Recent eBook Articles

EBONI (Electronic Books ON-screen Interface). "Electronic Textbook Design Guidelines." Summary from introduction: "The need for best practice guidelines for the design of electronic textbooks arose from the growing availability of learning and teaching material for Higher Education in electronic format, to which students are increasingly turning as a first port of call when seeking material to support their studies...The on-screen design guidelines are primarily intended to be applied to books published on the Web, but the principles will be relevant to ebooks of all descriptions and, in certain cases, it is possible that only commercial ebook software companies will have the resources to comply at their disposal. They simply reflect the results of our user evaluations, and it is recognize that they will be implemented at different levels by different content developers."

Falk, Howard writes a regular column on ebooks for Library Hi Tech News, a monthly publication, entitled "E-Book Currents". Available online to subscribers. The April issue included the following:

Gelfand, Julia. "User Input: Experiences in Assigned Reading from E-Books - One netLibrary Experience," Library Hi Tech News, 19:1, 2002, pp. 17-8. (available online to subscribers). Abstract: Report on a one-year netLibrary trial conducted at the University of California, Irvine.

Henke, Harold. "Survey on Electronic Book Features," Sponsored by the Open eBook Forum, 3/20/2002. Abstract: Results of an Open eBook Forum sponsored survey to help assess what users desire and expect from ebooks. 163 electronic surveys were collected from individuals who were familiar with current ebook technology. The most desirable feature was that the ebook opened to the last page viewed.

Issue 125 of Vine (published quarterly by LITC), which is dedicated to ebook, electronic journals and elibraries, contains the following (available online to subscribers):

• Edwards, Louise and Hazel Woodward. "Shaping a strategy for e-books: the role of the DNER", pp. 5-11. Summary from publication: This article describes the role of the E-Books Working Group of the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER).
• Rodgers, Christine Love. "Opening the book: developing e-book resources at the Open University Library", pp. 12-17. Summary from publication: A range of different types of electronic texts are being offered to the distributed users of the Open University library, including free out-of-copyright texts, online versions of reference works, collections of full text and academic texts from netLibrary. Indications are that they are well used. Some indications of the criteria for evaluating different collections are emerging.
• Wilson, Ruth. "Electronic books for everyone: designing for accessibility", pp. 18-24. Summary from publication: This paper discusses the accessibility issues surrounding electronic books, focusing on the opportunities and potential dangers of this new technology, relevant emerging standards, and commercial products that aim to make ebooks accessible to readers with disabilities and learning difficulties.
• Hodgkin, Adam. "Integrating reference books for the web", pp. 25-31. Summary from publication: Adam Hodgkin, director of xrefer, looks at the role of the reference book within traditional libraries as compared to the new role for reference books on the web. He explains the approach taken by xrefer, and the added benefit that aggregation and integration offer the user online. He concludes by looking at the scalability of the xrefer approach and the future for online referencing.
• Cox, Andrew. " One author's view of electronic books: An interview with Feona Hamilton, author of Belaset's Daughter ", pp. 32-3.