O'Reilly Radar » Peter Meyers

Now available: "Breaking the Page" preview edition

Peter Meyers — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 19:00:00 +0000

I’m thrilled to announce the release of the preview edition of “Breaking the Page: Transforming Books and the Reading Experience” (available through the iBookstore, Amazon and O’Reilly). In this free download, I tackle one big-ticket question: how do we make digital books as satisfying as their print predecessors?

I’ve studied hundreds of recent publishing experiments, comparing them all to what I’ve learned during a 20-plus year career as writer, editor, and publisher. My goal: distill best-practice principles and spotlight model examples. I want to help authors understand how to use the digital canvas to convey their best ideas, and how to do so in a reader-friendly way. As app book tinkering flourishes, and as EPUB 3 emerges as an equally rich alternative, the time felt right for a look at the difference between what can and what should be done in digital book-land. That’s my mission in “Breaking the Page.”

The preview edition’s three chapters focus on some basics: browsing, searching, and navigating. This ain’t the sexiest crew, I know, but it’s amazing how hard it is to get this stuff right. I focus on examples good and bad, toss in a few design ideas of my own, and suggest how to include these services in a way that makes digital books pleasing on eyes, hands, and minds.

Ahead, I’ve got a head-to-toe tour of model digital book features planned for the full edition (coming mid-2012). I’ll be focusing on questions like:

What’s the best way to integrate — and not just add — different media types? And, on a related note: is it possible to make the viewing experience as seamless and immersive as reading is in print?
How do you design content and reading paths on what is, essentially, an infinite canvas?
How do you pick the best balance between personalized design (reader-controllable font sizing, for example) and author-driven fixed layout? Are there any acceptable compromises?

While I’m pushing ahead to the finish line, I’d love to hear what you think. Suggestions, examples, critiques … send ‘em all my way.

TOC NY 2012 — O’Reilly’s TOC Conference, being held Feb. 13-15, 2012, in New York City, is where the publishing and tech industries converge. Practitioners and executives from both camps will share what they’ve learned and join together to navigate publishing’s ongoing transformation.

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Sometimes one screen isn't enough

Peter Meyers — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 19:00:00 +0000

This is part of an ongoing series related to Peter Meyers’ project “Breaking the Page: Transforming Books and the Reading Experience.” We’ll be featuring additional material in the weeks ahead. (Note: This post originally appeared on A New Kind of Book. It’s republished with permission.)

I’ve been fiddling with the idea of using multiple displays to give a presentation — putting different slides on different screens. One design sketch — working title: “Documan” — has gotten some chuckles around my office (yes, I work alone):

Man-mounted iPads, plus a nearby monitor. A few possibilities not shown: each iPad could contain images, not just text; objects could move between iPads or from iPad to monitor; and presenter could rotate one or more iPads.

Why on earth does the world need to see a man strap on a half dozen iPads? And, more importantly, what kind of message would benefit from a rig like this?

Beats me. But I do think that content experiments, designed expressly for the screens we all use — rather than our ancestors’ print pages or single PowerPoint slides — are the best way to figure out how stories and teaching change when they move onto the touchscreen.

I’ll spare you, for now, the words and images I’m testing out to fill those screens. (One teaser, though: think about how easy Keynote for iPad makes it to build an action that exits screen right and enters screen left. Now, if you could just get the timing right when using two iPads …).

Clearly, I’m not the only guy playing around here. Ahead, I round up a few content confections that span multiple screens. Some involve separate physical displays, others use different virtual windows. Not all of this stuff is new. But I find it thought provoking how creative types are using the small, medium, and large screens that increasingly coexist near each other.

iPad + projector

Joe Sabia calls himself an “iPad storyteller” — love it! He showed off his stuff at a recent TED talk where he uses his tablet and a variety of different apps (iBooks, a drawing app, Google Earth, Photos, and so on) to entertain an audience that is variously fixed on him, the big projector screen which his iPad is attached to, and the iPad’s display itself.

iPad + magician

Sleight-of-hand artist and iPad maestro Simon Pierro pulls off some awfully clever tricks with his iPad and a real tennis ball, a glass of milk, and a weather forecaster’s hair (she’s on a video inside the iPad). I have no idea what’s magic, what’s video editing trickery, or what he and the iPad are actually doing. And, you know what? It doesn’t matter. What he demonstrates here is how man and machine can team up to entertain in really innovative ways. Don’t miss his part two, where he — sorta/kinda — sheds light on what he’s done.

iPad-powered window displays

Gin Lane Media filled up three of Saks 5th Avenue’s storefront windows with 64 iPads and nine 27-inch displays.

iPad/iPhone partnerships

A few apps use the big and small screen of a tablet and a smartphone in tandem. The iOS app Scrabble, for example, lets you conduct group games in which the iPad serves as publicly viewable board and the iPhone is each player’s private letter stash. Remote Palette is a painting app where the iPad is the canvas and the iPhone is the paint palette.

Multiple browser windows

The band Arcade Fire worked with director Chris Milk to compose this mind-blowing HTML5-powered interactive video for its song “We Used to Wait.” You give this web app the address of the house or building where you grew up in. It then whips together a custom-built video (woven around some stock footage) that incorporates Google Maps footage of your old neighborhood and other graphical magic mashups … all in multiple browser windows of various sizes. (It only works in the Chrome browser.) If you like this one, you’ll love sour-mirror.jp, which uses snapshots of you from your laptop’s webcam, and your Facebook and Twitter feed, to compose a multi-window extravaganza. It all culminates in a mosaic of your face built out of pix pulled from your social media feeds.

