Looking for guidelines for the production of electronic textbooks

This paper starts by reporting the results of two studies into electronic book production, the Visual Book and the WEB Book. The Visual Book study (Landoni, 1997) explored the importance of the visual component of the book metaphor for the production of more effective electronic books, while the WEB Book study (Wilson, 1999) took the findings of the Visual Book and applied them to the production of books for publication on the WWW. It was possible to extract from the two experiences a set of recommendations for producing electronic books. These are the starting point for a new project, EBONI (Electronic Books ON-screen Interface). EBONI focuses on the evaluation of electronic resources for teaching and learning in academia and it is going to expand our previous findings with the aim of producing a set of guidelines for publishing educational material on the Web.