Most ebook experiments do a better job of showing off our devices rather than solving specific reader problems. We get video extras, web links, piped in Twitter feeds. Problem is, these “enhancements” often answer the wrong question: what can we add? In an age of Information Overload, readers don’t need more; they need help. A video of battle footage may be fun to watch, and a simple way to add what’s not possible in print. But what students of World War Two often struggle with is much more mundane: remembering key events for that upcoming test or prepping for an essay they’re writing.

Rather than starting from what the iPad or EPUB 3 makes possible, we should instead think about where print fails to solve readers’ needs. By keeping a simple question in mind regarding any enhancement — what’s it for? — I think we can create digital books that are superior to print in some really tangible ways.

Here are five different areas that offer some reader-friendly opportunities.

Comprehension

When readers encounter terms they don’t fully understand — melody, histogram, mothers-in-law — comprehension suffers. The best solution, of course, is writing that’s clear and engaging. But figuring how much detail to provide is tough. So we often use presentation tools like sidebars and glossaries to aid those who need extra guidance. But think about the distraction we impose on a reader’s flow when a book forces her to leave the main text and go elsewhere. A simple, unobtrusively designed pop-up box is a great alternative. It’s guidance at the point of need. Inkling does this nicely:

Quick explanations, a tap away, maintain the reading flow.

Similarly, video often gets mentioned as great for topics that are tough to describe in text: rolling sushi, for example. But it’s easy to idealize the power of video, and overlook some fundamental shortcomings: things like scanning to find the point you want and reviewing a clip at your own pace. Re-reading complex text is something we all do as readers. Most videos — or, more accurately, video-playing tools — don’t make it easy to review particular sections.

The app Hello Cupcake includes a really nifty stop-motion control for its visual instructions. Simply trace your finger rightward (to advance) or leftward (to review) and the steps unfurl at a pace that’s simple to follow.

The Hello Cupcake app lets you use your finger as a “scrubber” to slowly review demo steps in this stop-motion video.

Memory

A key part of understanding a book’s meaning lies in remembering what the text says. We draw conclusions and pass judgements only when we’re able to stash away mental nuggets: a character’s actions, events in a country’s history, and so on.

But reading today is fraught with distractions. Maintaining focus and sustaining attention is tough. Even our reading schedules are a problem. We start books, put them down for two days, and then have a hard time recalling characters and concepts when we return. Sure, in an ideal world you’d simply concentrate more closely and take careful notes. But we don’t live in an ideal world.

Why not, instead, think about instrumenting books so they help us remember? A year or so ago I roughed out an idea I called “Character Notes”: brief character summaries, available at a tap and just as quickly dismissible.

Short summaries help readers recall a character’s key info.

My design goal was to aid readers of a novel who just need a quick memory jiggle. Amazon has since unveiled a similar service by wiring up many of its ebooks to notes from its Shelfari subsidiary. (Tap the menu icon in any Kindle app and you’ll find this info in the Book Extras section.) The Atavist offers similar help, written by its own authors, in its non-fiction articles.

Is it worth the time it would take a publisher or author to create these notes? I’d certainly pay a buck or so more for the version of any novel that had this built in.

Interpretation

A simple example of baking an interpretive aid into a book comes from the goofily named Shmoop — a small competitor to book summary services CliffsNotes and SparkNotes. Regardless of how you feel about the ethics of these businesses, Shmoop’s implementation is interesting. They bundle the plot summaries and canned interpretations with the underlying original text. In their edition of My Antonia, for example, the reader is a simple tap away from a brief blurb on the meaning of various key passages throughout the novel. Of course, this could be done via foot- or end-notes. But the digital version makes it much easier to maintain the reading flow.

A much more intriguing idea comes from media designer Brett Victor. One of the essays on his must-read site (worrydream.com) is called “Explorable Explanations”. In it he demonstrates three different ways that interactive documents can help readers analyze an article’s key points. In one example there’s a passage on the revenue that vehicle license fees would generate for California state parks. At first glance it looks like the same kind of prose you’d see in an opinion column or a textbook. But thanks to some underlying JavaScript, you can use your finger or mouse to adjust some of the main assumptions…and then watch, live, as the changing base values affect the conclusions later in the piece. Neat.

