Appearance and functionality of electronic books

We present the results and the lessons learned from two separate and independent studies into the design, development, and evaluation of electronic books for information access: the Visual Book and the Hyper-TextBook. The Visual Book explored the importance of the visual component of the book metaphor in the production of “good” electronic books for referencing. The Hyper-TextBook concentrated on the importance of models and techniques for the automatic production of functional electronic versions of textbooks. Both studies started from similar considerations on what kinds of paper books are suitable for translation into electronic form but di.er on the prominence given to book appearance and functionalities. The results of these two research projects are critically presented in this paper, with the aim of helping designers and implementers to better integrate appearance and functional aspects of books into a more general methodology for the automatic production of electronic books for information access.