Chapter 3
Description of the Model Webbook

Mod­el Webbook

The mod­el web­book for this book is actu­al­ly a real web­book. It is:

Pub­lish­ing by Voice (https://​Pub​lish​ing​ByVoice​.com)  PBV

As you can see by vis­it­ing PBV, it pret­ty much fol­lows the for­mat out­lined in Chap­ter 2 (i.e., the tra­di­tion­al book for­mat that read­ers find com­fort­able). Note that the first web­page one sees upon access­ing PBV is the book cov­er web­page. The Table of Con­tents (TOC) is includ­ed with the cov­er image. With the TOC on the cov­er web­page, a user can imme­di­ate­ly browse through to find the chap­ter (top­ic) that they wants to read.

Alternative  The alternative is a cover page (with just the cover image) that includes a link to the TOC located on a separate webgage.

Each chap­ter in the TOC is a link direct­ly to the chapter’s web­page. The chap­ters are short in PBV so that no fur­ther breakup of the chap­ters is need­ed for rea­son­able nav­i­ga­tion. How­ev­er, for longer chap­ters, you could list the chap­ter head­ings and sub­head­ings in the TOC and link them direct­ly to the head­ings and the sub­head­ings of each chapter.

If you go to the copy­right page, which is typ­i­cal­ly on the reverse side of the title page, you will notice that there is no ISBN num­ber. An ISBN num­ber is nec­es­sary to enable book­stores to keep track of the books they sell. Since this book is a web­book and not a book that the book­stores sell, no ISBN num­ber is nec­es­sary. How­ev­er, for a print­ed ver­sion of the web­book, an ebook ver­sion, or a bookapp ver­sion for sale, each would require a unique ISBN number.

You also notice that PBV has diverse media. It has pho­tographs, screen­shots, and sound bites (voice-bites). The real val­ue of the diverse media in this par­tic­u­lar web­book, how­ev­er, is in the voice-bites includ­ed in numer­ous web­pages, which give some authen­tic­i­ty to the webbook.

Indeed, the voice-bites dis­tin­guish PBV from print­ed books and even ebooks. The accu­mu­lat­ed file size of the all audio files includ­ed on this web­book is about 11 megabytes (MB). I con­sid­er this very light use of media, and I intend to expand the use of voice-bites for PBV to about 70 MB. Note that 70 MB exceeds the lim­it for Android apps and Apple apps. And Ama­zon penal­izes authors and pub­lish­ers for ebooks exceed­ing just a few MBs. Con­se­quent­ly, if you con­vert this web­book with 70 MB of voice-bites into an ebook or bookapp, it would be too large for Ama­zon Kin­dle, iTunes, or Google Play. There­fore, the only way this book can be pub­lished is as a web­book. You should note that it’s easy to load up a web­book with lots of diverse media that exceeds the lim­its of the online book­stores. When using diverse media, it is dif­fi­cult to stay with­in such arbi­trary limits

If you’re a savvy web surfer, you will dis­cern right away that Pub­lish­ing by Voice is a Word­Press web­site. Con­se­quent­ly, menus in the side columns of the web­pages, which act as the TOC, are auto­mat­i­cal­ly cre­at­ed. Word­Press enables all sorts of third-par­ty pro­gram­ming (plug-ins). Thus, you can add func­tions to a Word­Press web­book just by installing plug-ins. What­ev­er plug-in you install, you can use it in any webpage.

Note that an SEO (search engine opti­miza­tion) plug-in is used in PBV to facil­i­tate expand­ed SEO capability.

PBV is a pret­ty spiffy web­book in that I was able to pro­vide to read­ers actu­al audio exam­ples of what I explained in the text. On the oth­er hand, it’s a weak ver­sion of what this web­book could be poten­tial­ly. The sky’s the lim­it on what I could’ve done with diverse media in PBV.

For instance, I could’ve test­ed 20 dif­fer­ent pop­u­lar micro­phones (instead of four) and giv­en sound sam­ples. I could’ve pro­vid­ed an audio ver­sion of each web­page; that is, some­one read­ing the page like an audio­book. That would be help­ful to peo­ple who did­n’t want to read the text.

I could’ve insert­ed more asides (side­bars) to pro­vide addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion that was valu­able but not direct­ly rel­e­vant to the top­ic at hand. I could’ve pro­vid­ed video clips to show how to do cer­tain things. I could’ve done a whole host of things I haven’t thought of yet, and per­haps when I think of them, I will include them in the future. The impor­tant point to be made is that there is no lim­i­ta­tion on the diverse media that you can include in a webbook.

Users of PBV will find it very com­fort­able. It is in a high­ly rec­og­niz­able book for­mat. The cov­er includes the TOC. The diverse media that’s includ­ed is easy to use. Because I use a Word­Press tem­plate with a respon­sive for­mat, you can eas­i­ly read PBV on a smart phone.

Search

There’s a search func­tion in every web­page of PBV. This is built into Word­Press. This enables a user (read­er) to search on any word that they desire. The search func­tion will find the web­pages in which the word appears. This can be more use­ful than a nor­mal index because it enables a read­er to use any word rather than just a lim­it­ed group of words.

On the oth­er hand, the search func­tion will find every inci­dent of the word, and many of those inci­dents will be of no inter­est to the user. Pre­sum­ably, for a print­ed book index, that’s not true; the index will only include sig­nif­i­cant inci­dents of the word. So, the search func­tion has its advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages. But I favor the search func­tion over an index because users find it eas­i­er to use and authors find it easy to provide.