Change some of the text's assumptions, and watch the author's analysis update, on the fly.

Relevance

Print books — and their digital replicas — are designed as “one size fits all” products. But not every reader needs the same serving size. A traveler to Brazil in the fall doesn’t need a whole chapter about February’s Carnival. And a vegetable hater reading Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything ends up with many recipes he rarely consults. My point here isn’t to eliminate these irrelevant sections. After all, when a meatatarian’s vegan sister visits she might want to borrow his iPad to cook. Instead, think about how a digital book can highlight and even internally promote some material more prominently than other. The iPhone version of Bittman’s book moves in this direction by using its start screen to showcase seasonally relevant recipes:

When summer arrives, this cookbook app changes its start screen to highlight grilling recipes.

It’s also worth thinking about designing books that expand and contract in response to how much time a reader has. In other words, think about providing an executive summary for readers who want a quick take versus the unabridged edition for those ready to do a deep dive.

For example, what if I’m interested in Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants. But if the full book requires something like 15 or 20 hours of reading, perhaps that’s time I don’t have. Here’s where a book that presents multiple versions of itself could be really useful. Startup Semi-Linear is taking a crack at that concept with its Citia line of condensed editions. (Disclosure: I’m working with them on editorial development and product design.) The idea with Citia is more than simply shrinking the big book down into some kind of Reader’s Digest edition. Citia extracts a book’s key concepts and uses a nice visual layout to let readers explore the work in a way that interests them. So now you’ve got a chance to get to know Kevin’s ideas in something like two hours. Plus, you can navigate through his book-sized thoughts in a way that isn’t constrained by the linear path of sequential pages.

The Citia version of “What Technology Wants” offers a shorter, non-linear alternative to the full edition.

Extraction & Action

Reading a book and using its guidance are often things that want to happen in very different places. Maybe you browse a cookbook at night, in bed, for ideas. But when it’s shopping time the recipe’s ingredient list would be much more helpful at the grocery store. Especially with reference and how-to books the ability to export key nuggets is a huge advantage that digital books can offer.

Email-ready ingredient lists are by now a pretty familiar feature in digital cookbooks. The How to Cook Everything apps add a nice twist. Many recipes come with a bunch of variations built in: use zucchini or summer squash or eggplant.

Decide which ingredient option you like and the choice ends up in your portable shopping list.

Little radio buttons next to each of these choices let you pick the option you want. The ingredient you choose is what gets dispatched to your emailed shopping list. Nice.

Jamie Oliver’s cookbook app, Jamie’s Recipes, has a nice feature for iPad-using cooks when they’re in the kitchen. There, your hands are often greased up or wet, making it tough to swipe or tap the screen to move through a recipe’s steps.  The app’s solution is a little mic icon which, when tapped, lets you say “Next” or “Previous” for hands-free operation. It’s super useful.

Another example in this category comes from the iBird line of apps. These field guides have a wonderful collection of bird vocalization recordings. This audio does double duty: helping at-home browsers study up on what’s out there, and serving as a lure out in the field. The app is both teacher and tool, helping attract the attention of birds you want to photograph.

So. Five different ways that digital books can address specific reader needs: comprehension, memory, interpretation, relevance, and extraction/action. If you think about the Kindle’s success, a big reason is how the device and the buying process solve a very specific problem for serious readers: having something to read when and where we want it.

Why haven’t enhanced ebooks taken off in a similar way? I think a big barrier lies in the way we’ve approached this whole question of what to add. It’s time to stop thinking about what our devices make possible and instead focus on what readers need.

• Red Jumper’s Book Creator
• Blurb’s ebook-making service
• Moglue
• Demibooks Composer
• iBooks Author
• Inkling Habitat
• Atavist
• Vook
• Adobe Digital Publishing Suite
• Woodwing
• Aquafadas
• Red Foundry

And if you’d like to download my slides, feel free; just know that, as in all my talks, most of what I have to offer comes out of my mouth, rather than what’s on the projector screen.

Wow, what a lot to digest from my first trip to South By Southwest. I’ll be chewing on everything I learned for weeks to come, but here’s an ultra-quick roundup of my “need to check this stuff out” list. I jotted these items down during sessions, bar chats, lunches & plane rides. Lightly annotated and satisfaction most definitely not guaranteed, but I’m thinking there’s some gold in these nuggets.

