Research Introduction – Creating a Guide for the New Digital Reading Experience

The physical book exists for over 500 years. During this long time, it has been established as a trusted carrier of processed information and convoluted ideas which contributed tremendously to society’s development. Its paper form is so practised that so far, no alternative has been settled for it in the digital arena.

Our primary purpose of the research is to investigate how can readers be drawn back to attentive reading – through design, focused on digital platforms?

As opposed to keeping the digital reads based on a paper object, we wish to embrace the digital possibilities and create a new reading experience, offering added value to the content.

To do so, we wanted to re-examine the classic publishing process with a digital outcome in mind. We focused on four pillars of publishing – the content, the design, the technology and the market. Our starting point was to understand the current status of each domain and how can they all be brought together in the digital space.

Method.
For our pre-research, we read relevant articles and books and interviewed leading people in the publishing world, content designers and technology companies dealing with the field of digital reading content.

In our interviews, we used the same questions for each category, to see similarities of thinking as well as different points of views.

We inquired our interviewees regarding their current state of content digitalisation, their design processes, their technological means for generating and presenting the content and their financial models of actualising it.

The following articles are a summary of those interviews and reading materials, following the four pillars of the new digital reading experience.