10/16/24

7AAVDH20:
Digital
Publishing

Week 4: Mobile
publishing/platforms
John Lavagnino

1 2

Today’s lecture
• Affordances once again
• Case study: Kindle, a substantial ebook ecosystem, and the example of microgenres
• Case study: Kiwix, a novel kind of ebook platform

Affordances once again

3 4

1
 10/16/24

Mobile = everything Affordances

• The advertised curriculum for this module includes this section on mobile publishing and platforms, but • We saw before that “affordance” referred to the things a person can do with an object, the ways you can
really that’s everything, isn’t it? Do you really need to say “mobile”? interact with it, going beyond the basic idea of its intended use.
• There are vastly more phones, tablets, and e-readers around than desktop or laptop computers. • One attractive affordance of mobile devices when used for book reading is that the physical bulk of the
• Back when desktop and laptop computers were all there was, there still were minimal sales of books for book no longer matters: you don’t need to carry around a big wad of paper to read a long book.
reading on them. People do some of that for work, but these are not widely preferred reading systems. • At the same time, that affordance has a few disadvantages. You can’t easily impress anyone with the size
• The real question would be whether you want to even bother making a desktop/laptop version of a of the book you’re reading. The book seems less appropriate as a gift because it has no physical size, and
digital publication; they exist, but mostly because ebooks sold for mobile use can be plugged into desktop that goes along with some other limitations stemming from the more general lack of physical form--- you
versions of e-reader software too without any special effort. can’t easily write a message on an ebook given as gift.
• The important issue is how you create something that works well on mobile devices. • Many features of an object or system will have desirable affordances as well as drawbacks: users will
decide whether on balance they’re better off or not.

5 6

The reading question Print that’s like a phone

• We saw with e-readers that some common features reflected specific ideas about reading: that an E Ink Here’s an example of a magazine page: this is from
screen was better than LCD or LED screens; and that a format somewhat larger than a phone was New Scientist for 12 October 2024, a publication a
needed. little bigger than A4 size on paper. The text on this
• But there are standard formats for printed text that aren’t so different from a phone. page is divided into four narrow columns. It’s in
multiple columns for the most common reason: you
can fit more text onto a page without making it
unreadable. It’s generally agreed that lines running
the full width of this page at this type size would be
difficult to read.

7 8

2
 10/16/24

Closeup of an article Screen size issues

This is a passage from one column of that page: the Looking again at that page of New Scientist, you can
number of words in each line is very similar to see that the whole page as printed is very
unsuitable for phone consumption, even though
any one column is narrow enough to be readable on
screen.
Many existing fixed-format texts are highly
unsuitable for reading on mobile phones because a
small part of a page can be shown at a legible size
at one time. What would it be like to read this
magazine page on a mobile phone, one column at a
time?

9 10

The screen size issue Getting features for free

• How much can fit on the screen at once is a comparatively unimportant issue for prose text that’s in • We saw before that the ebook industry mostly doesn’t do anything that groundbreaking in ebooks.
reflowable form. But many things created for larger display areas pose problems for our use on smaller Ebooks use web technology, but mostly don’t even use all the features of that technology.
screens; affordances relating to seeing the whole display along with areas of detail at the same time are • At the same time, because ebook readers often just use platform services to display the web pages within
often present with paper but absent with small screens. EPUB files, there is a certain amount of development even when developers don’t do anything. You can
• Maps offer a good test case for issues of this kind: good digital map systems do not just show a fixed get new features for free.
image in different sizes, but change the amount of detail and the size of labeling to match the screen size
and zoom level. Even here, though, what you lose with a small screen is the ability to see a large area at
the same time as seeing how a small particular area fits in. The affordances of the large display are not
possible to fully recover without size.

11 12

3
 10/16/24

An example of free features

• Here’s a screen shot from Apple Books, showing how selecting a word triggers a popup menu offering
functions including “look up” (a dictionary lookup plus some web search results) and “translate”. These
aren’t features the software had to do very much to support: possibly no more than enabling those
options when using a library for displaying web pages. The evolution of the platform means the program
gets better even though they didn’t do any real work.

