Hard Copy

The written word has been around in one form or another for thousands of years. The structure of books has evolved from the physical limitations of the media. While there is no necessity for you to conform to the conventions for printed work, you should be sure that your electronic book provides at least the same level of access as a printed book.

Readers are familiar with printed works, and will have certain expectations of electronic books. Books provide linear access to the work, so the reader can start at the beginning and proceed through the entire publication to the end. They also provide the ability to jump to any page of the book at random, and most books provide a table of contents that list chapters, and enable readers to locate each chapter quickly. Technical books also provide an index by topic that allows readers to find topics.

Web Sites and Electronic Books

An electronic book can be nothing more than the contents of a web site that is packaged into an ebook file. But if you have not organized your web site properly to start with, few people will want to browse it, or read the ebook version.

An electronic book or web site consists of a number of pages linked together. These pages usually include graphics and sometimes include sound files and or video files as well. The hypertext links can take you to any page, so the medium is much more flexible than printing. Don't think of your publication simply in terms of printed text, because you will fail to take advantage of the electronic medium.

One important point is that printed pages are all the same size, while electronic pges can be different sizes.

Do You Know What You Want To Publish?

You can publish just about anything electronically. What you publish will affect how you organize it.

	Novels - The most important need is sequential access to the pages, as well as a table of chapters. Can be done as two frames, one containing the table of contents, the second the page to read. Interactive novels will require additional links between pages.
	Ezines and collections - such as poetry collections, short story collections, newspapers and magazines also need sequential access, but just as important is the links to each of the articles. Readers may also want to jump to related articles, or other stories/poetry by the same author. Frames can be cluttered because there could be many entries in the table of contents.
	Technical Manuals - Readers here generally do not read from page one to the last page, but choose specific topics. You will need a good topic index or cross reference as well as a table of contents. There are programs on the market which will generate index lists based on the text, but the best indexes are still produced by skilled humans.
	Shopping catalogs - need lots of illustrations as well as descriptions. Smaller catalogs will probably be read from beginning to end, but larger ones will more likely be read in parts. You could include audio files describing products, or even video files of the product, something that cannot be done with printed publications. You could even use a web site to elicit enquiries, then put together individual catalogs based on each user's requirements.

Goals Of Your Ebook

If your Ebook is to be effective, you must know what you want to accomplish with it, and design it to achieve those goals.

Do you want to entertain? Do you want to inform? Is your target audience learned professors or lay people? Do you intend people to read from start to finish, or to wander around aimlessly exploring, or to find information on particular subjects?

Your goals don't have to be complex. For a novel they might be as simple as "Write a thriller that they can't put down. When they reach the end of chapter 3 they will feel compelled to send money to read the rest of the story.".

For a short story collection it might be "To showcase stories written by my creative writing students. People will want to locate by author, by story, by subject matter, and of course read the entire work from cover to cover. I want readers to be able to contact the authors to commission further work."

For an Ezine you might decide "We want to shock people. We want something experimental, out there, that people will keep browsing just to see what else is there. We want them to come back each month for another issue. We want advertisers to pay us for placing adverts.".

Writing Style

Novels and short stories are sometimes written in the first person: "I did this, I did that", most other writing is written in the third person: "He did that, she did that." Almost all published writing is in the past tense "She walked along the path..." not "She walks along the path...".

Most text books are written in a dry "professorial" style: "Captain Cook landed at what is now called Botany Bay. He came ashore with Sir Joseph Banks and a party of sailors and claimed the territory for Britain...".

Instruction manuals are often written in a softer, more personal style, using the second person and the present tense: "You must..." This chapter is written using this style.

Poetry and experimental writing can break all the guidelines, but then that is part of its style.

You should chose an appropriate style for your writing. For example, trying to write a learned text book for university professors in something other than the "professorial" style will make the work seem shallow, as if you really know very little about the topic. On the otherhand, writing a shopping catalog or poetry in the professorial style will stop people from wanting to read any further.

If you feel you need more information on writing style, there are books available at good bookshops or libraries on this subject, and will go into a great deal more depth than we do here.

Planning Your Ebook

Almost no one sits down at their word processor, starts with the first sentence, and then works steadily through to the conclusion. To do so is likely to produce an unstructured work that looks like a mishmash of ideas just thrown together. People are unlikely to read it.

Successful authors plan out what they are going to write beforehand. Even short stories have plots and a cast of characters. Published authors have worked out the plot and characters ahead of writing; many unpublished ones didn't.

The same applies to designing web pages and electronic publishing. You need a rough outline of the structure of your work, so you can see the big picture, and where things fit together.