Multi-screen patterns

Here’s a pattern-style analysis of different content and interaction designs for multiple displays, from the basic (how Amazon uses Whispersync to keep book location and notes coordinated across a user’s different reading devices) to some innovative software that helps end users take an image, chop it up, and display it on their own collection of displays. That’s what the next item is about.

Junkyard Jumbotron

Free to use (beta) software from some MITers that automatically splits up an image and displays it on whatever collection of screens (smartphones, tablets, PCs) you assemble. This demo shows it in action.

The multi-screen experience

Here’s a five-minute video, with a bunch of TV and consumer electronics execs and analysts. Nothing hugely revelatory, but a nice little brain-tickler about how we are entering an age wherein audience and content producers alike are thinking about how to create and consume stories that play across displays of many different sizes.

Splitscreen: A Love Story

Heartwarming. Winner of a Nokia smartphone video-making contest, this video shows how split-screen stories can add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Google Wave cinema: “Pulp Fiction”

Not really — okay, not at all — safe for work, but a really nifty example of how innovative, multi-pane software (in this case, the soon-to-be late Google Wave), allowed one artist to take a scene from “Pulp Fiction” and render it within this program, weaving in videos, image, text, and maps.

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What we could do with really big touchscreens

Peter Meyers — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 20:00:00 +0000

I don’t hear much talk about Microsoft’s Surface computers, those industrial-strength touchscreens-on-a-tabletop. But maybe the idea was about $10,000 too expensive and a few years ahead of its time. Hear me out while I play connect-the-anecdata-points and argue that 10-inch tablets are just the start of the touchscreen publishing revolution. I’ll bet that large, touchscreen canvases are coming, and I think they’re going to change the kinds of documents we create.

But first a quick bit on why on earth we need larger compositional spaces. After all, any decent novelist, blogger, or journalist can get by with a 11-inch laptop, right? Sure, but what about creative types who like scattering notes, sketches, and outlines across their physical desktops? And what if they want to mix and match different kinds of media and incorporate touchscreen gestures? Some tools (Objective-C, HTML5) exist, but how many creative minds have the skills necessary to use that stuff?

Last week in my digital publishing tools webcast I previewed a handful of apps and online software that let people create “media mashups”: compositions that break free from the rigidly sequenced vertical layouts that many writing tools impose. Take for example Microsoft Word or pretty much any blogging tool — only with some serious effort can you break free from producing a stacked sequence of editorial elements:

etc.

Rigid layout structures like that are, of course, great for mainly-prose narrative. But they make rich page layout — think: the interior design you see in a magazine, infographics, and their touchscreen successors — tough.

I hope you all take some time to play around with the software I mentioned — Webdoc, Blurb Mobile, Polyvore’s editor, Storify, Hype, and Mixel. Only by practicing with these rich media canvases will we begin to see the kinds of stories and messages that might emerge if we move away from the constraints of tools that segregate word from image.

But what I didn’t mention in my webcast, and the heart of this post, is a hardware development that feels increasingly likely: the arrival of large touchscreens that will make composition even easier than it currently is on devices like the iPad. Consider how the spread of really big touchscreens could improve the kinds of personal publishing projects we all work on … from family photo books to website design, and from slideshow presentations to scrapbooking. If we could combine the touchscreen’s signature talent (allowing us to signal our layout wishes directly: put this picture over there) with the large displays and workspaces that many of us enjoy at our work desks, wouldn’t that change the kinds of documents we create? And wouldn’t that require authoring tools that make it easy for us to mix and match different media types?

So, here’s my list of recently spotted data points and observations:

The slow but steady convergence of Mac OS X and iOS

Anyone who follows Apple closely knows the deal here. Some headline developments for those who aren’t Mac geeks: Lion’s elevation of iOS-style, touch-friendly app icons; the increasingly high profile of touch gestures on all Mac laptops and, for the desktops, the availability of the Magic Trackpad. Steve Jobs rightfully dismissed the notion that we’d ever reach out and touch vertical displays. But it only takes a quick stroll down memory lane, and a glimpse at the sunflower-inspired iMac, to imagine a screen design that could easily shift between vertical (for long-form writing and reading) and horizontal-ish for touchscreen activities like page layout.

The heart of Windows 8: the touchscreen-friendly Metro

Microsoft’s next big operating system update is built around the premise that people will want to switch between keyboard/mouse-controlled computers and those operated via touchscreen. They’re counting on manufacturers to build tablets that do both. In one of their Metro demos, presenter Jensen Harris (a senior executive on the Windows user experience team) makes the case that in a few years it’ll be rare to find any display — tablet, laptop, or desktop — that isn’t touchscreen capable.

Touchscreen software for the big display

The New York Times’ Nick Bilton wrote recently about a sneak peak Adobe gave him of a 50-inch “drafting table running Photoshop Touch where you can essentially draw and create on a screen.” As Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch told him: “The creative process has been tied to a keyboard and mouse until now, and we want people to be able to touch the screen to create, just like we all used to use pencils and X-acto knives in the past.”

Decreasing prices

We all know how this works: new technology gets cheaper as it matures. Those first generation Kindles sold for $399; now they start at $79. It’s not hard to imagine a time when not only 20-plus-inch desktop monitors (the swivel variety, as I described above) are affordable, but also imagine portable touchscreen displays everywhere from your office walls to your refrigerator.

