Presentation given at the Society of Scholarly Publishers event on Nov. 8, 2011 in Washington, DC.

1. Academic E-Reading
Themes from User Experience Studies
Nicole Hennig, Head
MIT Libraries User Experience Group
Nov. 8, 2011

2. Today’s talk
1. User needs study results
2. Mobile academic ereading - the current state
3. Mobile academic ereading - improving it

3. User Needs Research
Digital Scholarship Study
17 students kept diaries of their
academic lives for a week
- in-depth interviews
how are new
technologies & formats
changing how students
work?

4. Themes
Convenience wins Fragmentation hurts
People count Place matters

5. Convenience wins
Familiarity
Time invested in familiar systems
Post-paper society - no more
flipping through current journals

6. Convenience wins
Difficult? change topic
Interlibrary borrowing?
Just difficult enough to skip.

7. Convenience wins
The convenience of pen &
paper.

8. Convenience wins
Mobile works

9. Fragmentation hurts
Multiple storage solutions

10. Fragmentation hurts
Even “the cloud” is fragmented.

11. Fragmentation hurts

12. Fragmentation hurts
Work-arounds

13. People count
Collaboration
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kmakice/3462454985/

14. People count
Collaboration tools

15. People count
Alone together

16. People count
Distance tools

17. People count
Familiar experts

18. Place matters
24-hours, work from everywhere
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kcolwell/502787405/

19. Themes
Convenience wins Fragmentation hurts
People count Place matters

20. “How might we?...”
A. Convenience wins
1. How might we make our services as convenient as possible?
B. Fragmentation hurts
1. How might we reduce fragmentation in our resources and tools that we
provide?
2. How might we make our tools interoperate with the tools that people
use? (Dropbox, Instapaper, Google Docs, Evernote, Refworks, Zotero)
C. People count
1. How might we enable people to connect to the experts they need?

22. Academic ebooks - current situation

23. We subscribe to
many ebook
packages, but
most are not
easy to read on
mobile devices.

24. http://libguides.mit.edu/ereadingfaq

25. What we tell our users

26. Comparing features

27. What we look for

28. Students use of ebooks not growing
Chronicle of Higher Education

29. MIT Libraries Fall 2011 survey
77% have a smartphone or e-reader.
MIT Libraries Fall 2011 Survey. 6,500 responses, 44% response rate

30. MIT students want to read & take notes while mobile
Results not completely analyzed yet, but majority “not currently doing this, but would
like to” for all choices.
MIT Libraries Fall 2011 Survey. 6,500 responses, 44% response rate

31. Expectations from non-academic e-reading
- read anytime/anywhere
- small, lightweight, carry many books with you
- easy to get new books immediately
- ability to sync between mobile devices & computers
- zooming in to details of illustrations (iPad & other tablets)
- even small screens can work for reading PDFs, thanks to
apps like GoodReader

32. Popular workshop

33. http://libguides.mit.edu/apps

35. “Librarians must carve out new roles as
advocates of more usable digital collections”
Char Booth, Univ. of California, Berkeley

37. What academic ebooks could be
1. Solve user problems Convenience wins
2. An ecosystem
Fragmentation hurts
3. Social context
People count
4. Take advantage of
the medium Medium matters

38. It’s more than reading
• pondering
• thinking
• taking notes
• bookmarking
• copying
• quoting
• defining words
• underlining
• highlighting
• comparing with other text
• skipping around
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bludgeoner86/2298513747/
• skimming
• looking at photos
• examining charts/graphs
• citing
• discussing

39. Convenience wins
Easy annotation
Improved ways to annotate digital documents
that allow for either typing or handwriting in a
way that works easily and intuitively.
GoodReader
iAnnotate PDF

40. 1
Convenience wins
Integration with citation tools
Allow for ease of saving and formatting
citations in formats required.

