Ever since I wrote eBooks are Coming! I've been talking with friends about what we want in an eBook reader. The topic has generated hours of discussion, and I quickly learned everyone wants something different. I want an eBook reader because of my bad eyes, another friend wants it to be a super Palm Pilot, someone else wants it so his kids won't have to carry textbooks, another guy wants a portable library. And if I hop on eBookNet, I find even more opinions.

Lessons learned by running SciFan directly relates to emerging problems with eBooks and eBook readers. Delivering web pages means delivering information. It used to be newspapers, magazines and books delivered information, and those word outlets had a religious order of editors, publishers and printers that oversaw the delivery of information.

Now, anyone, with any skills, can publish anything, and have theoretically an unlimited print run, with a potential audience in the millions, if not a magnitude greater. Olivier and I have no degrees in journalism, no experience as editors, no training in graphic layout. I have to work hard at writing proper English and for Olivier, English isn't even his native language.

Yet, we are in the right spot, at the right time, to discover important insights into the future of information delivery. There are two aspects to create a useful web page: content and layout. Content is information. Layout is delivery. The difference between the old world of books, newspapers and magazines, and the new world of web pages and ebooks is delivery.

With printed informational delivery the final layout had to be frozen on the page. There might be an infinite number of ways to design a page, but ultimately, only one way could be printed. With electronic publications, the publisher really has no idea what the page will look like. Designers spend a great deal of time and effort trying to create HTML layouts that will look consistent across operating systems, monitors, browsers and other devices.

We have never found two people who agree on any aspect of SciFan's layout. Our present design is a negotiated stalemate. You have no idea how often the two of us argue over font sizes and background colors and other layout issues. I never knew there was so much diversity of tastes until I started creating web pages and polled people's opinions. At one point I was ready to just put plain words on the page, with no backgrounds or graphics, and leave the font information and sizes to the defaults of the reader's browsers. Of course, Olivier argued me out of this, and through many weeks of transatlantic email fighting, we arrived at our present layout.

Some people say our typefaces are too big and bold. Others say our fonts are too tiny and thin. So what do we do? It turns out that the Macintosh renders everything about one font size smaller than PCs. If we make it normal looking on the Macs, the typefaces look gigantic on Windows. We have no idea what we look like on Linux, Sun or other Unix machines, or WebTV, or PalmPilots or other specialized devices. Should we buy a Linux box to test our layout for users that represent less than one half of one percent of our visitors?

When I visit a web page I am very concerned with readability. My second concern is printability. If I can't read it on screen, can I print it out? It is surprising how many sites fail at both measures. I wage war against sites that use frames because they usually fail at one of the cardinal virtues of the web, which is bookmarking. The whole idea of cruising the web is to leave a trail of bookmarks to find your way back to any wonderful discovery. Companies that use frames are basically telling the world by their chosen method of informational delivery to only come to the front door, and by the way we don't want our content linked to, and we would prefer that you not print from our pages either.

In other words, there is implied meaning by how information is delivered. What is a magazine saying when its layout is fancy but the readability is low?

What is the solution for making the most people happy when delivering their information? Since I started researching eBooks, I've come across a number of interesting concepts that ask this same question in many ways. If you have eBooks, how do you format the content for people so that it's standard? You can buy the same hardback or paperback anywhere and read it. The same should be true for eBooks. Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com and Borders should all sell the same identical eBook readable on PC, Mac, Linux, Palm Pilot, Rocket eBook, SoftBook, Windows CE, etc.

If you have eBooks, then the next thing is eLibraries and eBookstores. Millions of documents will need to be converted to eBooks, so it is essential that this major undertaking is only done once. So why waste time and money adding layout information and freeze in some particular view of the information? Not only will human readers want to look at their words in different sizes and shapes, but a variety of machines, some not yet invented will need to process these words. This is why such schemes as using Adobe Acrobat are doomed, which merely brings complex magazine layouts to the digital screen. I always have to print Acrobat documents to read them, which defeats the purpose of electronic reading.

Information should be transferred in a non formatted package. In other words, we need to push the layout decisions down to the readers, both human and machine. And the Open eBook Standard is doing this. However, I believe formatting and style decisions should reside in a style sheet on the browser or ebook reader, and not within the ebook.

The whims and tastes of the reader should dictate how a page should look, what typeface is used, the size and color of the font, what the background color should be, how wide the margins should be, and so on. Like a Burger King hamburger, reading material should be served your way. I certainly know I want my eBooks formatted my way!

This is not possible with traditional print mediums, but it is possible with electronic print, so why shouldn't it be used, and be the standard? If you listen carefully, you will hear all the layout artists in the world screaming. There will be print media for a long time to come, though not as long as most like to think. Graphic artists and layout designers will have those static venues to work in. Electronic sources of information should be dynamic.