Case study: Kindle and microgenres

13 14

Ecosystems Book are not commodity goods

• Although the ebook as a unit has not changed very much in the last decade, the ecosystems in which it is • One of the difficult features of publishing as a business, compared to some other businesses, is that
embedded have seen much more interesting developments. books aren’t usually commodities, in the economic sense. It matters a lot to buyers exactly what content
• Simon Tanner, in an optional reading for this week, wrote: “An ecosystem is a set of interdependent they get: they don’t just want any fantasy novel, they want Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and
relationships among the resources, technologies, organisation hosting, creators and consumers.” The idea not some other book. They don’t usually care if you insist there’s another book with the same kind of
is familiar from everyday experience: using particular technology products like mobile phones is not story elements that’s just as good.
about a single device alone in the world, but one that is connected to services and other products, and to • As Thad McIlroy said in our reading this week: “Authors are the brand, not their publishers. This is true
the whole world of other people using compatible devices. for most creative content.” It’s not a happy situation for publishers, and means that for many kinds of
• As an example of the intersection of technology, product description, marketing, and platform features, books successful authors have a lot of power, and can readily move to another publisher. Book editors
we’ll look at microgenres. who are good at choosing books that become successful are also important in the industry.

• Source: Thad McIlroy, Mobile Strategies for Digital Publishing: A Practical Guide to the Evolving Landscape (New York: Digital Book
World, 2015), 92.

15 16

4
 10/16/24

Towards making books commodity goods Microgenres in the book world

• But there are areas of the industry where books begin to approach the status of a commodity. • Categories that Netflix and other vendors currently use publicly tend to be more general than that. But
• There are classifications commonly used for books, so that you can go to a bookstore or an online store there are some parallels in the book world, notably in romance publishing, a large and successful
and find fantasy books, self-help books, romances, and so on; though the usual experience of working subsector, and one in which readers often have very specific preferences. Publishers and booksellers have
with books categorized this way is that there’s still a lot of hunting within the category for books of actual been devising microgenres to respond to these preferences.
interest to you. The categories are too broad for all the books in one category to be of interest. • Harlequin Enterprises, a prominent romance publisher, divides the world of romance novels generally
• Library cataloguing and metadata can sharpen the focus somewhat, but are not designed for marketing into six subcategories: Contemporary Romance, Inspirational Romance, Romantic Suspense, Erotic
and don’t have much connection to it. Romance, Historical Romance, and Paranormal and Fantasy Romance.
• A development in the digital world, visible in the realm of other kinds of media, is the microgenre: the • Each of these itself divides into numerous categories: under Historical Romance, one is “Vikings and
much, much narrower category, such that if you care about one work in it you’re very likely to feel at least Medieval Romance”. Specific storytelling preferences can be selected: under Contemporary Romance you
some interest in others. can choose “Spicy and Steamy Reads” if you want to read details about sex, or “Sweet and Wholesome
• Netflix internally developed such a system for films a decade ago, which included categories as specific as Romance” if you prefer books that (as they put it) “are lower on the sensuality scale”.
“Scary Cult Mad-Scientist Movies from the 1970s” and “Feel-good Foreign Comedies for Hopeless
Romantics”.
• Source: “Your Guide to Romantic Genres”, online at Harlequin’s web site.
• Source: Alexis Madrigal, “How Netflix Reverse-Engineered Hollywood”, Atlantic Monthly, 2 January 2014.

17 18

Microgenres and the ecosystem More on romance microgenres

• You don’t have to just guess based on how the book is described or what’s on the cover. At one time, • One way readers can use this system is by an advanced-search interface allowing you to select particular
shopping in a physical bookstore, you could glance through a book to figure out whether it was what you content: on Amazon’s site, “Romantic Themes”, for example, includes the topics Amnesia, Beaches,
wanted; samples available in an online bookstore may not be enough to tell you. Clean, Gambling, International, Love Triangle, Medical, Second Chances, Secret Baby, Vacation, Wedding,
• But the value of microgenres for helping you discover the right books intersects with the nature of digital and Workplace.
ecosystems with large vendors like Amazon. • Available “Romantic Heroes” include Cowboys, Doctors, Firefighters, Highlanders, Pirates, Politicians,
• Their Kindle ecosystem is not just a combination of e-readers and software. They also have a larger range Royalty & Aristocrats, Spies, Vikings, and Wealthy.
of ways to sell the content than was seen in the print world: you can buy individual books that you’ve • Not every combination of all these topics exists, but exploring them shows that quite a lot do.
found out about somehow, or subscribe to large chunks of their library, notably born-digital books • Authors are also aware of the market possibilities represented by these categorizations, and now often
published primarily or exclusively as Kindle books. specialize in filling in particular combinations.
• Here, the high demand from some genre-fiction readers intersects with microgenres so that fiction does • Readers still take an interest in particular authors whose work appeals to them, but this particular
come close to being a commodity product: readers may still combination of a popular genre, keen interest in particular story elements, ability to market large
numbers of titles, and author response to the needs of the market, makes for a distinctive ebook world.
• Other genres are more costly to produce, less popular, and otherwise more resistant to this kind of
transformation, but it has the potential to spread farther.

