John Williams
National Book Award winning writer

General Rules of Thumb

• Learn from your experience
• Let the content be your guide
• Let the market be your guide
• Enrich appropriately (let the "problem of the manuscript" be your guide)
• Know when to stop. Don't become enamored of bells and whistles. Don't get precious.
• Don't replicate paper (unless audience/market demands it)
• Maximize utility of digital content
• Provide multiple utilities for multiple audiences
• Test with the ignorant

Specific Rules of Thumb

• Join forces of technically-literate with design-literate colleagues (get a real designer involved)
• Integrate design and product development
• Recognize limitations and design with them in mind
  • 80% of general market using modems, 60% of our audience has daytime Ethernet access sometimes, thus
    • provide warning of high-bandwidth content
    • don't force big images, big files, big stuff on readers
    • keep any "page" below 50k, including both text and images, whenever possible
    • use digital tools to shrink, compress, and limit in-line (forced) images

New Possibilities

Content Demands

• Linear hypertext
• Read-once occasional reference frequent reference
• Light dense (dimensionality)
• Long-lasting quickly aging
• Permanent frequently updated
• Video sound graphics text
• Read in bed read at desk

Purpose of publication

• disseminate profit
• image/market/list-building sale
• ensnare provide
• preëmpt/establish add

Use of Publication

• pedagogical individual enrichment
• educate entertain
• research/reference/reuse read-once
• as part of collection
• as collection of entities to be used in super-collection later

Audience

• broad narrow
• institutional individual
• technically adept technically novice
• just-the-facts aesthetic

Market

• non-institutional individuals (modem slowness ca 2 yrs)
• institutional/university individuals (ethernet speeds)
• library/institutional purchases

New Possibilities

• multidimensional/multiplanar exposition
  • abstract
  • summary
  • overview (headings/subheads as list? first sentences? "topic" sentences?)
  • content
  • content w/links
• "live" indices
• new forms of active indices (all paragraphs addressing concept X, all entries related to topic X (EFB)
• selective/specific searches
• increase graphics (cheap online)
• increase references, notes, related material, etc.
• diverse presentation (graphics separate from content, subtopic groupings of essays/chapters, tables in multiple formats for different contexts)
• reader-specific presentation
• multiple distribution modes (read view PDF download PDF to print order book
• of course, links to other free or for-pay material