What would it be like? It's hard to imagine what the perfect book would be, and certainly, different types of text for different reasons would have different requirements. 

          But a few things are pretty certain, the perfect book would feature high readability, portability, connectivity & interactivity.

 

 

 

 

readability

 

portability 

         Informal studies have shown that when people read books (or magazines), they move the book many more times when reading than when reading on computer screens, even with laptops.

         The ability to easily move the screen while reading is an important and frequently overlooked ergonomic consideration. 

 

connectivity

No book is without connections. They are at the very least connected with the readers prior knowledge and experience. They are also likely to be connected to all other literature.

         Why not allow the reader better access to follow these connections, and to make entirely new connections as well?

         Useful connections in the internet sense then would include author-coded links and  dynamic access to look or words and phrases, to compare and to contrast, to check facts, to share thoughts and sections of interest.

         An electronic book with no external connections would be like taking only the most literal parts of the idea of 'book' and ignoring the potential of 'digital'.

 

interactivity

You can interact with physical books to a degree: You can fold in edges, write notes in the margin, photocopy pages, underline, and store photos and notes in its pages.

         Don't forget, the index is a type of hypertext. The index allows you to quite quickly ‘jump’ to any section of the book. If the index is designed well.

         Books can become very intimate as you read through them and ‘make them yours’, or they can stay pristine if you choose not to do anything to them. This is your choice.

         But electronic books, what a new dimension of interactivity we could magically add!

Look words up in dictionaries or specialized glossaries at a simple click. See what others have said about the book. Email sections to friends or blog about it. Annotate. Tag. And so on.

         Not all books would need such deep interactivity, not would benefit from it, but more academic books, technical and business books are not something you can easily afford to read through back to back and find the right sources to look up terms and so on, deep interactivity can help the reading experience here.