Growing familiarity with touchscreen gestures

Beyond early adopters, you see it everywhere: toddlers, deliverymen, senior citizens, checkout clerks — all of ‘em understand how to tap, pinch, swipe. As a culture, we’re becoming touchscreen literate.

The way I work

This one’s personal, but I wonder how unique I am. My writing method often involves a bunch of writing surfaces: draft notes that I crank out on my desktop display; a sheet of physical notebook paper where I take notes on what I’ve written; another piece of paper on which I construct an annotated outline. I don’t quite know what it is, but I just need to see it all spread out. And, man, do I love — do I need — to be able to draw lines, curves, circles, and arrows, connecting this idea over here, to that idea over there.

Writing, for me, on a laptop display feels claustrophobic. (I’m talking about the idea-generating and the drafting phase here; when it’s time to revise, I’m plenty happy blocking out all distractions and focusing on a single, limited-size writing viewport.) LiquidText is one company I’m following closely; they’re developing touchscreen-friendly reading tools that let so-called active readers tap, touch, highlight, and move text in ways that resemble my compositional tactics. They call it “multitouch document manipulation,” and it’s just one reason I’m incredibly excited about what may turn out to be the next desktop publishing revolution.

TOC NY 2012 — O’Reilly’s TOC Conference, being held Feb 13-15, 2012, in New York City, is where the publishing and tech industries converge. Practitioners and executives from both camps will share what they’ve learned and join together to navigate publishing’s ongoing transformation.

Register to attend TOC 2012

Photo on home and category pages: 40+242 Work by bark, on Flickr

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Links on the side

Peter Meyers — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 19:30:00 +0000

I’ve written previously about the distracting effects of excessive hyperlinks: how lots of “hey, click me” blue-lined text makes it hard to focus on a writer’s own writing. In this post, I want to air out a design idea that accommodates links, but does so in a way that helps readers maintain focus and momentum.

The example prompting this concept is similar to what you probably see online every day (click to enlarge):

Example of web article with way too many links (click to enlarge).

Are each of those time-consuming and attention-distracting links truly worth visiting? At a time when focus is a precious commodity, isn’t it odd how often digital documents place exit ramps in front of readers? My idea is simple. Remove the link from the body text and instead use a brief margin note to signal readers that additional info awaits. In sketch form it looks something like:

Links removed from the body text and placed, with brief commentary, in the margin (click to enlarge).

I see three main benefits:

Eliminating hyperlink distraction. I can’t be the only one out there who finds the mere presence of hyperlinks distracting. Even the majority of times when I don’t follow the links, I find myself struggling to ignore the noise of the unknown: What awaits if I follow that link? Why did the author put the link here and not beneath some other phrase? My mind wanders when what I really want is to focus.
Enabling link evaluation. Sometimes all we readers need is a bit more info about what a link points to. Then we can make better decisions about whether the click or tap is worth our time. In the original excerpt I posted, a curious reader can right-click the link to expose the URL — that at least reveals a citation’s source. But is it worth taking the time to do so? And do most readers even know that trick? I think that simply adding a smidgen more info — for example, what I added in my sketch — could help readers quickly judge the value of the target.
Offering the possibility of adding “read later” tools. Most people know about “time-shifting” reading services like Instapaper and Read It Later. They’re great for scooping up worthwhile reads that we don’t have time for during a busy day. I think it might be interesting to implement a similar service in a document-specific way. That is, give readers a quick way to say, in effect, “that linked article looks great; please hang onto it and give it back to me when I’m finished reading this piece.” I didn’t add that feature to the sketch, but doing so would be a relatively simple matter of adding in some kind of “read it later” icon next to each link.

Digital documents — books, web articles, business communications — that help readers focus are the ones that we’re most likely to remember. Those that send us scampering around the Web will be more easily forgotten.

Webcast: Digital Bookmaking Tools Roundup #2 — Back by popular demand, in a second look at Digital Bookmaking Tools, author and book futurist Pete Meyers explores the existing options for creating digital books.

Join us on Thursday, November 10, 2011, at 10 am PT

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Five ways to improve publishing conferences

Peter Meyers — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 15:00:00 +0000

Ever suffer from “conference head”? It’s that feeling, after a couple dozen speeches and panels, where you wonder: wow, what did I learn from all that talking?

Having just returned from Books in Browsers (BiB), a tweet from Liza Daly (@liza) stuck in my head: Much better to have talks as a series of refinements or rebuttals vs. 50 people telling us that the digital revolution is ‘here’.

It got me thinking: is the standard conference format — solo talks plus panel discussions — the best way to “program” a one- or two-day get together? What if organizers structured events more like a great class?

A few quick caveats before I answer: I have never designed or chaired a conference myself, and I offer up these thoughts from the perspective of a frequent attendee and with a huge helping of humility — I can only imagine the time and energy that goes into actually putting one of these shows on. This post was spurred by my time spent at the immensely rewarding BiB, but my ideas here are less a review of that gathering and more about how to make all speaker-heavy conferences more useful. Finally, as for what this topic has to do with digital book design issues: it’s tangential, to be sure, but since you can’t swing a dead cat these days without hitting a conference on publishing, it felt worthwhile to share what I hope are constructive suggestions

First, a quick roundup of key problems:

Problem: Presentation overlap

This is where multiple speakers give, more or less, the same presentation. Or even if the talks aren’t exactly identical, it’s the feeling you get when, say, speakers #2, #5, #8, and #11 all talk about how “social reading” is gonna change digital books. Even when organizers do a good job of keeping people from doing “brochure talks” (here’s a big problem & here’s how my company will solve it), you still end up watching multiple people block out their own version of a framing story that often ends up sounding pretty similar: publishing is undergoing a Gutenberg-sized revolution; readers are suffering from info overload; it’s hard to discover what to read; etc.

