Last October, the Internet Archive held a two-day meeting entitled “Books in Browsers,” cosponsored by O’Reilly Media. The goal of this meeting was to think through the new possibilities and challenges presented by delivering books through open platforms rather than closed devices.
Books-in-browsers present some significant advantages to readers in terms of portability and accessibility of content, as Brewster Kahle has explored. Delivering content via the browser also presents advantages for publishers, book sellers, and libraries, all of whom have an interest in balancing wide distribution with certain kinds of use restrictions.
In the last couple of months, several new browser-based e-book readers have been unveiled or announced, and other experiments are underway. Here’s a quick overview:
Kindle for the Web
This one’s still forthcoming, as yet, but the folks at Amazon have announced that sometime soon, you’ll be able to read your Kindle books directly in a browser. As a result, you’ll be able to access them from any computer, such as a teaching station, without having to install or log into the Kindle application. The announcement also notes that you’ll be able to synchronize your library, bookmarks, notes, and the like with the multiple devices on which you may already read your Kindle books.
Google’s eBook Reader
Brian wrote last month about the launch of the Google eBookstore and its associated iOS app, but Google has also made it possible for you to read the eBooks you add to your library directly in your browser.
The browser-based Google reader allows the user to switch between scanned pages and flowing text, to change the typeface and font size in which flowing text is shown, to change the paragraph justification, and to search within the text, but it does not as yet permit annotation or highlighting of your books.
Internet Archive Open Library
The Internet Archive Open Library, an open project that aims to build “one web page for every book ever published,” has developed a browser-based reader that allows access to public domain texts, as well as enabling users to borrow books from their local libraries. Even better, the reader is embeddable in other web pages:
Though the Internet Archive’s reader doesn’t have annotation functions, it does have a nifty “read aloud” function for many texts. And the larger Open Library project is open, and seeking user contributions.
Chrome Experiments
Among the recent Chrome Experiments, designed to push the limits of what’s possible with HTML5, Javascript, and Chrome, is 20 Things I Learned About Browsers & the Web, pictured in the header image for this post. Though the content of this one-off experiment might be a bit oversimplified for many technologically inclined readers, 20 Things is gorgeously designed, highly readable, and nicely animated, and it begins to suggest some avenues of development for genuinely browser-native books. Paradoxically, though, while HTML5 presents the opportunity for ebooks to do something more than simply re-create the page on the screen, this particular experiment plays most explicitly with the metaphor of the book, down to its page-turn animations.
More experiments and browser-based readers such as these are undoubtedly in the works. What features would you like to see in browser-based book readers? Let us know in the comments!
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23 Responses to Books in Browsers
ajp0000 - January 18, 2011 at 2:53 pm
Google eBooks has a fatal flaw for researchers at the moment: they have chosen to “crop” the page numbers from the “scanned pages” (or PDF) view. This is unfortunate because otherwise it looks like a great platform for those of who like ebooks but need to cite physical page numbers.
The funny thing is, if the book has preview pages in the old-school Google Books website, you can still see those parts of the pages that are cropped on the new Google eBooks platform! This means that Google can stop displaying the pages as cropped if we pressure them to do so. You can do that at this page: http://books.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=suggestions.cs
mmil2572 - January 19, 2011 at 7:42 am
Does that mean the page is HTML and can be read by a screen reader for a student or person who is blind, or is it an image?
bergtrom - January 19, 2011 at 8:20 am
I am a science faculty member and instructor interested in e-textbooks. Currently I see them mainly as a way to save students money, since text book prices are devastatingly high. Value-added features of e-texts in my field include:
-they are in full color
-Some are annotatable… by instructors as well as students. -Several are at least minimally interactive, linking or embedding formative quizzing or other engaging animations and activities to/in the e-texts.
Producers of e-texts should be encouraged in their development of interactive e-texts. Drawbacks that in my opinion should be addressed before I require e-texts include:
-Some are include animations. When these are in Flash, they are not compatible across platforms (PC, Mac, Droid…). That means they are not portable for everyone.