Tools

• Ready-Media. InDesign templates for firms that want to publish on the web, the iPad, and other platforms—all from one source. A big attraction here is the involvement of legendary publication designer Roger Black (who also gave a pitch for another project he’s worked on: Treesaver, an open source JavaScript framework for web content that looks good on a wide range of screen sizes).
• SlideRocket. Web-friendly presentation software. Features include: collaborative tools so teams can work together on the same deck, audience tracking, multimedia authoring, and built-in conversation tools (for your viewers).
• PowerPoint’s tablet-drawing tool. Dan Roam showed this feature off during the talk he gave called “Shut Up & Draw: A Non-Artist Way to Think Visually” (along with Sunni Brown and Jessica Hagy, one of whom touted Adobe Ideas as a great app for quick sketches). He marked up and doodled on his slides during the talk. Great for making his point about the power of casual drawing, but could definitely be useful for anyone looking to add on-the-fly emphasis to their slides. Requires a tablet PC running Windows. Can’t be long before Apple adds this to Keynote, right?

Apps

• Twirdie. “Twitter powered golf”: a “social word game”. Advance the ball across the links in this iPhone app by entering a search term; the more popular your term is on Twitter (over the past 60 minutes), the further your ball goes. Love how this game merges video game mechanics with word guessing.
• SharedTime. From the people behind the Center for Digital Storytelling. This app lets you tell stories about the volunteer projects you’re working on…and find out new projects to contribute to.
• Khoya. “Interactive fantasy adventure”. Melcher Media chief Charlie Melcher showed me this one (and the next two on this list). The blend of text, images, and animations in this iPad app really caught my eye.
• Chopsticks Novel. This book app from Penguin (for iPhone and iPad) is composed primarily of visual items (photos, videos) that viewers explore, guided by a little bit of narrative text. Has gotten just the right mix of diametrically opposed reviews (“things that are more exciting than this app: #1, watching the floor…” vs. “totally engrossing iPad experience”) to make me want to download.
• POST Matter. Magazine app for iPad that skews a bit more towards advertising and shopping than editorial, but some of the multimedia stuff (especially slo-mo twirlings of models) are good fodder for those interested in how to create lush digital imagery.
• Monty Python: The Holy Book of Days. Speaking of Melcher Media, they just released this must-have addition to any Holy Grail fan’s collection. A 28-day journal that tracks the making of the cult film. Lotsa great integration here of video and text—and one of the first implementations I’ve seen of frame-by-frame scrubbing (attention how-to content producers: this one’s a must-add for any video tutorials where viewers would benefit from controlling the speed of the replay).
• The Wider Image. Touted in one of the show directory ads as “coming soon” from Reuters. I’d ordinarily be skeptical of the launch site’s claims (“Re-experience news photography…an entirely new interactive experience…this immersive app will offer a multitude of ways to visually explore the world.”), but, hey: this is Reuters—they wouldn’t exaggerate, right?
• SELF magazine. What I’m looking forward to checking out here is this iPad app’s “happy plate”: an interactive tool that lets readers load food choices onto said plate and find out whether their choices add up to a healthy meal. Goofy sounding, but potentially useful.

Other

• Lumarca. A lightshow rigged up in 3D “real space” in which light beamed from a projector onto a floor-to-ceiling grid of threads illuminates different patterns. 3D “info artist” Albert Hwang demo’d it during his fascinating talk “Detached Messages: Spatial & Immersive Systems” (given along with Adam Pruden).

• BoostUp. Mentioned by the Center for Digital Storytelling’s Joe Lambert during his session “No Brochures: Digital Storytelling for Nonprofits”. The site spotlights video profiles of young people facing hard times; after you watch the stories, more info (text, graphics, charts) is available on how to help. Interesting as a content design idea: attract visitors with video, then give them more info after they’ve watched these riveting mini documentaries.

Isn’t it ironic how a device whose design embodies minimalism often gets used to show off overwhelming amounts of media?