Problem: I learned what?

What’s tough in most conferences is pattern-spotting and takeaway extraction. What’s missing are the epiphanies a great teacher gets her students to notice by the end of a class or semester: a sense kids get that they now know more about the topic than when they began. Facing a barrage of speakers who often stray from the descriptions they’ve submitted (guilty, I plead), the audience can sometimes find it hard to pinpoint what, exactly, they’ve learned. Is it possible that what conferences need most are good editors to prune, shape, and synthesize all the valuable ideas that speakers (and attendees) share? More on that idea in a moment.

Problem: Format monotony

One speech followed by another speech followed by another speech. Have coffee. Repeat. Even when everyone’s top notch, the sheer uniformity of sitting through multiple slide-powered talks is hell on our brain’s need for diversity.

Having sketched out what I see as the three big problems, here’s my crack at some solutions worth exploring:

Solution 1. Organizer as curriculum developer

More than just articulating a theme and curating a speaker list, the organizer would need to devise a “curriculum” — one that doesn’t dilly dally too much with basics and yet spends enough time tackling fundamentals so attendees would really feel like they’d gained a new appreciation for issues they thought they already understood. This would clearly entail a substantial amount of speaker management. Organizers would need a degree of cooperation that some presenters might be unwilling to commit to; for example, they’d have to agree in advance to sticking to their assigned topics. As someone who strayed at least partially from the blurb I pitched to the BiB program committee, I know first hand how tempting eleventh-hour inspiration can be.

The event I have in mind would resemble something like a learner’s journey — from gentle introduction to the articulation of big challenges; then onto intermediate-level matters; and finally, culminating in some niche topics suitable for those with a master’s level understanding. (I did think, by the way, that Brian O’Leary’s call at the end of BiB for industry-wide cooperation was a pitch-perfect example of the kind of topic well-suited to wrap up a conference.)

Solution 2. Diverse activities

Rather than a non-stop sequence of solo presentations, I’m picturing a varied program of events woven around traditional talks: a moderator, mic in hand, working her way around the audience posing questions, eliciting answers, and drawing out connections; group activities (split into groups of five, and take 10 minutes to design a product you’d buy); team debates; the presentation of pre-made content (like documentary shorts), website tours, and narrated app slideshows. The idea here is to keep attendees engaged by giving them lots of different ways to consider the material under review.

Solution 3. Note-takers & synthesizers

The first idea here is for a conference to provide a note-taker (skilled in the art of sussing out key points — kinda like the bloggers The New York Times uses to report on live events). Freed from the distractions of writing, attendees could focus more on what speakers are saying. Even better, what if, once or twice a day, an emcee-type got up on stage and distilled out big themes and takeaways? What if these nuggets were posted in a highly visible spot (off- and online) to give everyone a persistent sense of lessons learned or emergent themes?

Solution 4. Workshop-style critiques

Hugely controversial and potentially disastrous territory I’m entering here, but I’m brainstorming, okay? What if someone — respectful, inquisitive, skilled in the art of asking illuminating questions — was up on stage with the speakers and, following their talks, engaged them in a Q&A. This, of course, is what post-speech question time is meant for, but many audience members are too shy, reluctant to challenge, etc. I do want to make sure I’m clear here: I’m not suggesting we grill speakers gotcha-style. I am looking for a way to get people to address the toughest challenges they face and make a strong case about why their solutions and ideas are compelling.

Solution 5. More content

Boy, for an industry built around authors, it’s amazing how little time they get at our events. I’m not just talking about storytellers. I’m also thinking of how-to explainers, idea-weavers, cookbook chefs, photographers. Is there a way to get more of these people up on stage — not just talking about their fears in this new era of publishing, but actually sharing what they create to remind everyone of why consumers buy books in the first place?

Join us on Thursday, November 10, 2011, at 10 am PT

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Photo: Empty new museum auditorium by ol slambert, on Flickr

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More stories from the “Breaking the Page” project

Six ways to think about an "infinite canvas"

Peter Meyers — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 19:30:00 +0000

Next week, I’m speaking at the Books in Browsers conference on “the infinite canvas.” When I started chewing on this topic, my thoughts centered on a very literal vision: a super-ginormous sheet for authors to compose on. And while I think there’s some great creative territory to explore in this notion of space spanning endlessly up, down, left, and right, I also think there are a bunch of other ways to define what an infinite canvas is. Not simply a huge piece of virtual paper, but instead, an elastic space that does things no print surface could do, no matter how big it is. So, herewith, a quick stab at some non-literal takes on the topic. My version, if you will, of six different ways of thinking about the infinite canvas.

Continuously changeable

The idea here is simple: refreshable rather than static content. The actual dimensions of the page aren’t what’s elastic; instead, it’s what’s being presented that’s continuously changing. In some ways, the home page of a newspaper’s website serves as a good example here. Visit The Boston Globe half a dozen times over the course of a week and each time you’ll see a new serving of news. (Haven’t seen that paper’s recent online makeover yet? Definitely worth checking out, and make sure to do so using a few different screen sizes — laptop, big monitor, mobile phone … each showcases a different version of its morphing, on-the-fly design.)

