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This paper considers the Electronic Books ON‐screen Interface (EBONI) Project’s research into the importance of the user when designing electronic textbooks. The results of the Visual Book and the WEB Book experiments, which explored design aspects of e‐books and provide a backdrop to EBONI’s research, are presented. EBONI’s methodology and evaluations, involving over 200 students, lecturers and researchers in UK Higher Education, are described, and the findings discussed. It is proposed that, while aspects of paper books such as tables of contents, indexes and typography should be retained, books delivered electronically should also adapt to fit the new medium through use of hypertext, search engines and multimedia. In terms of the design of e‐book hardware, issues such as size and weight, display technology and functionality are of primary importance to users. These findings have been presented to creators of educational digital content in the form of a set of Electronic Textbook Design Guidelines.

This paper starts from the observation that the appearance of information contributes to its overall value and that, because there are many ways to represent information, it is very important to find the model which is going to be the most effective and conveys the greatest value of the original information. Appearance has always played a key role in the learning process, as it facilitates the discovery of new concepts by allowing visual association with those which are already familiar. This is why metaphors are so important in learning in general, and have therefore proved to be a valuable tool for designing alternative paradigms when adapting traditional tasks to novel environments. This paper will briefly discuss the link between paper books and their electronic counterparts. It will then focus on the role of metaphors in producing electronic books and introduce and discuss the importance of the visual rhetoric concept in driving the design process. Finally it will also present the main results of the visual book experiment and how these results can be interpreted in the context of the visual rhetoric approach.

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of current developments in the area of electronic books and libraries, and to describe an on‐going research project. Following a discussion of the key terminology used in this field, a number of issues will be investigated: what an electronic library is; how this concept has evolved during the last twenty years; what an electronic book is; and the relationship between an electronic library and an electronic book. As a result of our research we have defined a new concept, the Virtual Electronic Library, and its basic components: the hyper‐book and the visual‐book. These are two forms of electronic books which are built from different sources: paper books and electronic texts respectively. The environments in which such electronic books are produced will also be described.

The objective of this paper is to highlight the importance of a scientifically sounded approach to search engine evaluation. Nowadays there is a flourishing literature which describes various attempts at conducting such evaluation by following all sort of approaches, but very often only the final results are published with little, if any, information about the methodology and the procedures adopted. These various experiments have been critically investigated and catalogued according to their scientific foundation by Bell [1] in the attempt to provide a valuable framework for future studies in this area. This paper reconsiders some of Bell‘s ideas in the light of the crisis of classic evaluation techniques for information retrieval and tries to envisage some form of collaboration between the IR and web communities in order to design a better and more consistent platform for the evaluation of tools for interactive information retrieval.

This paper describes a series of three evaluations of electronic textbooks on the Web, which focused on assessing how appearance and design can affect users’ sense of engagement and directness with the material. The EBONI Project's methodology for evaluating electronic textbooks is outlined and each experiment is described, together with an analysis of results. Finally, some recommendations for successful design are suggested, based on an analysis of all experimental data. These recommendations underline the main findings of the evaluations: that users want some features of paper books to be preserved in the electronic medium, while also preferring electronic text to be written in a scannable style.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the importance of usability and overall user satisfaction when comparing performance of different search engines.

The study described in this paper starts from an investigation of existing methodologies for evaluating search engines in order to find out what are the most important factors for users to decide which system to use when searching the World Wide Web.

This study confirmed that usability and popularity are closely linked. This study has shown that no one‐search engine holds the key to ultimate search results. Just as there is cultural, political and geographical differences in the world's population, there are a number of search engines to fit the individual needs of every net citizen. Whereas results, precision, recall and reliability are the factors which participants prize highly, regardless of all other aspects. It was found that the speed of search engine results has become a high priority to participants.

Number of participants was limited and although some questions were confusing to some individuals, a majority of questionnaires were completed in a satisfactory fashion.

This paper describes a usability study involving different search engines looking at links between popularity and usability.

The purpose of this paper is to describe an experiment in introducing fiction e‐books in two reading groups run by a public library.

A user study involving two reading groups run over a period of three months. Electronic versions of titles of interest to each group were given out to each participant on Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). Readers were then asked to fill in a satisfaction questionnaire and discuss their experience with the rest of their group.

Readers were not too negative about using a new tool/gadget like the PDA but they did not see any advantage in reading an electronic version of the selected book.

It was realised quite earlier on that the target readers were emotionally so attached to physical books to feel as if they were betraying them when reading them electronically. A different sample of users more inclined to use technology and more open to different publishing models would have possibly provided a better insight.

The group reading approach introduced a social side to the adoption of e‐books and it was hoped that that would have made a difference. It was also one of the first attempts to look into the use of fiction e‐books in public libraries as opposed to an already existing number of studies looking into e‐books and their use in education and academic libraries. As such it can benefit both publishers and librarians.

This paper provides an analysis of the current state‐of‐the‐art in e‐books, and attempts both to set the scene and provide reasons for their low uptake.

The different approaches to e‐books of academic librarians, authors, publishers and readers are considered, using the results of a recent survey commissioned by the Joint Information Systems Committee.

The findings of this study make it clear that those who know about e‐books see them as potentially useful tools. However, a number of users of ICT resources are still unaware of e‐books even when their academic libraries' e‐book holdings is high. The lack of promotion from within the university, particularly from the academics, and to a certain extent from the librarians, is indeed a major reason for this knowledge gap.

Publishers, e‐book providers and aggregators, academics and intermediaries (i.e. librarians and information specialists) should concentrate on raising awareness of what is available and what are the advantages related to e‐books for specific categories of users. At the same time e‐book suppliers should make e‐books easier to find and purchase. Crucially, both the research and commercial development communities have to address these major issues: definition of common bench marks for research to progress; user‐centred design as a paradigm; better and stronger links with all stakeholders.

This paper offers a stepping stone for all parties interested in moving forwards to achieve this common goal.