Recently I’ve begun looking for what might be called minimalist apps—those whose contents match the iPad’s spare design. My search gained new impetus thanks to Children’s Picturebooks: The Art of Visual Storytelling, which studies an art form that, like the iPad, has attracted creators interested in mixing media. One of the points that struck me in this wonderful study is how some of the best artists exercise a design restraint, leaving out more than they include. Often this is done because of their audience—young kids not yet equipped to process lots of info at once. This condition—this input sensitivity—struck a chord: it reminded me of my own current battle with Info Overload and how frequently I feel mentally skittish, unable to focus, overwhelmed.

The benefits for app designers who exercise simliar restraint could be more than simply soothing mentally addled minds. There might be cognitive and pedagogical advantages—namely, by resisting the impulse to spoon feed viewers ready-made multimedia (tap here for alternate views of Harry’s march up the quidditch field), our apps might spur readers to construct their own memory-friendly mental models. Perhaps “show, don’t tell” needs updating for the iPad Age: Show less, learn more.

As the Children’s Picturebooks authors write: “all challenging picture books make readers work hard (though it’s enjoyable toil) at filling in the gaps between the words and pictures to construct meaning.”

Two examples in particular from the book are worth thinking about.

First, Pat Hutchins’ Rosie’s Walk (HarperCollins, 1968). About a young hen out for a walk, followed by a fox she doesn’t see, it’s:

“…one of the first picturebooks to fully subvert the relationship between the “seen” and the heard. The secret lies in what the words don’t say as the fox is never mentioned in the written text, which comprises a single sentence about Rosie…taking a walk “across the yard”, “around the pond,” etc. then coming safely home. The fun comes from the fact that the fox…has one misadventure after another as he chases after her. The book never fails to elicit squeals of “Behind you!” in young children as they try to alert the hen to the danger. The reader never knows whether Rosie is very cool, very stupid, or just plain lucky, but picturebooks like these provoke young readers to be actively involved in making meaning as they fill the gaps in for themselves.”

Next, consider John Burningham’s Granpa (Jonathan Cape, 1984), which leaves:

“…tantalizing gaps for the reader to fill in. In Granpa…the grandfather and granddaughter don’t have an actual dialog; instead the words are made up of those scraps of conversation that sometimes go nowhere—such as questions that have no answers…Most powerful of all is the final spread where the little girl, whose body posture is one of dejection, looks across at granpa’s empty chair. Burningnam leaves the reader to respond to the image and interpret whether granpa has died or not. Children often come up with alternative explanations for his disappearance as they don’t want to face the inevitability of death. Such picturebooks allow young readers that license.”

Two thought-provoking examples of the power of things left unsaid, of visuals not shown. The idea seems almost heretical, given a canvas as capable as the iPad. But it’s definitely worth a bit of chin stroking for book app designers: what if we didn’t show absolutely everything? What would viewers gain if, rather than being able to explore, they were forced to imagine what’s not there?

I’ve studied hundreds of recent publishing experiments, comparing them all to what I’ve learned during a 20-plus year career as writer, editor, and publisher. My goal: distill best-practice principles and spotlight model examples. I want to help authors understand how to use the digital canvas to convey their best ideas, and how to do so in a reader-friendly way. As app book tinkering flourishes, and as ePub3 emerges as an equally rich alternative, the time felt right for a look at the difference between what can and what should be done in digital book-land. That’s my mission in Breaking the Page.

The preview edition’s three chapters focus on some basics: browsing, searching, and navigating. This ain’t the sexiest crew, I know, but it’s amazing how hard it is to get this stuff right. I focus on examples good and bad, toss in a few design ideas of my own, and suggest how to include these services in a way that makes digital books pleasing on eyes, hands, and minds.

Ahead, I’ve got a head-to-toe tour of model digital book features planned for the full edition (coming mid-2012). I’ll be focusing on questions like:

• What’s the best way to integrate—and not just add—different media types? And, on a related note: is it possible to make the viewing experience as seamless and immersive as reading is in print?
• How do you design content and reading paths on what is, essentially, an infinite canvas?
• How do you pick the best balance between personalized design (reader-controllable font sizing, for example) and author-driven fixed layout? Are there any acceptable compromises?

While I’m pushing ahead to the finish line, I’d love to hear what you think. Suggestions, examples, critiques…send ’em all my way.

