by Joseph T. Sin­clair

For two decades many col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties have been putting cours­es online (web-based train­ing). They’ve done this for a vari­ety of rea­sons not the least of which are stu­dent con­ve­nience and cost sav­ing. They’ve used a wide vari­ety of dig­i­tal tech­niques and train­ing inno­va­tions. As a result, a new gen­er­a­tion of stu­dents has grown up using online edu­ca­tion and feel­ing it’s a nor­mal part of the train­ing land­scape.

Com­mer­cial train­ing (post­grad­u­ate train­ing in the busi­ness world) has fol­lowed high­er edu­ca­tion. In the last decade, com­mer­cial train­ing that uses dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy has grown by leaps and bounds. Although much com­mer­cial train­ing has migrat­ed to PCs and the web, it has also migrat­ed to tablets and even smart­phones. It’s dif­fi­cult to find com­mer­cial train­ing now that’s not avail­able in a dig­i­tal for­mat.

In addi­tion, the high price of text­books is caus­ing a migra­tion away from print to ebooks. The for­mat of text­books is typ­i­cal­ly more com­plex than that of How2 books. The graph­ics are typ­i­cal­ly more com­plex and var­ied, and text­books even attempt to include min­i­mal inter­ac­tiv­i­ty in print by doing such things as pos­ing ques­tions at the end of each chap­ter and even pro­vid­ing answers.

Text­books will con­tin­ue to migrate to dig­i­tal for­mats for two rea­sons. First, the high cost of text­books can be reduced sig­nif­i­cant­ly. This, of course, is sig­nif­i­cant to stu­dents. Sec­ond, dig­i­tal for­mats enable the com­plex­i­ty of text books to be pro­duced less expen­sive­ly and more effi­cient­ly as well as inte­grat­ing mul­ti­me­dia and inter­ac­tive tech­nol­o­gy. These tech­nolo­gies are begin­ning to come into their own in regard to enhanc­ing train­ing. Con­se­quent­ly, a dig­i­tal text­book can incor­po­rate these rel­a­tive­ly new tech­nolo­gies and enhance the learn­ing expe­ri­ence.

The ques­tion an author/publisher needs to ask is, what’s the dif­fer­ence between a print­ed book and a train­ing course. On the one hand, the text­book is a stand­alone infor­ma­tion prod­uct for train­ing an indi­vid­ual in regard to a cer­tain prac­tice or body of knowl­edge. On the oth­er hand, a train­ing course is an inter­ac­tive process that includes an instruc­tor. The instruc­tors impart knowl­edge, ask ques­tions, answer ques­tions, and per­son­al­ize the edu­ca­tion­al process.

One way of look­ing at train­ing sources is to take a few steps back­ward. You can see a text­book at one end of a spec­trum (say the left side) with inter­ac­tive train­ing at the oth­er end of the spec­trum (say the right side).

The spec­trum is pret­ty straight­for­ward. You have the print­ed book at the left for which mul­ti­me­dia and inter­ac­tiv­i­ty are a great strain at best and impos­si­ble at worst. At the oth­er end of the spec­trum on the right, you have nor­mal web-based train­ing with­in a struc­ture that can include both mul­ti­me­dia,  inter­ac­tiv­i­ty, and an instruc­tor. It used to be that there was not a huge amount of con­ti­nu­ity between the two.

Dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy has changed the spec­trum, how­ev­er, as new for­mats for books have emerged. First, the ebook has pen­e­trat­ed to book mar­ket quick­ly and deeply. Sec­ond, web­books (books online in the for­mat of a web­site) have become more com­mon. Third, bookapps (books in the for­mat of an app) present new pos­si­bil­i­ties for pub­lish­ers. Although each of these for­mats has some lim­i­ta­tions in regard to its imple­men­ta­tion and capa­bil­i­ty to han­dle diverse media, the new spec­trum is real.

There is now a con­tin­u­um on the spec­trum between an ebook and a dig­i­tal train­ing course. As an ebook, web­book, or bookapp uses more diverse media and inter­ac­tiv­i­ty, it starts to look like an online train­ing course. At some point in the inte­gra­tion of diverse media and inter­ac­tiv­i­ty into a dig­i­tal book, it does become in effect a train­ing course.

For instance, a bookapp can have an exam that is self-grad­ing. It can have cal­cu­la­tors, sim­u­la­tions, and data­bas­es. It can, in effect, dupli­cate an online course, albeit with­out an instruc­tor. In the new mobile dig­i­tal envi­ron­ment, the dif­fer­ence between a book and a train­ing course becomes less clear than it was yes­ter­day.

Ulti­mate­ly, the dif­fer­ence may be defined exter­nal­ly to the dig­i­tal book or train­ing course. For instance, a train­ing course might include a com­mu­ni­ca­tion link to a live instruc­tor affil­i­at­ed with an edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tion and may have some kind of authen­ti­cat­ed test­ing and authen­ti­ca­tion of suc­cess­ful com­ple­tion. A dig­i­tal book would pre­sum­ably not have such struc­ture. If book and train­ing tra­di­tions con­tin­ue, a dig­i­tal book will be self-con­tained sole­ly for the inter­ac­tion of the read­er, and a train­ing course will be inte­grat­ed into some scheme affil­i­at­ed with a train­ing or aca­d­e­m­ic enter­prise or insti­tu­tion.

Except for these dif­fer­ences, how­ev­er, a diverse media dig­i­tal book and dig­i­tal train­ing course might look much the same. The pri­ma­ry point to be made is that the dif­fer­ence between a book and a train­ing course will be very much blurred in the future due to the diverse media capa­bil­i­ties of dig­i­tal books.

The blur is obvi­ous for How2 books, infor­ma­tion­al books, and text­books. What about oth­er kinds of books?

Most oth­er gen­res of books fall into the gen­er­al cat­e­go­ry of fic­tion. Fic­tion books are more close­ly relat­ed to art and enter­tain­ment than they are to train­ing. Hence, how to use diverse media and inter­ac­tiv­i­ty for fic­tion books is a mat­ter for artists (authors) rather than those writ­ers who sim­ply write to instruct. The sto­ry of diverse media for fic­tion is beyond the scope of this arti­cle. Nonethe­less, diverse media dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing tech­nol­o­gy pro­vides fic­tion writ­ers with a brave new world that they are only begin­ning to explore.

For those who write to instruct, dig­i­tal diverse media is not so new. The only thing new is that it’s now pos­si­ble to pull it all togeth­er with inex­pen­sive soft­ware to be viewed on a uni­ver­sal device (smartphone/tablet) owned by two bil­lion peo­ple world­wide. But that in itself is a revolution—one that now changes the deliv­ery of infor­ma­tion rad­i­cal­ly.