41. Convenience wins
Solve user problems
Content is no longer just a product. It’s part of a value chain that solves
readers’ problems. Readers expect publishers to point them to the outcomes
or answers they want, where and when they want them.
- Context, Not Container
by Brian O’Leary

42. Fragmentation hurts
Download once, read anywhere
Allows one to be “device-agnostic”... change
or upgrade device, keep your content.

43. Fragmentation hurts
Download once,
read anywhere

44. Fragmentation hurts
Integration with cloud tools
Allows for easy organizing, saving, and moving
content between devices and systems.

45. People count
Social features, discussion
Allow for sharing of quotes and text snippets via email,
Twitter, Google+, or other social media.

46. People count
Social features, discussion

47. People count
http://findings.com/

48. People count
http://openmargin.com/

49. Medium matters
Text - also known as “formless” content
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aufheben/494023168/

50. Medium matters
Text + graphics, maps, diagrams
- also known as “definite content”
http://www.flickr.com/photos/25541021@N00/4339699941/

51. Medium matters
Formless vs. Definite Content
“.....definite content..... It may be reflowable, but depending
on how it is reflowed, inherent meaning and quality of the
text may shift.”
— Books in the age of the iPad
by Craig Mod

52. Medium matters
Better ways to view illustrations
Allow for zooming in and out, with multi-touch gestures
for very large, detailed images, maps, or diagrams.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/manitobamaps/2230280043/

53. Medium matters
Learn from design
of comic apps
auto-zoom to each panel
What if zoom
features were
applied to
scholarly
illustrations?

54. Medium matters
The Elements, iPad app
3D images, rotation. Takes advantage of
multi-touch & swipe.

55. Medium matters
Page turning metaphor
“Take something as fundamental as pages, for example. The
metaphor of flipping pages already feels boring and forced
on the iPhone and on the iPad. The flow of content no longer
has to be chunked into “page”-sized bites.”
- Books in the age of the iPad
by Craig Mod

56. Medium matters
“One simplistic reimagining of book layout would be to place chapters on
the horizontal plane, with content on a fluid vertical plane.”
- Books in the age of the iPad
by Craig Mod

57. Medium matters
Limitless space beyond the edges
“In printed books, the two-page spread was our canvas. It’s easy to think
similarly about the iPad. Let’s not. The canvas of the iPad must be considered
in a way that acknowledges the physical boundaries of the device, while also
embracing the effective limitlessness of space just beyond those edges.
We’re going to see new forms of storytelling emerge from this canvas.”
- Books in the age of the iPad
by Craig Mod

58. Medium matters
“The way we think about book, magazine, and newspaper
publishing is unduly governed by the physical containers we have
used for centuries to transmit information.”
- Context, Not Container
by Brian O’Leary

59. Medium matters
DIY: create your own, mix/match
“Many current audiences (and all future ones) live in an open and
accessible environment. They expect to be able to look under the
hood, mix and match chunks of content, and create, seamlessly,
something of their own. Failure to meet those needs will result in
obscurity, at best.”
- Context, Not Container
by Brian O’Leary

60. Medium matters
Librarians & scholarly publishers
- we want to offer the best
- we want to innovate
- we want to provide useful tools for scholarship and learning
- we need more thoughtful analysis around DRM issues

61. Medium matters
DRM: Making informed decisions
Meanwhile, a growing number of mostly independent publishers are doing
the unthinkable: releasing ebooks without any form of copy restriction.
Are these publishers completely oblivious to the obvious problem of digital
piracy? Or are they taking a calculated risk that will ultimately benefit
their business?
- Analyzing the business case for DRM
by Kirk Biglione
http://book.pressbooks.com/chapter/analyzing-business-case-for-drm

62. A social book
Context, Not Container by Brian O’Leary
Books in the age of the iPad by Craig Mod
Analyzing the business case for DRM by Kirk Biglione

63. What academic ebooks could be
1. Solve user problems Convenience wins
2. An ecosystem
Fragmentation hurts
3. Social context
People count
4. Take advantage of
the medium Medium matters

64. Nicole Hennig
hennig@mit.edu