The ability to write a textbook, especially a textbook about mathematics, science, or engineering, is a highly skilled craft.
Textbooks covering these subjects demand a presentation style that combines effective narrative with the use of images and illustrations modeling the topics under discussion (think about trying to explain a conic section without drawing one).
Given that the authoring and production of a high quality textbook is an expensive, time-consuming task, it is no wonder that publishers seek to maximize return by using one content model to drive distribution through as many channels and media forms as possible.
Delivering content to electronic media involves selecting from a number of approaches – re-flowable formats that change the amount of text presented based on the destination device page size, and fixed-layout – where designers keep image content locked to a page position to retain the artistic message which may rely heavily on the proper positioning of text and accompanying graphics.
It would be nice if such formats worked well for textbooks that focus on skills related to complex problem solving, but they don’t.
Yes, there are rendering standards (EPUB, Mobi, PDF), and a boatload of authoring tools that pretend to leverage the features of modern display devices. Nevertheless, current production technology is generally doing little more than producing content to be presented on devices (tablets, phones) that behave much like books of different page sizes.
But today’s phones aren’t books.
When electronic media renders content designed to develop problem solving skills requiring the tight integration of text and images, the user experience leaves much to be desired.
The re-flowable format which is most popular among e-book publishers is incapable of reliably maintaining a close proximity between text and illustration. The fixed-layout approach, useful for children's books or other works that include a good deal of graphic content, often results in inconsistent experiences across different devices.
It is time to try something different, a presentation model that a) minimizes eye travel between text and referenced illustrations (or at least makes such a distance consistent, and b) helps the eye stay focused on the narrative - rather than forcing they eye to wander the page in search of what needs to be read.
A first cut at trying to deal with such issues is represented by Electric Book’s new ‘Electric Booklet’ series.
Electric Booklets are add-on products to existing content published by OpenStax, the organizations producing free-of-charge textbooks under the creative commons license. These booklets re-distribute the example problems scraped from the book’s source code and re-packaged to implement some features that will take a step forward towards an improved experience for those trying to master problem-solving skills.
The presentation model provides the opportunity for readers to ‘single-step’ through a problem solving sequence, rendering only ‘chunks’ of content for each step. The idea is that the eye is naturally drawn to the last line shown on the screen, allowing the reader to more easily stay focused on the concept being emphasized.
The narrative area (text) and illustration area are bolted into dedicated portions of the display screen. While this doesn’t completely remove the need for the viewer to scan different parts of the page to find a referenced illustration, it does keep the viewing areas predictable and allows software to manage re-scaling of images to fit a display area without needlessly affecting the size of the text being read. More than one image for an example problem? Then pop different images into the image area without pushing the text further away from the image being viewed.
This rendering approach is accomplished first and foremost through a content encoding scheme that allows production software to discern the difference between pure narrative, descriptive text, and referenced images.
Once the encoding features are in place, technologies can take over to tune the presentation (stage content incrementally, isolate scaling requests, provide search services, bookmarking, etc….) by using features available on all modern phone browsers.
This re-packaging is appropriate only for titles that focus on developing problem-solving skills that rely on figures and illustrations to convey topic concepts. Text-heavy titles such as novels are still best served by the re-flowing implementations.
But when it comes to the best way to present review materials for science, math, and engineering subjects, it is best to understand that today’s modern phones should not be considered as a mere a digital representation of a book ---- and that is a good thing.