I bet you're asking, why does SciFan have so much formatting? Well, we're just like everyone else, and we design our pages as if we were a magazine. Even though most browsers will exert a degree of user selected customized control over page appearance, it is not to the level I'm talking about. The web world isn't quite ready for formatless documents. SciFan could design our pages without formatting, but they would look like pages from the first days of the WWW. It would make them easier to read and use, but they would look plain and dull.

Until people learn the advantages of reading text formatted for optimal readability they will just accept the status quo. I was just reading the new Popular Science magazine. This issue featured articles on improving the human body that I was anxious to read. But the small type, complex layout, card inserts and text overwhelmed by ads caused me to quickly tire of reading.

At Popular Science, their website, reading is easier because of larger font sizes, fewer ads, and a cleaner layout. If the Popular Science issue had been delivered for a Rocket eBook reader, I could comfortably size the text and read with the only interruption being to click the next page button. With all the card inserts, ads, folding pages, turn to page xx, and so on, just going to the next page on a magazine is a struggle. With an eBook reader I would spend less time physically wrestling with the magazine, and my eyes would not strain to see the words.

[The issue of advertising must be dealt with in a separate essay.]

Reading web pages do not involve this physical struggle, but gaudy designs often keep readers from even being able to read at all. A compromise would be to design web pages that offered the web visitor a choice:

1. No formatting
2. Fancy magazine layout
3. Wide margins, large font

Digital evolution will show the survival of the efficient. Why have one design for web pages and another for eBook readers? I bet eBook readers will become wireless web browsers, but web browsers will mutate to display information by formatting documents by reader controls. Over time, the science of readability will dictate layout. Publishers can not anticipate everyone's needs and tastes, as we have learned at SciFan. So why try? Let the readers have it their way.

We are now back to web browsers being the standard for eBooks, implying everything should be formatted for web browsers. Luckily, Open eBook is based on HMTL and XML, and style sheets--all web technology. With the introduction of other web devices like WebTV, cellular phones with web displays, handhelds like PalmPilots or Windows CE devices, everything is going to read information delivered over the web.

Ebook readers won't succeed unless they can read the same data, thus they need to be wireless extensions of our networks. Ebooks won't succeed unless they are easier to read than regular books. If ebooks and ebook readers succeed, a new form of information delivery will exist separate from the web, but web readable. I tend to think once people get used to this new readability standard, the web will start moving its design toward the ebook standards.

Look at it this way. I'm a bookworm but I seldom find books or magazines designed to be easy for me to read. If a technology emerges that allows me to read more comfortably and faster, why would I choose to read material based on the old systems?

And as a multitude of web based devices emerge, SciFan pages and most other web pages won't look very good on these new gadgets. The solution once again is formatless documents. Software and devices for the handicapped also find formatting challenging to deal with. The solution--you guessed it--take out the formatting.

Have you noticed how so many of the major websites have switched to using very tiny fonts? That's because they want you to see as much as possible on the front page. They make their sites two layers deep. The menu page has all the choices, and then the second level contains the content. Many times, the documents themselves are in bigger print.

Websites are designed and laid out like magazines because people read them like they read magazines. Regardless of the format you read a document, finding the document in the first place is related to other sciences. It pretty much breaks down into two methods. One method you go to a search engine, enter your search conditions, and pray that you are returned with a list of documents that are exactly what you want. The other method is how you read CNN. You go to their main page and look at a long list of news items and read what sparks your interest.

Formatless documents are perfect when you want to read, print or email information. There is no perfect solution for laying out table of contents or search pages. But that will change too. What if you had a cross between the ultimate card catalog system like Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal System, combined with the ultimate in news wire service, combined with a robot that really knows your interests and tastes?

Instead of going from site to site to browse for interesting articles, suppose you had one user interface to the whole world wide web. Lets say it's the morning of January 1, 2000 and you want to read about the effects of Y2K on the world. This ideal interface would present you with an orderly list of news articles culled from all of your favorite news sources, and any that your robot would think you would like to try. You find your first story to read, and bingo it's popped into a browser window with your exact favorite reading format--not the way CNN does it, or The New York Times, or ABC World News--but your personal format.

This is where the Internet is heading, not because people are choosing this direction, but because I believe this is where the forces of cybernature will take us. Efficiency will win out. Personal taste will win out.

In our future as data providers, Olivier and I will create content. It will not have formatting. It will be carefully classified by XML. It will be submitted to the Internet Library System, which will catalog it instantly. If anywhere in the world a reader is looking for information that fits the description of our content, it will be delivered to them. We won't be designing pages. We won't have to argue over the color of the backgrounds. We won't fight over font sizes. When we create a history of robots in science fiction, it will be cataloged with all the other histories of robots in science fiction. I doubt there will be many, but if there are, the reader might decide to read ours because they have read other essays from SciFan, and it is a brand that they like.

Additional Reading

• Microsoft Reader with ClearType
• Microsoft's eBook Timeline
• Microsoft Reader Uses ClearType Technology and Traditional Typography to Enhance On-Screen Reading
• Barnes & Noble to carry e-books
• New eBook standard: A best-seller?