This is the cool part of blogging. Someone you've never met but shares similar interests posts something in the morning. You read the post and have your own thoughts and interact with it and drop the original author a trackback, comment or email. He responds.

You meet someone who shares interests, and you're able to dialog about things, and hopefully all parties involved are able to learn a little something new.

That's what's going on right now between Roger Sperberg (at Electric Forest) and me. Our perspectives are a little different — from what I understand he's looking at portable devices (either dedicated reading devices or Palm/PocketPC style devices) and ebook content for those areas. My perspective due to my role at Logos Bible Software is different, thinking about delivering ebook titles in the area of Bible study and reference through the Libronix Digital Library System.

That said, I think Roger and I agree on the basics. Books are books, whether paper or electronic. Roger writes in his first post:

But the point is to look at the limitations of a print book and, without changing the essence of the material being presented, then to release the e-book from those limits.

And, of course, he's right. There are things that just need to be there for a book to be considered a book, despite the presentation technology (paper or pixels, fixed or portable). Roger refers me to a paper by Bill Hill from Microsoft titled The Magic of Reading (MSWord Doc). If it is the paper I think it is, it is worth reading — and I need to read it again, it's been awhile.

Roger and I are on the same page here. It's almost like there is, deep in the dark recesses of Plato's cave, the clear distillation of book-ness and in most instances it has only been reflected poorly in the electronic arena. The question isn't only technological, it is about what makes a book a book. Too often us techno-types get bogged down (or altogether too excited) about the technology and we forget the purpose: books are what people read and study. Roger continues in his second post:

So if I focus my argument on making books for the digital library instead of discussing the broader topic of ways of delivering information, it's because I agree [with Bill Hill] that books play a special role for us. Let's not re-invent everything just because we can.

Right on. We're still in agreement. And Brannan's First Law of Electronic Book Design ("Just because you can doesn't mean you should") apparently still holds. There is something about books that we're comforted by, that we're used to, and that we take pleasure in when we use them. So we need to shoot for that quality of book-ness when electronic editions of books are created. And we need to do this in the context of a digital library.

Roger and I start to differ when we take into account different reading platforms, when we start to move from general ebook theory into the reality of delivering content to a platform. Admittedly, I'm a little biased because I have a vested interest in thinking about the platform that Logos Bible Software runs on. The platform that Logos targets is the Windows user (and now the Mac user too!). This means desktops, laptops and a few (though increasing) TabletPC users. Logos is about providing libraries of content (customizable and expandable) to its users. We focus on Bibles and Bible reference tools; so think commentaries, dictionaries, foreign languages, ancient languages, and all sorts of assorted study guides, topical resources, cross-reference resources and the like (currently over 4,000 titles, and counting!). But because Logos delivers to a desktop/laptop doesn't mean that the importance of electronic editions that have that sense of book-ness isn't still there. We strive to do that as much as possible. Some of these areas are:

• We preserve paragraphing and attempt to emulate the typeset page within font and display constraints. So we don't have paged material for display, typically, because we have a continuously scrolling and re-sizable environment.
• We do, however, encode page breaks from the printed resource for citation purposes, and we do allow users to view a "visual filter" that puts page numbers in the text flow so they know where they are in the book.
• We encode subject/author indexes with the entries attached to articles. Thus users can search specific books, sub-collections or their entire custom library for subject index entries.
• Books are organic things, typeset as they were to convey certain information. We do our best to preserve this. We don't stuff every book into the same "global template" as if we really think all top-level headings must be 16 point Arial bold. That would be ridiculous. The book display should remind the user of the printed version, especially if the user is familiar with the printed version. So we select a serif or sans-serif font in accordance with the book's style; font sizes and weights and whitespace are all handled similarly.
• We encode all sorts of bibliographical metadata in the resource through including MARC record content for most every text resource, along with similar metadata in a Dublin Core style. This information is used within the application in numerous contexts, from browsing the library by Library of Congress subject, or author, or title; down to generating sub-collection or library-wide bibliographies in a number of formats, to appending a citation (in the user's preferred format) to copied excerpts. Why do this? Well, one aspect of book-ness involves considering how the book functions within the context of a collection of books (a library).

In his third post, Roger adds these final words:

My point in my post is not that e-book publishers don't know that they should or could link more, bring in other texts and pictures, and so on, but that you and I, as bringers-about-of-the-future, as Prometheans of publishing, have TWO obligations to meet if we are to succeed: we must find the things (hyperlinks in your case, motion graphics for process in my example) that print books can't do AND then execute these capabilities in such a fashion that in every other aspect we humans still regard the object we are reading as a book.

Remember too that every criterion I could list as to what makes a book could almost be met by magazines and newspapers and web pages — and CD-ROM publications too — and that I claim a special role for books. Hill's title claims the magic for reading and not for book-reading, and so maybe I'm on thin ice when I argue from this position. But it's why I focused on books instead of information retrieval as the key issue for libraries going into the future. Many people won't agree with me; and perhaps you won't agree with me, but that would be their and your prerogative. But my story is we've got to keep an e-book really booklike, and I'm sticking to it.

Agreed. Though I'd amend the last sentence in the first paragraph to say something like "... still regard the object we are reading and using as a book." Not all books are read or used in the same way. My context means I think much more about reference books; books that are accessed randomly and not necessarily sequentially. Many of these aren't books that are read from cover to cover but are read as they are consulted in discontiguous pieces. But Roger's bottom line, " ... we've got to keep an e-book really booklike" is spot on. I'm glad to hear it.

Too often (particularly in electronically representing reference books) the book-ness is stripped through concessions to technology. We don't want to do that at Logos. Bob Pritchett and other colleagues of mine have been able to instill a healthy value for the art of typesetting. It's why we're interested in looking at books (and at codices and scrolls from before the age of the printed page) to see how they communicate information. It's why I get jazzed when I look at the Complutensian Polyglot and realize that not only are the different language editions of texts aligned in columns, but through a superscript letter system they're actually aligned at the word/phrase level — and that in a book that was published in 1522!

There is something about the book. If Bill Hill says it's magic, he may be right. But we do need to do our best to not mess it up when we make electronic versions of things.

Thanks, Roger, for starting to write about these sorts of things. I'm looking forward to the sorts of topics y'all over there at Electric Forest have planned to blog about in the future.