students on their way to school

So, what sort of reaction did the eBook receive? Simply put, its reception, both in Khartoum and in the rural farming village of Dangeil, exceeded expectations. We produced 500 English copies and 500 in Arabic, the local language. We ran out of the latter. In retrospect, we should have produced a greater number of copies in Arabic. Copies were given to the local school and arrangements were made so that every household in the village received a copy.

Unloading eBooks and textbooks at the school

Although our eBook takes the form of a more traditional and perhaps somewhat static publication, its impact cannot be underestimated. The Dangeil villagers, and indeed university students and antiquities staff in Khartoum, viewed the publication as written for them, about them, and in their own language. The eBook has served not only as an educational tool, but has empowered the local community and created a sense of pride and proprietary ownership of the ruins and their history.

Julie Anderson
Assistant Keeper
Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan, British Museum

As I wrote last week, I have been co-organising the Inspiring Digital Engagement Festival in Sheffield and I wanted to make an eBook for it to try to capture participants feelings and views around digital technologies, digital inclusion, engagement and the festival itself. Thanks to Giles, these eBooks were printed through bookleteer’s PPOD service and ready for me to take to Sheffield on Tuesday.

The eBook was imaginatively titled ‘Inspiring Digital Engagement Festival‘ and consisted of 14 pages with the first page being an introduction and the last page providing space for comments and observations. Pages 3 and 4 were a double-page showing the programme for the day and this was so useful! It helped people anticipate the order in which things would happen and figure out who they were listening to at that moment.

The rest of the eBook was filled with a selection of open-ended questions. Questions included ‘How do you spend your time?‘, ‘Who owns digital space? What are the limitations, restrictions or edges?‘ and ‘What unexpected pleasures did today bring?‘ If you’re a member of bookleteer you can download the eBook here if you’re interested in seeing all of the questions we used.. (If you’re not a member you can sign up here!)

Example of a page from the IDEF eBook

The eBooks were handed out as people arrived at the event – you can see them on our registration ‘desk’ in the photo above… We had designed a selection of micro-activities to take place throughout the day which would have led people into filling in the eBooks individually and collaboratively. Of course, we ran late and some of these activities were cut, however, in the closing minutes of the festival we asked people to turn to their neighbour and to fill in their eBook together.

While the eBooks seemed too seductive for people to want to give them back to us the few that we have show such thoughtful answers and leading questions that I would love to see the rest and I feel that using the eBook for reflection and evaluation was successful and certainly something I would use again – though hopefully with more time to give to it throughout the event.

Fitting in very nicely with our discussions on Augmented Reading, Jakob Nielsen, the legend of usability studies, has conducted a test on the relative reading experience of reading a short story (Ernest Hemingway, in case you’re interested) on the iPad, Kindle eReader, PC and printed book.

Twenty-four participants read the story in each of the different formats. On average the story took 17 minutes 20 seconds to read however both the Kindle and the iPad came in slower than the printed book by 10.7% and 6.2% respectively.

In terms of user satisfaction, readers were asked to score each of the formats on a scale of 1-7 with 7 being the highest score. The iPad, the Kindle and the printed book all recorded similar scores (5.8, 5.7 and 5.6 respectively) all of which were significantly higher than the score for the PC at 3.6.

In their comments participants said they found the printed book more relaxing than any of the eReaders and that the PC reminded them of work. I guess Carlton hadn’t seen this study when they launched their AR books for children – to be experienced on a PC.

However, it’s also good news for eReaders and suggests that they no longer offer a worse reading experience than printed books and that in the end your choice of reading format might come down to personal preference as in the case of music listening where, despite the ease of CDs and MP3s, some people still prefer to listen to music on vinyl. This is another conversation I had at PU&P: Augmented Reading where I was discussing the topic of choice and formats with the guys from getmorelocal.co.uk in the context of trying to reach people who might not be inclined to go online to look for information. Indeed, this was one of the motivations behind the tangible format of bookleteer eBooks.

Read more about the study on Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox. Found via the Guardian.

* The Book for iPad by Longlivebooks via Design-Fetish and seen on a bookshelf at the top of this post

My name is J.-Thomas Maillioux, and I’ve been working as the librarian for the collège Evariste Galois middle school since 2005. I’ve recently started to use the bookleteers to create “adventure books” for our first-year pupils’ library orientation program in a format both convenient and original. The flexibility of the Bookleteer publishing platform has also allowed me to quickly and easily implement the modifications suggested by my own observations, or advice from the students and teachers involved in the orientation program.

Download A4 | US Letter PDF 486Kb

I’ve also been able to sit down with small group of students to discuss what they would do with the Bookleteers : they suggested uses both for school (custom booklets for note taking on school trips, tutorials or HOWTOs for specific activities in sciences and technology classes, reminders while giving presentations in front of a class) and home (grocery shopping, tasks listing, books and stories writing or games) that make me think that, with the correct amount of support from their teachers in acquiring and supporting the necessary skills, they should be able to make the Bookleteers and the publishing platform their own relatively quickly : a good way to reconcile them not only with the printed word, but also with their printed word – that what they write, too, can be and deserves being made into a book with very little hassle.

We’d love to hear more testimonials of how bookleteer, the eBooks and StoryCubes are being used – please send your feedback to us at bookleteer at proboscis.org.uk

Ideal for Creative Writers

Bookleteer could prove ideal for creative writers who want to share a selection of poems, a short story or novel extract.

I’m writing a teenage novel and regularly send chapters to teenage and adult readers in order to get feedback. In the past, I’ve emailed out my work as a Word document with a portrait layout, and have found that 15% of people don’t download and read the email attachment. However, this Autumn I used Bookleteer to produce a miniature hard-copy booklet of the first three chapters, added a Creative Commons illustration to the front cover, printed and folded the copies, and distributed them to readers.

The response has been terrific. 100% of targeted people were motivated to read my work.

My teenage readers reported that the miniature size of the book made it portable; they stuffed the booklets into their schoolbags and read them on the bus or tube. Some of the girls noted that the booklet had the feel of ‘a personal possession’; it seemed to tap into teenage girls’ lust for secrets.

The adult readers were keen on the format too; they felt they’d been sent ‘a real book’, rather than a document that closely resembled their office paperwork. Readers had to turn the page every couple of hundred words, which kept them engaged with the story.

My writing sample was 40 pages long, the maximum length recommended by Proboscis, so the folding and scissor-snipping were fairly labour-intensive. Having said that, the product is robust enough to withstand some wear and tear; a third of my readers have successfully circulated the writing sample among colleagues and friends.

The Bookleteer format would be suitable for writers who want to send a writing sample to a publisher. Creative writing students at the University of London are enthusiastic about using the format to workshop their writing. The .pdf that is produced would also make a valuable download on a writer’s personal website.

Kati Rynne
www.katirynne.wordpress.com