I met with Joost Kircz, the main organizer of the Unbound Book conference and director of research of Electronic Publishing at the Domain Media, Creation and Information of the Hogeschool van Amsterdam. We spoke about the conference, the e-boekenstad project and about the still-elusive future of educational ebooks.  

SS: What are the primary goals of the e-boekenstad project? And how does the conference relate to this project?

JK: The goal of the e-boekenstad project is trying to understand the relationship between electronic versions of educational material and the changing book chain. It is a collaborative effort of publishers, distributors, libraries and companies working on electronic material in general as well as the HvA as an educational institute. The point is that creating electronic educational material is not just making a photograph of an oil painting and selling it as a postcard, it is trying to find out how changing substrates of messages are influencing the way material is written, read and understood.

The relationship with the conference is that for most people it is clear that for educational material e-learning will become important because people are struggling with a greater number of books (and in an electronic environment also with books formally known as ‘out of print’), working from various places or even travelling long distances. However for educational materials the reason for e-learning is clear but the implementation of new educational material has a very long way to go. At the conference we try to tackle problems such as what is the book as an object, and how should a book be edited and structured? The real thread in the conference is the educational material because there it becomes clear what can be changed. We don’t know yet what the effect will be of the changes. 

SS: How does the ideal educational ebook look?

JK: Honestly I don’t know, and even the educational publishers don’t know yet. The point is that for some parts of an electronic educational book you need text to make it understandable, explanatory text. Other parts can be much better explained in pictures, film or sound. This is the difference between an illustration and an explanation. You can illustrate reasoning in a picture; say the movement of tectonic plates. On the other end of the scale pictures are the primary information such as the picture of a wound or a tire imprint in mud as forensic evidence. Here it is the text that explicates what we see, and after that explication we will always immediately be able to recognize. In the case of a wound colour is essential.

There is always a balance between a picture as illustration to make the reasoning better understandable and primary information, which has other demands. The quality of colour is not important when it is to illustrate, like a graph of a company’s turnover. On the other hand it you want to describe a flower, something from nature, the quality of the colour is essential. The technical requirements depend on the type of information, the genres and on the type of understanding. The balance for educational books is: where do you need text, where do you need pictures, where do you need sound. Plus, this is very important, how do you build different stages, different levels in a modular approach, that is now part of research.

The handling of material becomes something new. We solved the problem of handling a pile of books. Now it is possible to do comparative research on another level, since we have material in digital form to compare, to refer back to, or to make annotations of in the text. So, now I can do different kinds of study, which means I have different demands on my electronic equipment. When I, for example, do a comparable research of paintings, I want to have a picture manipulator like Corel or Photoshop. We don’t yet have a clear understanding of the methodology. It is very new.

An electronic educational book should enable students from various backgrounds, cultural as well as intellectually, to achieve a similar end. Now educational books start on a certain level, but not all students have the same level when they start. My hope is that an educational book will be able to have different entries. The electronic book will then be able to have a variety of educational lines within the same channel from first year student to graduation. There is not one didactical way to end up at the finishing point. Electronic educational works will enable you to implement different ways of coming to the same goal that can be much more student- and cultural-dependent.

SS: When do you expect ebooks will be used in education?

JK: Ebooks will be used when the business model is set; it is not only an intellectual exercise. Economically it is extremely important because the way we write and produce books is new. The once in a lifetime event of buying a particular book is over. For example it might become possible that together with your diploma you will get a lifelong licence of educational material. It is a completely new economic model. New material needs a completely new way of manufacturing. At the graveyard, there are stones, we only know for sure that if you want to be remembered you use stone, that’s it, there is no floppy disk on the graveyard. There is something in the human culture that if you want to have something that has stability, we use materials that have proven stability. And electronic memory is not yet proven to be stable, because they change every couple of years. People don’t feel certain of new materials. So they will not transfer lock, stock and barrel to electronic environments and put all their chips on that before there is some security of eternity. 

SS: There are many forms of ebooks, such as ebooks for the mobile phone. What is your opinion of ebooks for the mobile phone?

JK: It failed because they didn’t make an investigation of what reading is. You have to find out what the mental activity of reading is and what you need. Technologists have not invented the size of the book but it is formed by usage. For reading you need a certain size and overview. Will you read from a phone if you have a paperback? Why was the paperback so successful? Because it reads very nicely and you can take it with you. A telephone doesn’t read very nice, but you can take it with you. Of course you can eat peas with chopsticks and you can read a book on your telephone that is about the same. But why would you?

SS: What will be the future of ebooks for education?

JK: In the future education won’t be entirely digital. Education is also not on paper completely. You have to make a distinction between a storage medium and a presentation medium. The output technology will change, which can be screen, paper, or wall. If we have a flexible screen with a resolution as good as paper, there will be a day that you roll it up, and away with the codex. But we have a long way to go. So everything will be stored electronically, but the output, the presentation device is not necessarily an electronic screen. Simply because you might read in an environment where there is no electricity.

The development of ebooks, and then I don’t mean the electronic reproduction of a paper book, will be dynamic but it will be reasonably slow. We have to develop new methodologies, new ways of writing, new ways of editing, and that will take one or two generations. Two barriers have already been solved: logistics and memory. We now face the next barrier, how to read and how to compose because it is not just making a copy of a paper book. I truly hope that one of the outcomes of the conference is that we create a research platform on all aspects of ebooks that goes beyond the gadget.

SS: What are your other expectations of the conference?

JK: My expectation is first that there is a better understanding of the fact that now the barriers of logistics, memory and bandwidth have been solved and that we only start now to define the research and routine for, say, hypertext environments. The barriers have been solved technically but now we don’t know how to handle it. So there is a lot of experimenting going on and that will be presented. I hope we get a better understanding of how to make educated guesses, to do control tests with publishers, with libraries, with authors to find out what really are the novel aspects of electronic publishing. Hence, you have to define what is the message between the author and the reader and what technology fits best to cater for the conveying of that message. I like the word ‘message’ more than ‘content’ because content is one of these undefined notions in this world, which are most often used as a measure for charging users of electronic networks. A message can be a full book but also a telephone number that you are looking for.