Abstract
This article focuses on a critical evaluation of the design of ebooks. In the post-digital era, the form of content of ebooks is still presented as a simple rendition of the books’ printed version. Over the past ten years or so, although e-readers have popularized reading on screens, digital technologies have made little progress in the design of texts on screens. The few business initiatives that dominate the market of e-readers tend to minimize the typographic quality of texts on screen to its basic components and merely promote the usability of e-reading devices. Interesting experimentations with the form of texts on screen are introduced by independent stakeholders showing possible future directions that could serve new modes of digital reading by empowering the principal function of typographic design, i.e., to promote the nature of texts and enable readers to create meaning.
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Notes
- 1.
Michael Hart’s Project Gutenberg, founded in 1971, initiated the idea of electronic texts for continuous reading before the appearance of ebook readers in the market. Portable dedicated e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle (2007) marked the arrival of commercial ebooks in the market.
- 2.
Human Interface Guidelines (iOS) (2020) https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/ios/overview/themes/.
- 3.
Major commercial drivers of the ebook market are currently Amazon (Kindle), Barnes and Noble (Nook), and Kobo, Apple’s iTunes and Google’s Google Play services [20].
- 4.
Publisher’s website https://editionsatplay.withgoogle.com/#!/about (Anna Gerber & Brit Iversen in collaboration with Google’s Creative Lab).
- 5.
Publisher is based in France, https://www.artbookmagazine.com.
- 6.
The work is no longer available in the Apple Store. See http://www.joezeffdesign.com/jzdblog/the-mutant-library.
- 7.
A mechanistic approach embraced by the HCI community (Drucker 10).
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Sioki, N. (2021). Thinking Out of the Book: Visual Language and Textual Form in the Design of ebooks. In: Martins, N., Brandão, D. (eds) Advances in Design and Digital Communication . Digicom 2020. Springer Series in Design and Innovation , vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61671-7_1
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