I’ve been fiddling with the idea of using multiple displays to give a presentation—putting different slides on different screens. One design sketch—working title: “Documan”—has gotten some chuckles around my office [Don’t you work alone? -Ed.]:

Man-mounted iPads, plus a nearby monitor. A few possibilities not shown: each iPad could contain images, not just text; objects could move between iPads or from iPad to monitor; and presenter could rotate one or more iPads.

Why on earth does the world need to see a man strap on a half dozen iPads? And, more importantly, what kind of message would benefit from a rig like this?

Beats me. But I do think that content experiments, designed expressly for the screens we all use—rather than our ancestors’ print pages or single PowerPoint slides—is the best way to figure out how stories and teaching change when they move onto the touchscreen.

I’ll spare you, for now, the words and images I’m testing out to fill those screens. (One teaser, though: think about how easy Keynote for iPad makes it to build an action that exits screen right and enters screen left. Now, if you could just get the timing right when using two iPads…).

Clearly, I’m not the only guy playing around here. Ahead, I round up a few content confections that span multiple screens. Some involve separate physical displays, others use different virtual windows. Not all of this stuff is new. But I find it thought provoking how creative types are using the small, medium, and large screens that increasingly coexist near each other.

iPad + projector

Joe Sabia calls himself an “iPad storyteller”—love it! He showed off his stuff at a recent TED talk where he uses his tablet and a variety of different apps (iBooks, a drawing app, Google Earth, Photos, and so on) to entertain an audience that is variously fixed on him, the big projector screen which his iPad is attached to, and the iPad’s display itself.

iPad + magician

Sleight-of-hand artist and iPad maestro Simon Pierro pulls off some awfully clever tricks with his iPad and: a real tennis ball, a glass of milk, and a weatherwoman’s hair (she’s on a video inside the iPad). I have no idea what’s magic, what’s video editing trickery, or what he and the iPad are actually doing. And, you know what? It doesn’t matter. What he demonstrates here is how man and machine can team up to entertain in really innovative ways. Don’t miss his part two, where he—sorta/kinda—sheds light on what he’s done.

iPad-powered window displays

Gin Lane Media filled up three of Saks 5th Avenue’s storefront windows with 64 iPads and nine 27-inch displays.

iPad/iPhone partnerships

A few apps use the big and small screen of tablet and smartphone in tandem. iOS app Scrabble, for example, lets you conduct group games in which the iPad serves as publicly viewable board and the iPhone is each player’s private letter stash. Remote Palette is a painting app where the iPad is the canvas and the iPhone is the paint palette.

Multiple browser windows

The band Arcade Fire worked with director Chris Milk to compose this mind-blowing HTML5-powered interactive video for its song “We Used to Wait”. You give this web app the address of the house or building you grew up in. It then whips together a custom-built video (woven around some stock footage) that incorporates Google Maps footage of your old neighborhood and other graphical magic mashups…all in multiple browser windows of various sizes. Works in the Chrome browser only. If you like this one, you’ll love http://sour-mirror.jp/ which uses snapshots of you from your laptop’s webcam, and your Facebook and Twitter feed, to compose a multi-window extravaganza. It all culminates in a mosaic of your face built out of pix pulled from your social media feed.

Multi-screen Patterns

A pattern-style analysis of different content and interaction designs for multiple displays. From the basic (how Amazon uses Whispersync to keep book location and notes coordinated across a user’s different reading devices) to some innovative software that helps end users take an image, chop it up, and display it on their own collection of displays. That’s what the next item is about.

Junkyard jumbotron

Free to use (beta) software from some MITers that automatically splits up an image and displays it on whatever collection of screens (smartphones, tablets, PCs) you assemble. This demo shows it in action.

The Multi-Screen Experience

Five minute video, with a bunch of TV and consumer electronics execs and analysts. Nothing hugely revelatory, but a nice little brain-tickler about how we are entering an age where audience and content producers alike are thinking about how to create and consume stories that play across displays of many different sizes.

Split-Screen: A Love Story

Heartwarming. Winner of a Nokia smartphone videomaking contest, this video shows how split-screen stories can add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Google Wave cinema: Pulp Fiction

Not really—okay, not at all—safe for work, but a really nifty example of how innovative, multi-pane software (in this case, the soon-to-be late Google Wave), allowed one artist to take a scene from Pulp Fiction and render it within this program, weaving in videos, image, text, and maps.

