Designing And Implementing A Chinese Calligraphy E-Textbook For Foreign Students

While e-books are on the market for almost ten years already,electronic textbooks(e-Textbooks)are still in a primitive stage of development.Despite many attempts made by the market players to launch and implement new technologies into the classroom,these new teaching tools are still years from any massive adoption by authors,editors,schools,teachers,and students.It is clear that printed books still have a great deal of awareness in every stage;however,many researchers come to the conclusion that one should explore the lack of usage of the technical possibilities of digital mediums.Understanding how to design and test an e-textbook as well as how to persuade students to use this innovative tool is the objective of this study.Also the design process is incorporated to better involve the editor,designer and final consumer to better create the final publication.Using Apple's “iBooks Author” software,an e-textbook prototype was then designed with special care in key areas such as type,colour and interactivity.This prototype was then given to a group of students in order to collect feedback and user satisfaction.The results show that although the users were impressed with the overall aesthetics of the e-textbook,there was some frustration over the navigation in the document,due to the device and software's technical limitations.