TOC: From Eye to Brain: Content Design & the “Last Mile” Problem - Peter Meyers

A book is for document organization.

Immersion is one of the big benefits of the page after page format of a traditional book. However the page after page format hides the really great moments in the book, you need to read it to find those moments. Yes, sometimes they are excerpted on the back of the book, but overall they are hidden within the book.

Other mediums have found solutions for this. Magazines advertise on the cover what’s hidden within the media (often headlines are on the cover). Browsing the outside gives you insight on the inside.

Steven Johnson – Where Good Ideas Come From – The annotation sketch note map is both a video advertisement for the book, but it also gives the game plan for the book and shows the reader the insides of the book. The video gives insight into the author, but also the map alone on the book makes the book more marketable on its own.

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. The table of contents is laid out in a grid. The piece in the middle of the grid are highlighted because the author indicated they were key ideas. There are little visual indicators (higher and lower stacks of paper) to show how much content is devoted to certain topics. It also pushes people towards experiencing the book in a non-linear way.

The Secret War Between Uploading and Downloading is not quite the right thing, but it is a great step forward in exploring how a book can present itself at first small (executive summary) then medium, then large (traditional book). It allows pinch and zoom into sections where it’s first a toc, then summary paragraphs, then chapters.

eBooks should not be “we have this mass of multi-media files lets dump them in” they want thoughtful curating and inventive use of the media.

“I believe our attention is well-directed these days thanks to good algorithms and great curators, but it’s like a flashlight beam whipping around the room. Never resting. Never returning. What’s the alternative?” - Robin Sloan

A big block of text pushes us off readers who are used to quick snippets on the web. It can almost be a wall. Sloan made an eBook app, a tap essay, which prints a line with each tap. It aerates the text, giving space to the words and space for yourself to ponder the words. He also uses different background colors, all caps, and font color for effect. He has a page that has this:

Maybe that’s a reasonable

DEFINITION OF LOVE

on the interne tor anywhere else:

TO LOVE IS TO RETURN

And only on that page does he offer a share button, which communicates the idea that he thinks this is the part of the text worth sharing. It highlights it as a major point. There’s a rhythm to the writing that is reveled with each tap, a rhythm to language that the digital world can communicate.

When he gets to the sentence “it’s like a flashlight whipping around the room” is in white text on black as opposed to the text before. He then greys out a sentence as if to lower his voice. Then there’s a blank page which says to the reader to take a rest.

Writing like this is paying attention to the materials we use to write with.

There is a web-based book called Welcome to Pine Point. It has drawings and an instrumental sound track. Words on a screen interact differently with other kinds of media. It is always difficult to get people to pay attention to text and not the media, so often people put a large amount of text and not much media. In this book however the opposite is done and the text is short, almost poetic. It is a remarkable example of integrating different kinds of medium.

The problem with video is it deprives the reader of the pacing control they have with text. With text you can go back and reread or read at a different speed at your choice. Video forces you to go at its frame rate. In the print world you can handle a recipe by laying it out in storyboard fashion with the text within each image. There’s less cognitive burden because you don’t need to attach text and picture. Hello Cupcake is a great example of giving the control to the reader. Wiping your finger across the page scrubs the images forward at your own pace. The stop motion video with scrubbing is the best of both worlds.

www.wearemudlark.com/orchestrated/winter_1.html Has a pairing of text to the music that really helps you understand the music. It was originally spoken word on a CD, but now it offers a much better combination of description and music. It illuminates the pieces in an effective manner.

On Writing

Several Short Sentence about writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg

“The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.” – Tom Waits

Thinking about line length (look at marketing descriptions) when writing.