I don’t hear much talk about Microsoft’s Surface computers, those industrial strength touchscreens-on-a-tabletop. But maybe the idea was about $10,000 too expensive and a few years ahead of its time. Hear me out while I play connect-the-anecdata-points and argue that 10-inch tablets are just the start of the touchscreen publishing revolution. I’ll bet that large, touchscreen canvases are coming, and I think they’re going to change the kinds of documents we create.

But first a quick bit on why on earth we need larger compositional spaces. After all, any decent novelist, blogger, or journalist can get by with a 11-inch laptop, right? Sure, but what about creative types who like scattering notes, sketches, and outlines across their physical desktops? And what if they want to mix and match different kinds of media and incorporate touchscreen gestures? Some tools (Objective-C, HTML5) exist, but how many creative minds have the skills necessary to use that stuff?

Last week in my digital publishing tools webcast I previewed a handful of apps and online software that let people create “media mashups”: compositions that break free from the rigidly sequenced vertical layouts that many writing tools impose. Take for example Microsoft Word or pretty much any blogging tool: only with some serious effort can you break free from producing a stacked sequence of editorial elements:

<some text>

<an image>

<a header>

<some text>

etc.

Rigid layout structures like that are, of course, great for mainly-prose narrative. But they make rich page layout—think: the interior design you see in a magazine, infographics, and their touchscreen successors—tough.

I hope you all take some time to play around with the software I mentioned (Webdoc, Blurb Mobile, Polyvore’s editor, Storify, Hype, and Mixel). Only by practicing with these rich media canvases will we begin to see the kinds of stories and messages that might emerge if we move away from the constraints of tools that segregate word from image.

But what I didn’t mention in my webcast, and the heart of this post, is a hardware development that feels increasingly likely: the arrival of large touchscreens that will make composition even easier than it currently is on devices like the iPad. Consider how the spread of really big touchscreens could improve the kinds of personal publishing projects we all work on…from family photo books to website design, and from slideshow presentations to scrapbooking. If we could combine the touchscreen’s signature talent (allowing us to signal our layout wishes directly: put this picture over there) with the large displays and workspaces that many of us enjoy at our work desks, wouldn’t that change the kinds of documents we create? And wouldn’t that require authoring tools that make it easy for us to mix and match different media types?

So here’s my list of recently spotted data points and observations:

The slow but steady convergence of Mac OS X and iOS

Anyone who follows Apple closely knows the deal here. Some headline developments for those who aren’t Mac geeks: Lion’s elevation of iOS-style, touch-friendly app icons; the increasingly high profile of touch gestures on all Mac laptops and, for the desktops, the availability of the Magic Trackpad. Steve Jobs rightfully dismissed the notion that we’d ever reach out and touch vertical displays. But it only takes a quick stroll down memory lane, and a glimpse at the sunflower-inspired iMac, to imagine a screen design that could easily shift between vertical (for long-form writing and reading) and horizontal-ish for touchscreen activities like page layout.

The heart of Windows 8: the touchscreen-friendly Metro

Microsoft’s next big operating system update is built around the premise that people will want to switch between keyboard/mouse-controlled computers and those operated via touchscreen. They’re counting on manufacturers to build tablets that do both. In one of their Metro demos, presenter Jensen Harris (a senior executive on the Windows user experience team) makes the case that in a few years it’ll be rare to find any display—tablet, laptop, or desktop—that isn’t touchscreen capable.

Touchscreen software for the big display

The New York Times Nick Bilton wrote recently about a sneak peak Adobe gave him of a 50-inch “drafting table running Photoshop Touch where you can essentially draw and create on a screen”. As Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch told him: “The creative process has been tied to a keyboard and mouse until now, and we want people to be able to touch the screen to create, just like we all used to use pencils and X-acto knives in the past.”

Decreasing prices

We all know how this works: new technology gets cheaper as it matures. Those first generation Kindles sold for $399; now they start at $79. It’s not hard to imagine a time when not only 20-plus inch desktop monitors (the swivel variety, as I described above) are affordable, but also imagine portable touchscreen displays everywhere from your office walls to your refrigerator.

Growing familiarity with touchscreen gestures

Beyond early adopters, you see it everywhere: toddlers, deliverymen, senior citizens, checkout clerks—all of ’em understand how to tap, pinch, swipe. As a culture, we’re becoming touchscreen literate.

