You can also create a moving circle of pictures or chapters – think of a play on the use of “art circles”, where images relating to specific topics move around in a circular motion. You can have plenty of fun exploring the combination of two different search items, whether they are key ingredients or important search parameters. The search wheels can be spun around to match together different search terms. In the case of apps such as Martha Stewart‘s cookie ebook, you can even use search wheels. This includes internal links to other relevant sections of the ebook, which will increase how the ebooks are organized and the book’s reading flow. With multi-touch ebooks, you can go even further with the creativity for innovative search tools. There are also tabs at the bottom that allow readers to switch between searches and the text being read. For easier navigation, each tab at the top of the page is organised depending on relevance, content order (where the content happens), and type (whether it’s audio or text). One way to make searches more usable is to let readers sort by relevance – iPad textbook publishers, such as Inkling, have created searches using tabs. Remember, readers don’t have the benefit of using bookmarks or fingers to keep their place. But they are hard to use, and you can’t always get back to your original reading position afterward. This then brings up every incidence of the keywords in chronological order. Search assisting toolsĮbooks so far have a plain and simple search panel that allows you to type in the search parameters. Struggling to make your work more interactive as well as informative? This article on how to create an interactive ebook will help. A sample ebook we had created in the past, involves a diagram of the human body structure, which once zoomed, will show the structure from the back. This is particularly useful for educational ebooks. Think along the lines of a map with clickable locations showing the hero’s journey – this could work with Harry Potter, for instance, or even The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Information and ideas that are available at the tap of a finger gives readers the scope to deal and interact with their ebooks in a more interactive way. Combining text and video is also a great way to shake things up, and use various media to give information, especially if what you’re creating is a textbook. This puts information literally at a user’s fingertips, allowing readers now have the option to draw up the text or video as they wish. One of the excellent things about interactive ebooks is that you can either have text on its own or simply the video, or combine both at the same time. Not everyone learns best through text on its own, so this is also an ideal opportunity to embed a video or a radio snippet instead. Readers can then tap on particular parts of the image (which can even be made 3D so they can change the angle, zoom in and out and the like) to draw up a pop-up box with in-depth text specific to that part. Think of children’s book publisher Dorling Kindersley who have made excellent use of this in their multi-touch and highly interactive ebooks. This means that, at least initially, on the page, you see a picture (or collage of pictures) with a reduced amount of text. Needless to say, Apple has been an industry leader on this front, with its well-established Apple Books app at the forefront of published interactive ebooks. It’s essentially a more visual experience compared to traditional books. Rather than bombarding readers with lots of text, a more interactive ebook gives readers the scope to bring up text as they wish. All can be adapted for the age-group you write for, and can be made an invaluable and exciting part of the book. There are plenty writers can do to make their digital books worth every electronic page they are ‘written’ on.īelow are five simple hacks that you can use to make your books more engaging for readers and users, whether it’s a textbook, cookbook or novel you’re writing. As far as the author is concerned, this creates endless possibilities to engage their readers positively. The potential for interactive ebooks and their valuable place in engaging users is not a new concept, every day there are new technological and creative innovations in ebooks.
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