Content Placement

PBV con­tains a chap­ter on micro­phone tests. Voice-bites of micro­phones paired with mix­ers and record­ing devices pop­u­late this par­tic­u­lar web­page. Just for the sake of ana­lyz­ing the struc­ture of the book you might ask, why did I put the micro­phone tests into a sep­a­rate chapter?

I’ve could’ve put such tests in an appen­dix to the book, and no one would’ve thought much of it. They would expect to find some­thing like that in an appen­dix. But I want­ed users to have imme­di­ate access to the tests. I could’ve put the tests in the chap­ter on micro­phones. But I did­n’t. That chap­ter was already a long chap­ter, and adding in the micro­phone tests seemed to me that they would be buried at the end of a long webpage.

By putting the tests in their own chap­ter with very lit­tle text, users will know exact­ly where to go back and lis­ten rather than scrolling to the end of a long chap­ter. You will note, though, that I did put the micro­phone-test chap­ter right after the chap­ter on micro­phones. Con­se­quent­ly, although the micro­phone-test chap­ter is most­ly diverse media with lit­tle text, it’s con­ve­nient to users and flows log­i­cal­ly with the struc­ture of the webbook.

This is an exam­ple of the kind of choic­es you can make when struc­tur­ing the con­tent of your web­book. Even when fol­low­ing the for­mat of a tra­di­tion­al book, you have plen­ty of flexibility.

Resources Page

The nice thing about your book as a web­site is that you can place live links any­where in the entire web­book includ­ing right in the mid­dle of any para­graph (text). This works quite well because you have to be on the inter­net in the first place to read the book, and there­fore the links will be live.

Nonethe­less, I’ve also includ­ed a Resources page. Although such a page might appear as a bib­li­og­ra­phy where peo­ple might expect it, it seems to be well estab­lished on the web that Resources pages are of such impor­tance that they receive their own web­page title. In oth­er words, they receive a title just like glos­sary, bib­li­og­ra­phy, appen­dix, etc. The whole point of hav­ing a Resources page, of course, is to pro­vide live links to users who want to imme­di­ate­ly access the resources that you’ve provided.

Whether you have a Resources page or not is up to you, but if you have one. I think the best place­ment is not in an appen­dix but rather in its own sep­a­rate web­page. Indeed, the Resources page is almost iden­ti­cal to a bib­li­og­ra­phy and can be a sub­sti­tute for a bibliography.

If you’ll remem­ber from the Chap­ters 1 and 2, the back of the web­book gives you a chance to cre­ate new book com­po­nents that are not present in print­ed books and may not even be pos­si­ble in ebooks or book apps. This is your oppor­tu­ni­ty to be innovative.

If you pro­mote your book every­where you can, you will not only want to have a web­book ver­sion but also per­haps an ebook ver­sion, a bookapp ver­sion, and a print­ed ver­sion. In a com­pet­i­tive world, the print­ed ver­sion is like­ly to cost more because there is the repli­ca­tion cost of pro­duc­ing phys­i­cal copies of your book.

If you sell a print­ed ver­sion of the book, the ques­tion becomes, are you going to let peo­ple print copies of your web­book chap­ters? Pos­si­bly some­one could cre­ate a print­ed book using your web­book with their desk­top print­er at a low­er cost than actu­al­ly buy­ing a copy of the print­ed book in a book­store. I have var­i­ous thoughts about that:

• You can use a JavaScript to pre­vent users from print­ing webpages.
• Some­one has to go to a lot of trou­ble to print your entire book on a com­put­er printer.
• Print­er pages do cost mon­ey (paper and ink or toner).
• When some­one gets done they still have to bind the pages togeth­er to make their phys­i­cal copy easy to use.
• A lot of users might read your short chap­ters, but when it comes to long chap­ters, they might feel more com­fort­able print­ing them for eas­i­er read­ing. Why deny your users that convenience?
• Even though you can deny some­body the capa­bil­i­ty of print­ing a web­page, those in the know have easy ways of get­ting around such a web­page restriction.

There­fore, I con­clude that unless you have a spe­cif­ic and com­pelling rea­son to put JavaScript in your web­page that pre­vents peo­ple from print­ing the page, that it’s not worth your time and effort to do so. It may end up more as an incon­ve­nience to your users than a pro­tec­tion for the print­ed ver­sion of your book.

Diverse Media

Keep in mind that any­body can steal the diverse media that you embed in your web­pages. Any­thing that you do to pre­vent this, knowl­edge­able peo­ple can work around it. Con­se­quent­ly, pre­ven­tion is prob­a­bly not worth doing. If you do it, it may become an incon­ve­nience to your users. So what’s the solu­tion to this poten­tial mischief?

There isn’t a fool­proof solu­tion for audio or video.

For images the solu­tion is to sim­ply use image media that is only appro­pri­ate to the con­text of your web­book, not for print. For instance, a 1920 x 1080 pix­el dig­i­tal pho­to (HD TV size) is a good size pho­to for a com­put­ing device but not for a phys­i­cal print. There­fore, don’t include a dig­i­tal image that’s 6000 x 4000 pix­els. Some­one can use the larg­er dig­i­tal pho­to file and make a large print from it. Yet the larg­er size may not be nec­es­sary for your webpage.

Summary

The mod­el web­book Pub­lish­ing by Voice (https://​Pub​lish​ing​ByVoice​.com) makes a good exam­ple for the ideas expressed in the web­book you’re now read­ing about how to cre­ate a web­book. As you read fur­ther, refer often to PBV to bet­ter under­stand the infor­ma­tion that Pub­lish­ing by Web­book provides.