If you will publish a book as a webbook, you need an organization for the webbook that will enhance reader usability. This outline is strictly based on the tradition organization of a book.
What is a Webbook?
A webbook is just that, a website that is a book. There are no webpages on the webbook website except the pages that are in the book. The first page of the book website is the book cover together with the Table of Contents.
Why a Webbook?
Many websites include a booklet, a white paper, a book, or some other substantial publication. On such a website, the book that’s included seems ancillary and of less importance than the website itself. It’s just another feature of the website. The whole point of creating a webbook is to make the book the only feature of the book website, and the best way to do that is just make the book itself the entire website (i.e., a webbook).
Cover
The cover is simply the cover of the book, a graphic presentation to attract people to the book. It is the first webpage, the opening webpage (but see Table of Contents below). A cover is primarily a marketing component of the book whether a book in print, an ebook, a bookapp, or a webbook.
Front Matter
The front matter consists of the title page, copyright page, dedication, table of contents, forward, preface, and acknowledgments. Most users look at the front matter of the book once, if at all. The one exception, of course, is the table of contents (TOC).
Table of Contents
The TOC in a webbook is simply a traditional table of contents except that each entry (e.g., each chapter) is a hyperlink to the place in the webbook where the entry is located. The TOC is perhaps the most important part of the book because it’s the navigational scheme which enables users to navigate the webbook easily.
The TOC comes in the middle of the front matter in a book. That’s it’s proper order in the traditional scheme. But for a digital book, the TOC is the most important element in the front matter. Consequently, the TOC needs to be the first page of a webbbok. Users can access the remainder of the front matter (or the remainder of the book) from the TOC. Many digital books (e.g., ebooks) don’t open at the cover; they open directly to the TOC.
Best Practice An alternative to a cover as the first page of a webbook is a combination of the cover and the TOC. The subtle thing to keep in mind is that the cover is the first thing users should see when they access a book. For a webbook, the cover graphic should be very prominent. The TOC should immediately follow below or appear on the side. Thus, users see the cover first but have direct access to the webbook’s navigation (TOC).
Chapters
The content of a book resides in its chapters, and each chapter in a webbook is a webpage by itself. You should note that user studies have shown when people are motivated to read or otherwise consume webpages, they do not mind scrolling. Hence, using just one webpage for each chapter facilitates a logical structure for a webbook and is quite usable for those who read it.
Appendixes
Information that goes in the appendixes is important and relevant information to the content of the book. It is typically information or data that supports the content of specific chapters. An author typically places such information in the appendixes because it is a large graphic or chart, data, a huge amount of text large enough to be disruptive, or a strictly reference resource.
The appendixes in a webbook can be powerful because an author can place links anywhere appropriate in the webbook directly to the appendixes for the convenience of users. And in the appendixes, the author can include links to outside references on the web.
Glossary
A glossary works much the same as in printed book except that you can create links from places inside chapters to relevant glossary entries. This makes the glossary more powerful.
There is also the potential to link of glossary terms to outside sources where a user can read or obtain much more extensive information on a glossary term.
Bibliography (Resources)
The difference between a bibliography for a printed book and a bibliography for a webbook is simply that each entry in the bibliography of a webbook can be a direct link to a place on the web where a user can either read or buy the bibliographic entry. If you have a lot of references to books, you may want to include a bibliography.
It has become fashionable, however, to use a Resources page instead of a bibliography. A Resources page is a list of outside resources that can enhance the webbook with a link to each such resource on the web; but each resource is not necessarily a book.
Index
An index is an important part of a book. One of the great benefits of a digital book is that a search function can replace the index and get users conveniently to the places in the content relevant to the word being searched. Indeed, you can have a search function on every webpage of the book.
Beyond the Back of the Book
This is information content that is not part of the book and may not even be directly relevant to the book. This sort of content has been very sparse in most printed books but provides a real opportunity in digital books to be almost anything the author or publisher desires to publish.
For instance, it is not uncommon in printed books to have advertising for the publisher tacked onto the end of a book. Such ads are usually for other books that either the author or the publisher or both have published.
At a minimum you should use this opportunity in a webbook to enable this literary tradition. Provide direct links to enable users (readers) to obtain or purchase your other printed books, ebooks, bookapps, or webbooks. It would be a grievous oversight not to do so.
More importantly, however, see the end of the book as your opportunity to supplement your webbook with digital diverse media content that’s not possible in a print format. What kind of content should you include? That’s up to you. Beyond the back of the book is the new frontier of book publishing, and you’re the pioneer.
It is digital technology that makes this possible. Extra content at the end of a printed book requires extra physical pages at a substantial extra cost. But for digital books, the marginal extra expense of replicating additional content within the book is nominal. The content itself may not be any less expensive to create, but including it in a digital book is not expensive.
HTML5 makes it very easy for you to include diverse media and embedded programming in a webpage. This enables you to create chapters enhanced with sound, video, color images, programming, and even interactivity. That in itself is a revolution that enables the potential for webbooks to be more valuable than printed books. And certainly beyond the back of the book is an apropos place to experiment even more with diverse content and diverse media than in the chapters of the book.
Navigation
You need to build navigation into your webbook so that users can easily move around and access the chapters and other components of your book. That’s easy to do with the hyperlinking capability of HTML, but you need to use the such linking capability in a way that makes it logical and easy for users to navigate. A good start is to make every entry in the TOC a link to a chapter of the webbook. And that may be all you need.
Then you can append a copy of the TOC to the bottom of every webpage (chapter).
With WordPress you can create a menu that automatically appears on each webpage. The menu is essentially a TOC with links to each chapter or even links to chapter headings and subheadings. For desktops and laptops, it’s on a side column. For tablets and smartphones, it’s at the end of the chapter.
Comments
You may find it desirable to enable users to comment on what you have written. Using website building software, such as WordPress, enables you to do so quite easily.
Access
Naturally, if your book is a website and you want to sell it, you have to prevent access by unauthorized people. Only those who pay get access. You need software that will enable you to sell passwords to your webbook. (An alternative is to make your webbook public and use affiliate advertising to produce revenue).
Possibilities
Everyone who has a smart phone (several billion people) has access to the web. Almost two billion people can use English as a first or second language. A webbook is immediately available to each. One simply enters a URL (the webbook’s URL) into the browser on their device, and voila!, they can read your webbook. On a phone there is little difference between reading your book as a webbook or reading it as an ebook on a book reader app such as Kindle.
Marketing
There are two aspects to marketing. First is how to get users to find your webbook. Second is how to make money.
It seems to me that the marketing of a webbook has the potential to be easier than marketing an ebook or printed book. That’s the discussion in Chapter 24.
The Webbook Website
If you have an idea that a website is something special and that there is a limited supply of them, I’m here to tell you that’s a very defeating attitude. These days you can get a web host service provider for $5 a month that will enable you to have 10 websites (or perhaps unlimited websites) and will further enable you to automatically install a copy of WordPress (freeware) on each website.
With such generous resources you can easily afford to put three of your books, each on its own website (as a webbook), use a fourth website for your book catalog, and still have websites left over for other marketing uses. Don’t let someone talk you into paying a monthly fee for just one website with limited resources. If you’re going to do a good job of marketing your book, you may need multiple websites.
Summary
Think of a printed book converted to a website, nothing less, nothing more. The book becomes the website, and the website is the book. It’s a simple concept that’s simple to execute. It’s a webbook!