-Most if not all are not integrated with course management systems CMS), requiring separate authentication and entry of assessment scores into the CMS grade book. Integration of assessment scores, rubrics and the like are essential time-savers if an instructor wants to require students to use them.
-Progressive (adaptive) quizzing should be the goal of e-texts, taking advantage of the ability to take students right to the correct information when they answer a quiz question incorrectly… and then back to the quiz.
-Instructors must be able to create such quizzes and add to or edit publisher-provided quizzes.
-instructors should be able to integrate links at relevant points in their e-texts to direct students to their own web-published content. I post PowerPoint lectures on our CMS. I would like to be able to parse these into smaller PowerPoint learning objects and point students to appropriate ones with a link that says something like “Click here to see what your instructor has to say about this.”
There are other things that I would like to see in an e-text, but these few are good ways for publishers to really take advantage of web platforms to create instructional flexibility and most important, to enhance student centered learning.
kfitz - January 19, 2011 at 8:25 am
@mmil2572: Unfortunately, no; these readers are browser-based, but not HTML. The Internet Archive’s browser-based book reader does have a “read aloud” feature, however.
stpage - January 19, 2011 at 8:26 am
Another problem with e-texts is that students usually don’t have access to them later. This is a critical shortcoming for core texts in the sciences.
mmil2572 - January 19, 2011 at 10:05 am
I am the Tech Coordinator in a Disability Services Office. It is crucial that accessibility is built in at the development phase of etext / ebooks. We have already had issues with certain online courses that have adopted a digital textbook, complete with interactive quizzes, etc. I tested the above sample and even though it has a “read aloud” feature, it is not accessible to a blind student who uses a screen reader. Making ebooks accessible doesn’t mean the experience can’t be rich with media and interactivity. It simply means those who creating the ebook need to know “HOW” to make an application accessible.
mottgreene - January 19, 2011 at 10:08 am
if you don’t own it, can’t annotate it, and can’t find what page you are on, and cannot re-sell it, its usefulness and value compared to a bound book are much reduced. The technology doesn’t need to change as much as the business model, I think.
mathieso - January 19, 2011 at 12:38 pm
bergtrom rules! There is so much more that can be done than move text from paper to pixels.
If we’re going to rethink textbooks, we could start from scratch. Ask: how can students learn this topic (whatever it is) effectively? (Look at learning science research results.) Then: what would such a course look like? (Look at learning science research results to design an effective course.) Then: what would a good text for that course look like? (There’s learning science results here, too.)
We could end up with textbooks that improve learning outcomes. For example, CoreDogs (a thing for my geek classes) embeds exercises directly in text. Students enter their solutions in the text, and ask for feedback. I look at them, and if there’s a problem, we have a conversation about it, inside the “book.” If you’re into jargon, it’s deep learning through fast, frequent, formative feedback.
Maybe it’s time to rethink what a textbook can be. We could give instructors active “books” that improve learning outcomes, without their having to become learning experts.
Kieran
bedford1 - January 19, 2011 at 12:41 pm
RE: mottgreene
When students purchase a textbook and then sell it back to the bookstore, they’re essentially subscribing to it for a term. I don’t think moving from a physical artifact one can re-sell to a digital artifact to which one subscribes is going to be a big value-loss for students. Besides, you don’t need to *own* an ebook in order to annotate and customize it.
For those who argue that the subscription-based business model makes it difficult for students to keep the book throughout the rest of their lives: (1) I think we sometimes romanticize how much students actually return to these books once the class ends, and (2) can’t a subscription can be easily extended once it’s expired? As more of our content/banking/socializing/music/etc. moves online, the notion of turning to a site and requesting your forgotten password to access something will not be as big a deal-breaker as we might think now.
domalley - January 21, 2011 at 9:38 am
@bedford1 What you propose sounds good to me. Students could decide at the end of the semester whether they want to pay a little extra to buy a book to which they’d subscribed that semester. When they purchase a book, they could keep their annotations. Maybe it would be a novel that was particularly meaningful, or a philosophy text, or a Bio 101 textbook that will be relevant to their major or their grad studies.