The way I work

This one’s personal, but I wonder how unique I am. My writing method often involves a bunch of writing surfaces: draft notes that I crank out on my desktop display; a sheet of physical notebook paper where I take notes on what I’ve written; another piece of paper on which I construct an annotated outline. I don’t quite know what it is, but I just need to see it all spread out. And, man, do I love—do I need—to be able to draw lines, curves, circles, and arrows, connecting this idea over here, to that idea over there.

Writing for me on a laptop display feels claustrophobic. (I’m talking about the idea-generating and the drafting phase here; when it’s time to revise, I’m plenty happy blocking out all distractions and focusing on a single, limited size writing viewport.) LiquidText is one company I’m following closely; they’re developing touchscreen-friendly reading tools that let so-called active readers tap, touch, highlight, and move text in ways that resemble my compositional tactics. They call it “multitouch document manipulation” and it’s just one reason I’m incredibly excited about what may turn out to be the next desktop publishing revolution.

• Pandamian
• PressBooks
• Leanpub
• Interactive Touch Books
• Moglue

• Demibooks Composer
• Red Jumper’s Book Creator

• Red Foundry
• Genwi
• Appmakr
• My App Builder
• Webdoc
• Blurb Mobile

• Polyvore Editor

• Storify
• Hype
• Toontastic

The example prompting this concept is similar to what you probably see online every day (click to enlarge):

Are each of those time-consuming and attention-distracting links truly worth visiting? At a time when focus is a precious commodity, isn’t it odd how often digital documents place exit ramps in front of readers? My idea is simple. Remove the link from the body text and instead use a brief margin note to signal readers that additional info awaits. In sketch form it looks something like:

Links removed from the body text and placed, with brief commentary, in the margin.

I see three main benefits:

• Eliminating hyperlink distraction. I can’t be the only one out there who finds the mere presence of hyperlinks distracting. Even the majority of times when I don’t follow the links, I find myself struggling to ignore the noise of the unknown: What awaits if I follow that link? Why did the author put the link here and not beneath some other phrase? My mind wanders when what I really want is to focus.
• Enabling link evaluation. Sometimes all we readers need is a bit more info about what a link points to. Then we can make better decisions about whether the click or tap is worth our time. In the original excerpt I posted, a curious reader can right-click the link to expose the URL — that at least reveals a citation’s source. But is it worth taking the time to do so? And do most readers even know that trick? I think that simply adding a smidgen more info — for example, what I added in my sketch — could help readers quickly judge the value of the target.
• Offering the possibility of adding “read later” tools. Most people know about “time-shifting” reading services like Instapaper and Read It Later. They’re great for scooping up worthwhile reads that we don’t have time for during a busy day. I think it might be interesting to implement a similar service in a document-specific way. That is, give readers a quick way to say, in effect, “that linked article looks great; please hang onto it and give it back to me when I’m finished reading this piece.” I didn’t add that feature to the sketch, but doing so would be a relatively simple matter of adding in some kind of “read it later” icon next to each link.

Digital documents — books, web articles, business communications — that help readers focus are the ones that we’re most likely to remember. Those that send us scampering around the Web will be more easily forgotten.

• I am not working on a sequel, a response, or any kind of book project related to Go the F**k to Sleep.

• The publisher of that book, Akashic Books, has not commissioned me to write anything. Nor have they, or anyone else, shared with me any unpublished or planned excerpts related to that work.
• During a presentation I gave at last week’s “Books in Browsers” conference, I clearly did not succeed in making the point that the story excerpt I read — “The Kid Responds” — was written by me.

• It was a humorous attempt on my part to illustrate how a publisher might use an existing book to sell follow-on installments. (For example: “Like these five short stories? Here are five more from the same author, available for $1 a story”.)

Two lessons learned from this episode:

1. When I’m having some creative fun in front of people who don’t know me, the deadpan humor I specialize in needs to be accompanied by a line like “Folks, this next thing I’m about to say is a complete joke”.
2. If humor doesn’t succeed in coming across to everyone watching you in a room, then it most definitely won’t be clear when posted online.

To Johnny Temple, Adam Mansbach, Richard Cortés, and all the other good people associated with that great ode to frustrated parenting: sorry!