Electronic publishing is not just taking a printed book and creating a set of web pages corresponding to the printed pages. The whole medium of electronic publishing requires more discipline. The printed medium dictates the structure - you have to have pages, they have to be arranged sequentially. The table of contents is at the front, the index at the back so people can find them easily. Chapters are specially marked so that people flicking through the pages can locate them.

There are books that tell you how to write particular material, and how to organize it for printing, but if they refer to hard copy printing, they are not adequate. Trying to apply the rules of traditional writing or design to electronic hypertext often results in documents that are either difficult to understand and navigate online or that simply don't take advantage of the features that hypertext provides. Poorly organized Web pages are also difficult to revise or to expand.

Using Topics

Once you know what you want to publish, and you have roughed out the content, you should try organizing your content into topics. Sometimes the goals you set for your ebook will become topics; for example suppose one of your goals was for people to pay to read the conclusion of your novel, then "Paying for this novel" will become a topic in its own right. If you don't tell people how to pay for your work, don't be surprised that they don't!

If you are writing a novel, the concept still applies, because you organize the action into chapters. Some of the action will be described within the chapters. Other actions will take place between the chapters, it will not be described, but will simply be mentioned.

Topics may not become individual pages in their own right, but they will likely be listed in the Table Of Contents. Large topics should be broken down into sub topics, but you should beware of going more than three or four levels into sub topics without good reason.

Small topics can be combined into bigger ones, because having too many small pages is annoying. The idea is to have a number of topics that are all roughly the same size.

Navigating Around Your Ebook

You can write the content once you have mapped out the topics, and then structure it into pages, or you can structure your topics into pages and write the content. You may find it easier to write the content first, because then you can see just how much text etc is included in a topic.

By pages I mean HTML files or Web pages. These are different from a printed page of a book. A book is constrained to have all pages the same physical size, and arranged sequentially. A web page can be any size within reason, and can easily be a complete chapter of a printed book.

There are some standard structures that have been worked out for online help systems and Web sites. The structure used depends on the content, because different structures suit different needs.

Linear

The most familiar structure is modelled like a printed book, where the information is structured into pages, and the links arranged to take you forward the the next page, and back to the previous page.

This is probably best suited to short stories, or step by step instructions, perhaps novels, but it severly limits a reader's ability to move around the document.

This structure can be improved by the use of a table of contents, arranging the content into chapters, and by the addition of an index.

Use this structure when you intend the reader to read sequentially through your material.

Figuring out the context is generally easy in a linear structure, because there are usually very few alternatives to which the reader can go.

Heirarchies

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the heirarchy, where there is a front page with menu entries that leads you to other sections of the book. These sections in turn lead you on to other sections.

Heirarchies and menus lend themselves especially well to online and hypertext documents. Most online help systems, for example, are heirarchical. You start with a menu of major topics; selecting one leads you to a menu of subtopics, which then leads you to discussion about a particular topic. Different help systems have different levels, of course, but most follow this simple structure.

With this type of organization, it is easy for readers to know their position within the structure. They move up for more general information, and down for more specific information. However, it is difficult to read sequentially through the pages, so this type of structure is best suited when your readers are more likely to be interested in particular topics, not the entire book.

However, you should avoid using too many levels, because your readers will become annoyed or lost among the levels. You should try to keep your heirarchy to two or three levels, combining pages at the lowest level if necessary. For example, this page is the third level. While it could have been divided into several pages at the fourth level, we thought it would be easier to read this way.

Linear with Alternatives

This is used where the structure is essentially linear, but sometimes you want to give readers a choice. A good example of this is a book with extensive footnotes, or a book with commentary. The linear structure branches for the commentary or footnotes, and returns to the page of the original branch.

Mix of Linear and Heirarchical

Probably the most popular structure for publishing is the mix of linear at the bottom level, and heirarchical above. For example, consider a book divided into chapters, with the chapters further divided into pages. You have heirarchical access to the chapters and the pages within a chapter, but at the page level you also have sequential access to each page.

A deeper heirarchy is a typical play, with acts and scenes. Each scene could then be divided into pages, and the pages read sequentially.

One point to be aware of with this structure is that the context of going up differs on different pages. If the reader has simply been reading through the pages sequentially, they may not be aware they have changed context unless you clue them with a device like chapter headings on the first page of each chapter (and possibly on the top of each page), or label the Up link accordingly.

The alternative of disallowing these shifts across chapter boundaries is often combersome, but changes the structure to that of the Linear Alternatives one. There will be cases where this is appropriate.

Web

A web structure really has no structure. While there is usually a predefined entry point such as the Index.htm or table of contents, readers can jump in at almost any point if they know the page reference, and can follow links to other pages in a meandering fashion.

