How Do You Make an Electronic Journal Readable?

Steven Pemberton

Reading a paper publication and an electronic publication are very different experiences. Hundreds of years of development of the printed page has made reading paper publications an easy and pleasant experience.

Is there any chance that reading publications online will ever become pleasurable? If so, what are the issues involved?

In January 1996, the first electronic ACM SIGCHI Bulletin will go online. SIGCHI is the ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction, and the Bulletin is their main publication. It was of course of prime interest and importance to SIGCHI to address these issues before putting their publication online.

This talk will present the issues we addressed in producing a pilot issue of the SIGCHI Bulletin, and the solutions we came up with.

Steven Pemberton is a researcher at CWI in Amsterdam, the Dutch National Research Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science. He is editor-in-chief of the ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, and chair of the ERCIM European WWW Working group W4G. His research is in broad aspects of computer-human interaction; he is currently working on the design and implementation of interactive books.