Deep zooms

Ever seen that great short video, “The Power of Ten“? It’s where the shot begins just above two picnickers on a blanket and then proceeds to zoom out so that you see the same picnic blanket, but now from 100 feet up, and then 1,000 feet, and on and on until you’ve got a view from outer space. (After the zoom out, the process reverses, and you end up getting increasingly microscopic glimpses of the blanket, its fabric, the individual strands of cotton, and so on.) Here’s a presentational canvas that adds new levels of meaning at different magnifications. So, the viewer doesn’t simply move closer or further away, as you might in a room when looking at, say, a person. As you get closer, you see progressively deeper into the body. Microsoft calls this “semantic zooming” (as part of its forthcoming touchscreen-friendly Metro interface). Bible software maker Glo offers some interesting content zooming tools that implement this feature for readers looking to flip between birds-eye and page views.

Alternate geometries

A printed page is a 2-D rectangle of fixed dimensions. On the infinite canvas, the possibilities vary widely, deeply, and as Will Ferrell’s character in “Old School” might say, "in ways we’ve never even heard of." Some possible shapes here: a 3-D cube with content on each side, or pyramid-shaped ebooks (Robert Darnton wrote about those in The New Age of the Book, where he proposes a multi-layered structure for academics with excess material that would bust the bindings of a printed book).

Canvases that give readers room to contemplate and respond

I just got a wonderful print book the other day called “Finish This Book.” It contains a collection of fill-in-the-blank and finish-this-thought creative exercises. It reminded me that one thing digital books haven’t yet explored much is leaving space for readers to compose their reactions. Sure, every ebook reader today lets you take notes, but as I’ve written before, these systems are pale replicas of the rich, reader-friendly note taking experiences we get in print books. Job No. 1 is solving those shortcomings, but then imagine the possibilities if digital books are designed to allow readers to compose extensive thoughts and reactions.

Delight

Print book lovers (I’m one of ‘em) wax on about their beloved format’s special talents: the smell, the feel, its nap-friendly weight. But touchscreen fans can play that game, too. Recall, for starters, the first time you tapped an iPhone or similarly modern touchscreen. Admit it: the way it felt to pinch, swipe, flick, and spread … those gestures introduce a whole new pleasure palette. Reading and books have heretofore primarily been a visual medium: you look and ponder what’s inside. Now, as we enter the age of touchscreen documents, content becomes a feast for our fingers as much as our eyes. Authors, publishers, and designers are just beginning to appreciate this opportunity, making good examples hard to point to. I do think that Erik Loyer is among the most interesting innovators with his Strange Rain app, a kind of mashup between short fiction and those particle visualizers like Uzu. It’s not civilian-friendly yet, I don’t think, but it points the way for artists interested in incorporating touch into their creations.

Jumbo content

A movable viewport lets your audience pan across massive content panoramas. Some of the possibilities here are photographic (Photosynth, Virtual History ROMA). Others have begun to explore massively wide content landscapes, such as timelines (History of Jazz). One new example I just learned about yesterday: London Unfurled for iPad, a hand-illustrated pair of 37-foot long drawings of every building on the River Thames between Hammersmith Bridge and Millennium Dome, complete with tappable backstories on most of the architecture that’s on display.

These are just a few of the possibilities that I’ve spotted. What comes to mind when you think about the infinite canvas?

Join us on Thursday, November 10, 2011, at 10 am PT

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Photo: masterpiece by 416style, on Flickr

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Linking in ebooks: How much is too much?

Peter Meyers — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 17:00:00 +0000

Hyperlinks often get marquee billing as one of ebooks’ main advantages over print: an easy way to expand the scope and depth of any document, enriching it — and its readers — with targeted additions. I’ve participated in plenty of ebook development projects in which links are regarded as a kind of bare minimum, enhancement no-brainer. But do hyperlinks always help? Does their presence ever hurt the reading experience? No and sometimes. Let me take a crack at breaking down the downside of linking and review a few alternatives.

Defensive linking

Some links read, to me at least, like a kind of defensive gesture on the part of the writer. As proof that he really knows what he’s talking about and is ready to share notes and research to bolster the authority his writing aspires to. But consider how distracting a link-laden sentence like that is. Even when not followed, a link poses a concentration-disrupting challenge: Should I click it? I wonder where it leads to … I think writers (on the web, as much as in ebooks) need to do a careful cost/benefit analysis before adding any link. Is the journey you’re sending readers on really worth the destination and the disruption?

In lieu of links: Margin notes

Some writers have experimented with margin notes as a kind of hyperlink alternative. Liz Danzico, over at Bobulate.com, uses the space in the left-hand margin to gently comment on her main writing.

She does link within the body text, but I like how the side-saddle layout shown in the image gently engages the reader’s peripheral vision, leaving us free to complete whatever currently holds our attention (a sentence, a paragraph). We can then review the margin note at a more natural break point. Contrast that with a link that’s inserted directly into a sentence; even if you choose not to follow it, the gravity of its target can tug at your attention.

End of post linking

Others position their link targets at the end of a section, chapter, or blog post. The idea here is to deliver background and suggested readings at more natural break points, keeping the main text more or less link free. John Gruber’s Daring Fireball blog uses in-text links for his footnotes. They swoop readers off to the end of the post, and then provide a link for the readers’ quick return to the point of departure.

