Expanded Books
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Expanded Books Project was a project by The Voyager Company during 1991, that investigated how a book could be presented on a computer screen in a way that would be both familiar and useful to regular book readers. The project focused on perfecting font choice, font size, line spacing, margin notes, book marks, and other publishing details to work in digital format.
Much of the impetus for Expanded Books derived from a meeting on digital books that Voyager sponsored on Bloomsday in 1990, attended by various pioneering multimedia and hypertext experts. Voyager had earlier released a successful CD companion to Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, and its president Bob Stein had obtained a grant to work on creating a similar product for literature. At this meeting, a consensus emerged that, to overcome the relative inconvenience of being tied to a low-resolution and cumbersome digital display, digital books would have to offer "added value". Florian Brody, head of the Expanded Books project, had the idea to design digital books specifically for the then-new Apple PowerBook 100, which Apple had donated to Voyager.
The programming for the initial products took place between October and December 1991. The first three book titles (The Complete Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Complete Annotated Alice, and Jurassic Park) were released at MacWorld San Francisco in January 1992. These books and their successors relied on a "book engine" that provided a simple but powerful feature set: convenient and simple search methods, the ability to switch between large print and normal print versions, unobtrusive navigation tools (such as a chapter menu that dropped down from the chapter heading on each "page"), a margin area on each page in which readers could write notes, and interactive annotations.
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This entry incorporates text from “Expanded Books” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.