A framework to the digital book design process

Abstract

The advent of the digital book has brought changes and challenges that have affected the conception, production, distribution and even the purpose and culture associated with the book. Given these transformations, it is necessary to reinforce attention to the design process of the digital book from a new perspective, adopting a systemic thinking to obtain a clear vision of the specificities of these artifacts and the complexity of their project. In this direction, this research aimed to propose a framework for the digital book design process, from a systemic perspective. To that, interviews were conducted with professionals who work in the development of digital books, whose results together with the findings of the literature gave rise to a set of premises that underpinned the construction of the first version of the framework, adjusted and refined from contributions of designers in the context of a focus group. The framework proposed in this study has explanatory character, diagrammatic form and represents the system that influences the digital book design process, composed of 13 interrelated factors and organized into three groups: primary (Content, Technology and Reader), secondary (Author, Other Agents, Publisher, Business Management and Distributor) and tertiary (Printed Book, Digital Rights, Similar Digital Books and Technological Players), as well as subfactors distributed among them.