When installed, a Safari and Chrome plug-in called Footnotify, automatically turns links like the one shown in the previous image into a tidy pop-up window:

Snippet preview

Here’s another interesting way to keep readers from orbiting away from your writing: Offer them a quick glimpse at the target content. It’s similar to how Bing and Google present search result snapshots, saving users the hassle of having to click through and inspect each listing.

The challenge here is all about implementation. Sprinkle too many of these on a page, or program things in an oversensitive way (so that pop-up windows launch willy-nilly), and your page turns into a mine field of exploding pop-ups.

Over-obvious targets

Can we agree that the average reader knows how to make her way to sites like Amazon and the White House? Isn’t it an unnecessary intrusion, then, to link to targets like these? This point, I realize, is highly subjective. Who’s to say what’s obvious? In my own writing I’ve chewed over the question of how often and whether to link to various apps I mention. On the one hand, I question what value it adds to link to popular apps like the Kindle, Angry Birds, or Flipboard. Given the topic I frequently write about — touchscreen publishing and ebook design — it would be easy for me to end up with a distracting number of links. But then, occasionally, there are obscure or ambiguously named apps I mention (a particular Dracula or Sudoku app — both of which inhabit categories crowded with similar sounding names). Should I provide links in only these cases? And what exactly is the rule here? (That’s an important consideration for publishers with style guides.)

Ethics & affiliate linking

These are the money-making programs that most big ecommerce sites offer. Add a special code to those links on your lizard fashion blog and anyone who clicks and then buys something from, say, Amazon earns you a small commission. Do writers who use such links owe their readers some kind of notification? (Personally, I haven’t signed up for any of these affiliate programs yet, but that’s mainly because I haven’t gotten around to it.)

Work avoidance links

Some writers seem to think that the mere existence of Wikipedia relieves them of the duty to explain difficult concepts. It’s a kind of serve-yourself approach to writing — a feeling that, hey, why should I waste space explaining terms like “long tail” or “multi-touch” when I can just point to Wikipedia? Good writing shouldn’t require a reader to go somewhere else for an explanation.

One window per link

Links often kill a reader’s momentum by whisking them away from whatever they’re reading. Click a link and either a new window launches or the current window’s contents get replaced with the target material. A few designs out there offer some alternatives. I’ve written previously about what might be called the “expandable page”, in which additional material (a footnote, for example) sprouts when a reader clicks a “+” icon, and then disappears when the user clicks the corresponding “-” button. Another option: a sliding panel, which is the same concept, except a pane slides onscreen with the link’s extra info.

Non-obvious link targets

Some links suffer the exact opposite of the obtrusive link problem. Instead, readers get no signal about where to click or tap. In the Jack and the Beanstalk Children’s Interactive Storybook app, there’s at least one screen containing Jack and his mom where the user is given no signal that either character can be tapped. Both characters reward tappers with additional dialogue that sheds light on their relationship.

One solution can be seen on a JFK memorial website, The President’s Desk.

Intermittently sparkling bursts of light signal which items are ready for exploration. For viewers who prefer to browse (as opposed to waiting for these flashes), yellow outlines appear around clickable objects as you mouse over them.

Toggling links on and off

Short-form publisher The Atavist has a nice compromise for readers who don’t care for a page full of links. Every Atavist publication comes with a collection of tap-to-summon extras: photos of key figures, Google Earth maps to help track location, a timeline, and so on. But if you find any of this stuff distracting, simply tap the Inline Extras icon at the top left of the screen.

In an instant, all the links disappear, and you’re back to plain prose and the pleasures of uninterrupted reading.

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iPad vs. Kindle Fire: Early impressions and a few predictions

Peter Meyers — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 19:30:00 +0000

Who knows for sure how the Kindle Fire will do? It’s crazy how confident some folks are about who it will kill, maim — or catapult to corporate dominance. The dang thing hasn’t even been touched yet by more than its birth parents and a close relative or two. (Me, I got a finger or two on it at last Wednesday’s press conference. I can’t add anything concrete to what you’ve probably already read.)

But what I can do is offer one man’s report, a year and a half in, on how I use my iPad. My goal? Compare and contrast the iPad’s talents with what we know the Fire will deliver. From there, maybe there’s a conclusion or two to be drawn about how this new tablet matches up against its two main competitors: the Color Nook and the iPad.

So, to begin with, here’s a rough tally of my iPad usage:

Most Frequent Tasks (~ 1 hour/day)

Email (Mail app)
Zite
Twitter (Twitter app)
Safari (general surfing)
Facebook (via Safari)
New York Times app

All together these six activities consume the majority of my iPad time. I list them roughly according to how frequently I use them, but the difference between the first and the last isn’t much, I’d bet.

Next Most Frequent (~ 15 minutes/day)

Various newly released apps (or ones I’ve just learned about). I wrote a book last year recommending the “Best iPad Apps.” This year I’m working on another book about designing digital books. So I need to keep up with what’s new.

Periodic (~ 1/2 hour/day, every couple of days)

Kids book apps with my two young daughters
Flipboard
iTunes (for podcasts while stretching or cooking)

As I mentioned, for professional reasons I’m always playing with new apps. When apps like Our Choice or The Wasteland launch, I get them &mda and probably play with them a dozen or so times to get a feel for how they work. The only three I’ve ever added to my regular rotation are Twitter, the New York Times, and Zite. But I wonder, really, how unique that makes me. Don’t most smartphone and tablet owners hear about new apps from friends and others online and then spend a little bit of scattered time trying new ones out?

