What Do Readers Want In A Digital World?
Cassandra is the Director of User Experience Strategy at Piehead
I recently spoke at a conference on digital publishing, talking about the user experience and eBooks, journals and reading applications.
Books are not what they used to be! In 2007, the advent of Kindle and iPhone, rocked the publishing industry. Suddenly, physical books were in competition with digital books. A series of gentler, but nonetheless disruptive aftershocks has occurred more recently. Content authoring tools have become more plentiful, storage is abundant and content can be disseminated in a range of formats. These changes have implications, consequences, and opportunities. The Society for Scholarly Publication brought together librarians, publishers and developers at a conference November 8th and 9th to discuss some of these implications. Participants gathered to share insight and knowledge around one critical issue: what do readers want in the current environment?
The increasing use of smart phones, e-readers and tablets means that content is available anytime and anywhere. Readers want convenience, discoverability, and connectedness. Consumers turn first to online search to find content. Thus, making content findable is critical and fundamental to a successful user experience. Additionally, metadata is key to surfacing content when users are searching. Readers may look for a specific product in some cases but typically, they are more likely looking for an answer to a question, a solution rather than a specific book, magazine or other “container” of content. Notably, some opportunities were also discussed; specifically the need for more searchability within certain published formats (eg. pdfs). Importantly, the main take-home, regardless of challenges or successes, was the need to make content discoverable.
Although the conference focused on scholarly publishing, which is necessarily long form, it evoked a healthy appreciation of the dynamic evolution of both long and short form content. Books were once written, published and provided to the reader in a finished immutable form. Now, long form content is often based upon short form content and communication between author and audience. Ideas are presented in blogs to which audiences respond and the ideas mutate. The long form content develops over time as a conversation between the author and audience rather than a complete book that is presented in a finished form to the readership. For example, Getting Real, a book published by 37 Signals, was based on blog entries over a number of years. Wikipedia, unlike the encyclopedia sets of decades ago, has thousands of authors and is changing constantly. Readers may unwittingly be reading book chapters when they are assuming they are just reading a blog post. Correspondingly, writers may be forever editing an unending series of drafts that never mature into a finished product! Talk about a living legacy!