This is a good structure for interactive novels, where each choice affects the plot, and subsequent choices may branch back to other pages. This structure doesn't have a lot of context, but a browser will make it easy to retrace your steps by supplying the history of pages visited.

In many ways this structure is similar to a maze, except that it may have many exits. You should probably consider some context buttons such as a Return to Home button, along with additional Return to... buttons as and when the context demands, to return the reader to significant parts of the story. It might even be appropriate to include maps of parts of the site, with a "You are here" indication.

Layout Considerations

Fonts

On screen text can be harder to read than printed text, so you will need to use a bigger font. For example, many copies of the Bible are printed using 8 point text, but using the same on many screens will be very hard on the eyes. It is better to choose a larger font size such as 10 point or even 12 point.

Windows 95 or NT ships with many True Type fonts, but older versions of Windows 3.x shipped with only 3 - Arial, Times New Roman, and Courier. While the ebook viewer program can use any font installed on a user's machine, if you have tried for certain effects in the layout, then they may not be preserved if you have used a different font from what the user has installed. You should therefore confine your efforts to one of the fonts above, unless you know for certain that all your readers will have a particular font installed.

Courier is a monospaced font, which means that each character is the same width, just as in this line. It is the usual font of typewriters and DOS, and not used much these days except for quoting program listings and the like. It is easy to line up text using Courier, but it does not look as nice as proportional fonts.

Arial and Times New Roman are proportional fonts, which means that each letter is a different width. Both look nicer than Courier. The main difference between the two is that Times New Roman has serifs, Arial does not. Serifs in this context aren't angels, but little "feet" on the letters. Most of this text should be Times New Roman (at least that is the default for the viewer program), while the text in this line is Arial. If you look closely you should see the serifs on the Times New Roman text, and observe that the Arial text does not have serifs. Which one you use is a matter of preference. You should also note that the two fonts are different widths for the same point size.

If you consult printers' style guides, they usually state that a serifed font is better for reading lots of text like novels, because the serifs lead the reader's eyes along the lines of text. A font without serifs (sans serif is the technical term) causes the reader's eyes to slow, and is better for instructional text or headings where you want the reader to take their time to take in your instructions.

Some Windows fonts like Wingdings, Symbol or Zapf Chancery provide odd little symbols like arrows, scissors and the like can easily be included without needing to resort to graphics.

One point to be aware of is do not use too many fonts in the text. It tends to jarr readers and is visually annoying (take a look back at the paragraps where we've included Courier or Arial). Stick to one font for your text body, with perhaps a second one for headings. Other fonts may be used for special effects (like the font in the diagrams), but use any third font sparingly.

Language

As we've pointed out before, use language appropriate for the audience you have targeted. Language that is too sophisticated for your readers will frustrate them, language that is too simple will insult them.

Amount of Text

Studies have indicated that reading speed decreases by 30% when users read online text rather than printed text. Therefor use concise text to compensate for the decrease in reading speed.

Paragraph Length

Keep your paragraphs short. Just as reading speed slows, so online readers tend to become overloaded more easily. Break your text into short paragraphs helps to avoid this problem.

Whitespace

Whitespace (blanks and empty areas of your layout) help make online text more readible. Use it to group information visually. Readers tend to think there is more information on a screen that actually exists. For example, if you have a ratio of whitespace to text of 50:50, readers are likely to see this as 40:60, and think the screen crowded. You should aim for a ratio of 60:40 for a better visual effect.

Highlighting

Use highlighting sparingly. HTML viewers already use highlighting to indicate links and previously followed links. Use a few highlighting devices can help readers find information more easily. Using many highlighting devices will decrease the effectiveness of your visual presentation.

Graphics

HTML supports 3 types of graphics - Windows Bitmaps (or BMPs), Compuserve GIFs and JPG images. These can be embedded in your HTML by use of the IMG tag. (Please consult an HTML reference for more information on this).

Bitmaps take up the most space, and should be avoided for this reason. However, if all you can produce is BMPs, then you don't have a choice. Bitmaps can be as restricted as two colors (black and white) up to 24 bit color (millions of colors).

GIFs use only 256 colors from a 24-bit palette, and are compressed using LZW compression to preserve every bit. They should be used for computer drawings and diagrams in black and white or shades of gray, where there isn't a large range of colors, and one color could be used in large areas.

JPGs use 24 bit color, but are compressed using a lossy technique that can make them grainy. However, JPGs can be compressed to a much smaller size than GIFs. They are best suited to photographs.

However, you should consider whether your readers will have access to 24 bit color, or only 256 colors. If you try to display an image with more colors than the video card can display, windows will substitute other colors that can be displayed. This can result in quite garish colors, and areas of a photograph that originally had different colors being displayed in all the same color, with consequent loss of detail.

Crop your images to remove unnecessary information.