Probably worth mentioning: the vast majority of my computing time gets spent on the laptop (a MacBook Pro) I’m typing on right now. Second place: my iPhone, which I use mainly for email, Twitter, ebook reading, web surfing, and phone calls. Let me wrap up this iPad audit with a few general observations:

I rarely use 3G (I’ve probably paid for three month’s worth of service in the one and a half years I’ve owned both 3G models‚ the original and the iPad 2).
I don’t read ebooks on the iPad very often. I find it bulky and too big, and prefer my iPhone (for plain text narrative) and print (for everything else).
I only pull it out on the subway (I live in NYC) when I can get a seat. Holding it in two hands requires more balance than my genes are ready to deliver.
I don’t really like typing on it. It’s okay for a few sentences (a quick email reply, for instance); anything longer and I wait till I’m at my laptop.
I’m not very conscious of missing out on Flash-enabled websites. I’m aware, of course, that many sites still use Flash, but I guess I just don’t visit those sites.
I rarely sync my iPad to my laptop (maybe once a month, or maybe even longer). Feels like every time I remember that I’d like to sync (to get some new photos on it or refresh my music) I decide I don’t have enough time. With the coming release of Apple’s iCloud service, this will all likely improve, but it remains to be seen how completely, and how well executed, Apple’s wire-free efforts go.

Now, what does all this mean when it comes to the Kindle Fire? I am of course getting one (and may have some big writing-related news on that front in the coming days … stay tuned!). But if I wasn’t Pete the Gadget Geek, and I didn’t yet own any tablet, knowing what I know now about how I use the iPad, which one would I get? Here are the big factors I’d consider:

$200 seems incredibly appealing. Like many other working professionals (a little bit of disposable income, worried about paying for two kids’ educations, second homeless), I worry about spending $500-plus each time Apple releases a new “must-have” device.
The only item on my iPad use-case list that feels hard to match is all that new app reviewing I do. The key question: will “long tail” apps show up in Amazon’s Appstore for Android? I’d bet, in many cases, yeah.
The Fire’s smaller screen size seems as much a plus as a minus. Won’t know for sure, of course, till I’ve had a chance to play with it, but at a minimum it will be easier to operate one handed.
Given my current subscription to Amazon Prime (which I will likely never give up), I suspect I’ll watch more TV and movies on the Fire than I do on the iPad.

So, what’s my prediction about the Fire’s fate? Way too soon to say, of course. But if I were a betting man, here’s where I’d put my money:

Nook Color will be the big loser in all this. There’s just not enough compelling content there to win a showdown with the Fire (if it performs as well as it did in last Wednesday’s demos).
iPad’s growth will slow from hockey stick-like to something still enviable and profit-worthy. But a year from now, we’ll no longer be forced to say what we must right now: there really is no tablet market; there is only an iPad market.
Amazon will sell, as Mr. Bezos predicts, “many millions” of these Fires.

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Pictures that propel prose

Peter Meyers — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 19:00:00 +0000

What’s the best way to combine text and pictures? Most designers — print or digital — try to artfully position both on the same page. Brian Selznick, author and illustrator of “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” uses a deceptively simple alternative: he devotes an entire spread (that is, two pages side by side) to each of the hundreds of illustrations in this charming and inventive story of a boy living alone in a train station. So, it’s a page of text, a page of text, drawing spread, a page of text, and so on.

Now that might sound like a lousy idea, one that could easily impose a page-flipping burden on the reader as she flips between pages to see the drawings or, worse, skips right over them. You see this happen all the time in computer books (sorry, O’Reilly!). The text on one page references the figure on another. All that back and forth between this page with the prose and that page with the picture impedes understanding and futzes with any flow the reader has established.

But Selznick puts his drawings to work, doing more than just illustrating what his prose explains. In “Hugo Cabret,” the art takes the storytelling baton from the text and, on its own, advances the plot. It’s an elegant device.

For example, at one point, the text describes an episode in which the boy, Hugo, follows a man who’s taken a notebook from him. We follow the pair leaving the train station, walking out onto the street, and the man ignoring Hugo’s pleas to return his notebook. The last paragraph in this scene, which is found at the bottom of a right-hand page, reads:

“Stop clicking the street with your heels,” the old man hissed through his teeth. “And don’t make me say it again.” He shook his head and adjusted his hat. Then, quietly, he said to himself, “I hope the snow covers everything so all the footsteps are silenced, and the whole city can be at peace.”

Next comes five spreads showing the two walking through the city, with Hugo tailing the man. On the final drawing the two enter a cemetery.

In “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” the text that follows this illustration assumes the reader has taken note of the pictured graveyard. (Click to enlarge.)

The text picks up again on the next page and begins: “They soon arrived at a decrepit apartment building across from the graveyard.”

See what happened there? The illustration is what first signaled the reader that the pair had entered a graveyard; when the text mentions it again (“the graveyard”), the assumption is that the reader already knows of its role in the story. By turning the visuals into part of the plot, Selznick earns his artwork more attention than a typical illustration-enhanced work of fiction. Readers, many of whom have gotten used to regarding art as “just a picture” that they can safely skip, learn that they need to pay attention to find out how the story unfolds.

So what’s the digital book takeaway? While I’m not advocating a direct replica of this perfect-for-print solution, I do think it holds one especially valuable lesson. By not cramming loads of different media types onto the same page and by purposefully relegating different items onto their own pages, Selznick gains control of the “reading path”: the order in which he’s decided the content should be consumed.

