Research and inspiration

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Books

Amaranth Borsuk: The Book

Book described as object, content, idea, and interface. Object/content divide describes how older formats evolved into a codex format that is used nowadays — important knowledge when thinking about transitioning into digital. (Honza has Kindle edition.)

Susan Hawthorne: Bibliodiversity: A Manifesto for Independent Publishing

Interesting essay about the role of small publishers, framed by systems thinking, social justice, feminism and market transitions of the 80s (big publishing houses) and 00s (Amazon.com). (Honza has paper edition in Czech.)

See Bibliodiversity page at Wikipedia.

Papers and articles

Anne Mangen, Adriaan van der Weel: The evolution of reading in the age of digitisation: An integrative framework for reading research

Paper developing a framework for reading research. (Full text available online.)

The framework defines reading along the following dimensions:

Ergonomic dimension: reading is a physical, multisensory engagement with a device;

Attentional/perceptual dimension: reading is allocation of attentional resources; perceptual processing;

Cognitive dimension: reading is cognitive, linguistic processing;

Emotional dimension: reading is, potentially, an emotionally impactful experience;

Phenomenological dimension: reading is a personally meaningful activity;

Sociocultural dimension: reading is a socioculturally (and ideologically) appraised and historically contingent activity with sociocultural implications;

Cultural–evolutionary dimension: reading is an exocerebral extension of the brain (Bartra, 2014) developed under pressure of the increasing informational demands of an ever more sophisticated cultural habitat.

Erin ‘Folletto’ Casali: A tale of the digital ebook in the tablet era

A vision doc about a project that had similar goals (books and magazines in HTML), but was more focused on packaging (primarily apps in mobile stores). See also related articles listed in the article’s footer.

Here’s the final State-of-project issue on github
Their website is available on archive.org
They developed HPub, a simple open format quite similar to basic file structure of an ePub or next-book

Videos

Andrew Rhomberg: Data driven marketing leveraging, Readium for the Cloud

Linked: description of the book previews and interaction methods. Slides.