Keep in mind that graphics are most effective when they are tied in with the text. Images that have no link with the text can be distracting.

Also, be aware of who holds copyright to graphics, and do not use graphical images unless you hold copyright or have permission from the copyright holder.

Audio and Video

HTML makes it possible to include audio and video grabs. As with graphics, you should use these where they enhance the text. For example, if you were packaging up an adventure story, you could include appropriate theme music as a background to parts of the text, just like they do in movies.

The same applies to video, but you normally would not want a video to start playing automatically, but instead when a reader clicked on a link.

The viewer program (like most web browsers) relies on windows to supply the audio and video support, so you should restrict yourself to file formats that windows commonly supports (eg AVI, WAV, MOV), or provide the appropriate drivers as part of your package. Failing that, you should at least provide information to readers on where they can obtain the appropriate drivers.

As with graphics, do not use audio or video files unless you hold copyright or have the copyright holder's permission to use the file.

Further Reading

For additional information about screen design, help system design and hyperext design, the following books and journals can be useful.

	"Designing and Writing Online Documentation" by William K. Horton (John Wiley & Sons, 1994).
	"Teach yourself Web Publishing in 14 Days with HTML" by Laura Lemay. [Sams Publishing, 1995]
	"Conceptual Differences Between the Display Screen and the Printed Page" by Annette Norris Bradford. (Technical Communication 3rd Quarter, 1984 pp13-16)
	"Handbook of Screen Format Design" by Wilbert O. Galitz (3rd Edition, QED Information Sciences Inc., 1989)
	"User Expectations of Online Information" by Larry Queipe (IEEE Transactions on Professional Communications PC 29 pp11-15 December 1986)

Although these books and journals were written primarily for technical writers and developers working specifically with online help systems, they also give a lot of information that is relevant to electronic publishing.

Horton's book in particular has ideas on structuring documents and for dealing with hypertext information in general. If you start doing a lot of work with electronic documents, you might want to pick up this book.

Laura Lemay's book is a good one for teaching yourself HTML, and is well worth reading if you are unfamiliar with HTML and web publishing.

(The others may not be available except through a large library).

Using StoryBoards or Mudmaps

Storyboards are a technique used much in filmmaking, where each scene and each camera shot is roughed out in the order in which it occurs in the movie. When applied to web pages, a story board roughs out the pages, outlines their content, and shows the links between them.

Mudmaps are similar, but often used in the construction of presentations. Topics are roughed out and the linking between them indicated.

These tools allow you to proceed with developing each page without having to continually refer to the surrounding pages to see whether some aspect has already been covered. It also allows several people to co-operate on writing the content by dividing up the pages into logical groups for each individual to write.

Where the work to be published is simple, or has a simple organization like a novel, the storyboard can be unnecessary. As a guideline, if you can hold the entire structure for your web publication in your head, you probably don't need a storyboard. If you can't, then you do.

If you are publishing an already written novel using a structure that sticks close to the printed document, you may not need a storyboard, but if you haven't yet written the novel, a storyboard can be a useful way of representing the plot.

A storyboard can be a simple as a sheet of paper with a diagram similar to any of the structure diagrams above, plus an outline of the content of each box. If you are likely to change the structure around, or are using a larger structure, then small squares of card arranged on a pinboard can be easier. The lines can then be indicated with string.

These days computer drawing packages and presentation software can be used. Some html editor packages (such as Microsoft Frontpage and Adobe Pagemill) also include a structure map of the pages, and can be used to rough out the storyboard first.

Some points to consider:

	As a general rule, each page should consist of one topic. However, the larger the number of topics, the more difficult it is maintaining them. Many small topics can be frustrating for the reader. If you are publishing a book, you could consider each chapter as an electronic page.
	How will people expect to read the publication? You decided this when you established the goals for your publication. You will need to include links to support these reading patterns. For example, links forward and back, up and down. You should also consider such items as a table of contents, index, glossary, footnotes and so on, plus a copyright and credit page that is displayed when the viewer first loads a new ebook.
	If you expect people to pay for your publication, you need to consider whether you issue a partial publication to whet reader's appetities, and whether this partial publication contains the other pages protected by passwords. If you include all the chapters, then on receipt of payment all you need to is email the key, otherwise you have to send out the complete publication.
	As a guideline, you should price your publication lower than the price of the equivalent printed edition. Alternatively, you could consider funding the publication entirely through adverts, but this will mean you need to establish a reputation with advertisers.

EBK Publisher and EBK Viewer are trademarks of Fugue Software. All other products mentioned are registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies.

Send mail to sales@FugueSoftware.com with questions or comments about this web site.
Copyright © 1997 David Noakes
Last modified: November 30, 1998