New Considerations on Book Design

David Meerman Scott has some interesting thoughts about the changes in the way people experience books, based on new technologies and the many different ways we obtain and process information. Meerman notes how he added the URLs of Web sites, blogs, podcasts, videos and other links at the bottom of the each page in case readers wanted to go to the sites he was writing about. Subsequently, one of his readers asked why books couldn't be more like websites, using various ways to display information and be more interactive.

Does this new "style" of literacy really call for a new book model? It might - at least for some types of books. We are looking at this situation right now. After the initial publication of Summit Academy Institute Press' The BLT Hypothesis, the authors have asked us to take another look at the book design and see how it could be enriched from a visual and communicative perspective.

This might actually involve full color illustrations, comic book-style explanations, sidebars and graphs that would break the information into more accessible bits, and present it in a way that's more interesting and a little more fun. The content of the book involves the basics of brain processing and how physical factors manifest themselves in conditions such as ADHD and Asperger's Syndrome. While presented clearly and without an overabundance of technical jargon, the authors want the book to be easily accessible to parents of children with these conditions...and some of them might actually have ADHD themselves. So, I might pose the question: if you were making a book for people with ADHD, where would you start? If you have some thoughts, please leave your comments.

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