Digital
textbooks are way too cumbersome, complain college students, and a consulting
firm specializing in the usability of digital media agrees.
Raluca
Budiu, a senior researcher with the Nielsen Norman Group (NNG), took a look at
the electronic versions of various nonfiction books and discovered a lot of
things that would drive students crazy. The books in question weren’t
specifically written as class textbooks, but they’re the type of nonfiction
titles often selected by professors for their courses.
“As any
college student will certify, lugging around a backpack full of books is no
fun,” Budiu wrote in NNG’s newsletter, Alertbox.
“Digital books are light and convenient, yet they still leave much to be
desired in terms of usability.”
In some
cases, the problems were in the formatting of the e-book, while others stemmed
from the e-reading app. Either way, Budiu found that some books offered no means
for readers to turn back to previous pages, something students do all the time
while studying print books.
Other
annoying difficulties included annotations that displayed out of whack with the
main content, tables that hadn’t been resized so they broke up across multiple
pages, low-resolution illustrations, text that references another portion of
the book but provides no direct link there, text that links to a full-size
illustration yet the adjacent thumbnail illustration doesn’t, and photo
captions that disappear when you zoom in on the image.
Budiu
recommended nonfiction publishers pay more attention to navigation in e-books,
support more in-text hyperlinking, and improve the quality and detail of
illustrations.