19 20

5
 10/16/24

Absent affordances
• We saw in looking at e-reader devices last week that one attraction cited by buyers was the absence of
affordances: they liked the way these devices did not have the range of possible uses that any tablet
would. It was appealing to them that the device couldn’t do as much as a tablet.
• This is not the most promising direction for development: usually being able to do more is an advantage!
• But it can be productive to consider ways to support use of a device when some features are only
intermittently available. Though the imagined use of mobile devices is with constant online connectivity,
it’s actually a familiar problem that it can be a problem in certain places even in large cities, or in
situations such as large crowds.
• Worldwide, also, there are many users of mobile phones whose actual connections are occasional rather
than constant. In low- and middle-income countries, there is still widespread use of mobile phones, but

Case study: Kiwix often only at carefully planned times, somewhat like the constraints once imposed by landline phones.

21 22

Kiwix: see www.kiwix.org An example: the entire Wikipedia

• This is a noncommercial project to support use of web content downloaded in bulk to your phone. The • If you’ve got 110 gigabytes of free space on your phone,
blurb on their main page is: you can get a complete copy of the English-language
Help us bring Internet to all Wikipedia (which was most recently compiled in January,
3 billion people have no or little access to internet. This can be because of costs, lack of infrastructure, or so is not entirely up to date).
outright censorship. • It’s vastly too large for ebook software, which is normally
• (I’m not a good source of advice on security and privacy, but this also gives you a way to get web built on the assumption that no one book is much bigger
resources onto your phone for use later on without a mobile trail.) than a printed book, or maybe a few of them.
• The Kiwix app is available on Android, Linux, Mac OS, iOS, and Windows, or as an extension for the
• But the Kiwix system involves prior generation of a word
Chrome, Firefox, and Edge browsers. index to a resource, so there’s fast searching even on this
• The app is a browser for precompiled resources, typically created from web sites. The software for
large amount of text.
compiling resources for Kiwix use is also free.
• The image at right shows a download selection screen
within Kiwix on an iPhone.

23 24

6
 10/16/24

A Kiwix screen Kiwix as an ecosystem

• This shows a Kiwix screen with the start of one Wikipedia • It’s not anywhere near as fully developed as the Kindle world or the ebook market in general, but it is
article. more than just one app.
• Display of pages uses standard phone features, and so you • The app is developed in parallel with compilation software for creating Kiwix files. This is an extra burden
get dictionary lookup and translation for free. on the community of developers: EPUB files have a much simpler format and it’s also shared by much of
the industry, so someone developing an EPUB business would not necessarily need to develop any new
• Some other features are more like a web browser than like
software. But that novel file format is also necessary to support specific Kiwix features, notably its
an ebook reader: for example, you can keep multiple tabs
searching.
open, where ebook readers tend to assume you only want
• The ecosystem also includes the equivalent of a content store, though right now everything is free. EPUB
one book open at a time, and only to one page.
files are available from many more sources; this is another part of the ecosystem that has to be built in
• Some book features are missing: there is no control for going order for this app to be viable.
on to the next chapter; there is no table of contents; you • We saw that their version of Wikipedia was created in January; some of the Wikipedia subsets are
scroll through text rather than paging through it. You could
somewhat more recent, from June. This reflects one of the issues about compiling digital versions of such
build some of these features into the input texts, but an
large amounts of information: you aren’t going to do it on a daily basis because the cost and labour of
ebook reader provides them automatically.
ensuring that it’s complete and correct are significant.
• But it also works for a wider range of web pages.

25 26

The bootstrapping problem

• Starting an ecosystem is not easy; even this comparatively modest effort requires a lot of development
beyond the app itself to be usable.

Thank you

John Lavagnino
John.Lavagnino@kcl.ac.uk

27 28