Name: Breaking The Page
Rating: 3.6 (20 reviews)
Author: Peter Meyers

Zusammenfassung von Breaking The Page

Peter Meyers

Transforming Books and the Reading Experience

3.6 (20 Bewertungen)

11 Min.

Kurz zusammengefasst

Breaking The Page by Peter Meyers is a comprehensive guide to the world of digital reading. It explores the shift from print to digital media, and provides readers with new strategies for reading in a world dominated by screens.

Inhaltsübersicht

What’s in it for me? Become an ebook enthusiast.

If given the choice between two titles that cost the same amount, would you rather have a digital or printed book?

For most people, the answer would emphatically be the latter, as most people prefer hard copies over ebooks. Why?

Because ebooks are not being used to their full potential. Theoretically, we could add features to ebooks that would change the way we read forever. And yet today they are still inferior replicas of their printed counterparts. These blinks help explain a few of the ways in which we could use ebooks to revolutionize how we read.

These blinks also explain

what a reading dashboard would look like;
why it could be smart for ebooks to come with a framed print; and
why you shouldn’t use silly cartoons in a religious text.

Ebooks can improve the reading experience in some genres.

Do you read ebooks? If you do, you know how different they are to “normal” books.

At first, many thought that ebooks would be just another fad. But now it’s safe to say they’re here to stay. But while they won’t dethrone classical books, they will begin to dominate in some areas.

One reason ebooks have become so popular is that the reader’s attention nowadays is scarce: he wants the most relevant information and he wants it now. But traditional books aren’t the easiest to skim through, and it’s difficult to hone in on the information you want.

Things are different with ebooks. If designed in the right way, they make it much easier for the reader to search and access the content he wants. If, for example, different formatting is used to highlight the most important parts of the text, even hurried readers know what to look at immediately.

However, ebooks aren’t well-suited to all forms of content. Fiction, whose content is mostly dependent on text, will largely stay in the traditional format. But non-fiction books will be able to take advantage of all the new opportunities that ebooks offer.

In traditional books, there is relatively little flexibility outside of arranging blocks of text. Although it’s possible to add illustrations to certain pages, it’s harder to do and the options are limited.

That’s not the case with ebooks – in fact, there’s the opposite problem. On the screen, large chunks of text are hard to read and follow, so you need to add more media – videos, photos, designs, and so on – to make the book more readable. Ebooks are thus an exciting medium for authors who play with layout or who have skills in areas other than writing.

They are also a work in progress. In the following blinks, we’ll examine the state of ebooks today and see what opportunities they hold for the future.

Ebooks can drastically improve the reading experience and incorporate other kinds of media.

Ebooks can reach out to the new generation of readers who feel limited by the narrow scope of traditional books. And with the flexibility of ebooks, we can design a reading experience optimized for all kinds of readers.

Specifically, ebooks can be designed to facilitate the three different types of reading:

Instead of promoting sharing with others, ebooks should help people share with themselves.

Almost every ebook has an option to share an element on social media. However, doing so is usually disappointing because the content can’t be shared very effectively.

For example, when you use a Kindle, you can share content from an ebook on Twitter or Facebook. Theoretically, this allows users to become active readers. But while one person might like the content, another person might not find it meaningful – or even just think of it as a distraction.

Kernaussagen in Breaking The Page