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There’s a long tradition of designing text pages for printed books, a craft nurtured for centuries and slowly adapted to changes in printing techniques. There’s almost no tradition yet of designing text for the computer screen—especially the screen of a handheld machine that’s supposed to be an electronic book.
In programs like the one recently initiated at Bellevue Community College (BCC), just east of Seattle, that’s starting to change, as instructors begin both to address the design of e-books and to use e-books to help students learn. As you might guess, in the case of BCC, at least, Microsoft has something to do with the push to integrate this new technology.
Hands On
Cheryll Leo-Gwin directs BCC’s non-credit “Art-Zones” program, and for the past year she’s been working with nearby Microsoft on incorporating e-books into the curriculum. Not only has the Microsoft Reader been introduced into literature classes, but BCC is creating an e-book program of study for graphic designers—“Graphic Design for eBooks.” The idea, as expressed in a listing headed “Opportunities for Graphic Designers,” is “to teach graphic designers how to design for eBooks and the user interface.” (In this case, of course, the “user interface” is presumably the Microsoft Reader, given that Microsoft is a partner in this endeavor. The principles should be applicable to other platforms as well.) As BCC’s call for instructors encouragingly puts it, “Microsoft indicates that this is a brand new path for graphic designers.”
Leo-Gwin says, “The steps we’re taking for fall are to build a graphic design/desktop publishing program based on the principles of good design taught in Design 101 at the university level, then [add] the curriculum needed to create an e-book: writing, photography, film, music, etc.”
Easy Does It
The BCC program will ease designers into e-books. “The initial reaction to e-books among students,” says Leo-Gwin, “is negative if they don’t understand what it’s about. They don’t realize at first that e-books are not meant to replace normal books.” Graphic design students didn’t see e-book design as a subject in its own right, and they didn’t sign up when classes were first offered. So Leo-Gwin plans to incorporate the Reader and design for e-books into the general graphic design program, starting with short workshops. Microsoft, not surprisingly, is very supportive of this idea.
The actual tools students will use in designing e-books are HTML, QuarkXPress, PNG, and Microsoft Word. “You have to use all four to get the best resolution,” says Leo-Gwin. “As you work with them, you learn where and when you can compromise.”
An E-book by Any Other Name
Among ordinary readers (including students), there’s a lot of resistance to e-books. Some of it, Leon-Gwin thinks, comes from a misunderstanding of what e-books really are. “At school here, we have found that the whole e-book concept is not being well received, because people have the idea that their leather-bound, gold-leafed, illuminated, parchment-paper pages will be taken away from them forever in favor of the electronic book—which of course is not the case. So… we’re out to educate the general public about what this e-book thing really is (in its current configuration): a very powerful set of tools.”
Part of this will be accomplished by introducing e-books into ordinary college literature classes, not as a replacement for printed books but as an additional tool. As one of the class descriptions on BCC’s current curriculum puts it: “Love to read the classics but lack the time? Be among the first to discover the power of the eBook and the handheld device which gives you the time to read anywhere. Download all 5 books. By the end of this course, you will be well read and well versed in eBook technology.”
Another part may consist of trying to change the expectations that people have already built up about e-books by simply changing the terminology. “The term ‘e-book,'” says Leo-Gwin, “if not a misnomer, is at the very least misleading. We have partnered with the Bellevue Regional Library to create an awareness of our educational programs built around this technology. The series will be held at the library during four evening sessions, beginning mid-January. We’re calling it ‘Literary Powertools,’ which takes us away from the emphasis on the word ‘e-book.’
“In talking with Microsoft’s e-book researchers,” she continues, “Geraldine Wade and Nathan Everett, they have confirmed that the terminology still needs to be developed around the concept of the e-book. And that is exactly what we have instructed our curriculum developers to do, in the hopes of defining ‘it’ in a way that gets a more accurate picture out there of what the tools are really about.”
Explaining the Future
Leo-Gwin is excited about the new technology, or at least about its potential uses. In November she’ll be speaking at the conference of the League for Innovation, in Minneapolis. The League is an academic organization, so the attendees are used to somewhat long-winded titles that cram everything in. Hers is long and a bit dry, but it’s actually pretty descriptive: “Revitalizing desktop publishing and literature classes with eBooks using Microsoft Reader with ClearType technologies.” That’s about the size of it.
In a few years, these technologies will probably seem perfectly ordinary. Electronic books will be just one more tool in the repertory of college students taking lit classes, just as purple, spirit-duplicated handouts once augmented the textbooks we read in high school. But right now, we’re in the stage where we have to learn not only how to use these new media, as readers, but also how to make them, as designers. It’s going to be frustrating, infuriating, and fun.
This article was last modified on January 26, 2023
This article was first published on August 17, 2001
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