and eventually prefers it to the paper version containing the same information; this can happen in the following situations:

• if its paper version does not completely satisfy the reader;
• if there is no paper version and the electronic version can solve problems of dissemination and time wasting;
• if reading from the screen is not a problem, i.e. the book is going to be “used” more than “read” sequentially;
• if the electronic environment is easily available to the reader, i.e. the user is in a specific computer/electronic oriented environment already.

The second category considers when the term “electronic book” can be applied properly with reference to some basic requirements which need to be satisfied in order to make the use of this label/term appropriate.

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