But isn’t that kind of authoritarian mandate heresy in an era of interactive, pick-your-path productions?

Not necessarily. Especially when it comes to fiction, letting the author control the reading experience is not necessarily a bad thing. By relieving the reader of any choice-making responsibilities — even as subtle as, Should I read this or that? or, Should I play this video or finish the text? — you give the audience something priceless: the ability to focus on the story.

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Five digital design ideas from Windows 8

Peter Meyers — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 15:00:00 +0000

Microsoft deserves most of the design criticism it gets, but let’s give them credit when they move in the right direction. What they’ve previewed in Windows 8 — especially the Metro touchscreen interface — is really lovely. It’s humane, efficient, and innovative. In fact, I think there’s plenty in it for digital book designers to think about emulating. I whipped out my notepad while watching one of their Build presentations — “8 traits of great Metro style apps” — and jotted down some key takeaways. (Also included are approximate timestamps so you don’t have to sit through the whole 90 minutes.) The best part? Whether or not Microsoft actually ships something that matches their demo, you can benefit from the great thinking they’ve done.

Tablet users’ postures and hand positions (16:31)

Microsoft did loads of research, hoping to identify how tablet users sat and where they placed their hands when holding these devices. The results are probably intuitive for anyone who’s spent time with a tablet, but the conclusions are nevertheless helpful. Most people use both hands to hold a tablet, and the most frequent touch zones are on the edges. The lesson? “To design for comfort, you need to position [key controls] near the edge” (19:23). And: “It takes a posture change to reach comfortably into the center of the screen (in any orientation).” In other words, it’s not that users can’t reach things in the middle of the screen, but it does require they change how they’re sitting. So, “put frequently used interaction surfaces near the edge,” and “locate key controls to be comfortable to use while holding on to the edges of a device.”

The difference between “fast & fluid” and “slow & jerky” (25:45)

The first phrase is Microsoft’s (it’s how they claim Windows 8 will perform; by the looks of the demo, they’re pretty far along). The second phrase is mine, but in the demo it’s clear that’s what they want developers to stop doing. How? By using Microsoft-supplied transitional effects — for example, animating the way picture icons arrive on screen as users add them to a list. This might sound like frivolous eye candy, but the demo makes the point convincingly: these little points of polish make users feel a closer connection to the content and less like there’s an engineer standing between them and what they want to do.

Specifically, what Microsoft is encouraging developers to do is use Windows 8′s “Animation Library” to implement these effects and take advantage of things like hardware acceleration. This, they argue, saves programmers from having to master animation flourishes or learn After Effects; the ready-to-use animations take care of the design work. I mention all this because a sluggish reading experience — even one that’s half a second too slow — can cause readers to bail.

This reminds me of a conversation I had last winter with Theo Gray, author of “The Elements for iPad” and one of the principals behind Touch Press. He was previewing an in-progress app for me and stopped the demo mid-way through. One of the gems onscreen that was supposed to spin was lagging a tiny bit. If you’re even off by a little, he said, users will notice. Sweating the details like this may be one reason the Touch Press apps are so successful.

“A language for touch” (27:30)

The point Microsoft makes in this part of the presentation is, if you’re making a touchscreen app, don’t have fingers and touch gestures replicate what a mouse does. Multitouch screens can and should be controlled differently than our regular computers. And Microsoft makes this case by poking fun at the cumbersome steps an iOS user has to go through to drag an app icon from one home screen to another that’s far away: “it’s like driving a car from one side of the ocean to another.” Anyone who’s got more than a few screen’s worth of apps knows what they’re talking about. What Apple has currently designed is really the equivalent of how you’d scroll horizontally with a mouse (except in iOS there are no quick scrollbar shortcuts).

The solution that Microsoft demos is neat (28:48): you hold the app icon you want to move in place with one finger and then, with your other hand, you pan under it, swiping the screens quickly to get to the new placement spot where you want to drop the icon. It’s very slick, and it’s a reminder of the benefits of designing explicitly for a touchscreen.

“Semantic” zoom (33:25)

By now we’re all used to tapping touchscreens to zoom in closer on an image or bump up the font size of an article. Microsoft has introduced a twist: zooming gestures now frequently deliver more and different kinds of info as users view content at different magnification levels. For example, when viewed up close, a group of neighboring app icons on the home screen might look like this:

Start screen app icons in their normal (non-magnified) view.

But when the user zooms out to a bird’s-eye view, that same group acquires a label, delivering an extra helping of information to help browsers decide where to go next or to rearrange groups into a different order.

Start screen app icons in their bird’s-eye view.

The same kinds of semantic additions at different zoom levels could be helpful for digital book designers looking to provide different views (book-wide, chapter-level, and so on) for readers browsing through different levels of detail. A few months ago I wrote about Glo Bible and something similar they’ve done with their outline zooming tool.

True multitasking (46:42)

In Metro, two apps can co-exist side by side on the main screen. One sits center stage, and the other gets tucked in this so-called “snap” state: a compressed rectangular view that apps occupy when they cede the main part of the window to another app.

An illustration of an icon in its snapped position.

“A great snapped state,” presenter Jensen Harris says, “invites users to keep an app on screen longer.” These truncated views are fully functional. One fun example that gets a mention: imagine a piano app in snap state, a drum app on the main screen, and the user playing both of them at the same time. In other words, true multitasking and a world in which users are encouraged to make their apps interact with each other. It’s a compelling reminder of something many serious readers (and writers) do all the time in the real world: keep multiple documents open simultaneously.

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