the Eat St. ecosystem was an important factor in determining the most
appropriate platform. Eat St. includes a seasonal TV series, supported by
a website and a mobile app for iPhone. Through brainstorming sessions
with our stakeholders, we established that the e-book would provide

a curated experience of recipes for every season of the show, offering
users the chance to follow along in the making of featured street food
and to learn more about each highlighted vendor. This season-based
edition of Eat St. recipes complements both the website and existing
app by retaining some of its “bookness,” but with features that are inter-
active and permeable to the web, allowing users to share content.

RESEARCHING EBOOK PLATFORMS

After examining a variety of ebook formats, our team determined that
while PDFs and EPUB ebooks are widely supported by e-readers and tab-
lets, they are also the most limited in terms of interactivity. While PDFs
allow designers to craft a highly controlled visual experience, they lack
adaptability to different screen sizes and general interactivity, render-
ing them a passive experience. The EPUB format offers live text, which
adapts to screen size, is searchable, and can be annotated, and some
level of interactivity such as support for video, audio, and image slides. It
relinquishes much control over the visual narrative, however, in terms of
page layout and font type and size.

Proprietary formats, such as iBooks’ and Kindle’s offer greater control
over visual narrative and more interactive features but are limited

in their cross platform adaptability, reducing the audience that can
be reached with each one. All the aforementioned formats depend
on e-reader applications such as iBooks or Amazon’s reader and can
be restricted to the features each supports. Ebooks as stand-alone
applications, such as those created with Adobe Digital Publishing
Suite (DPS) or open formats such as Baker and Laker, typically offer
rich interactivity and social media sharing. Yet, they are also more
complex and costly to build when customized or if they require regular
maintenance and updating.

Based on our extensive research on existing ebook platforms and our
vision for the e-cookbook, we decided to create a stand-alone ebook
app, using Adobe’s DPS platform. This platform allowed us a high level
of control over visual structure, rich interactivity based on native DPS
features as well as HTML, and the possibility of subsequently expanding
the project from iPad only to other devices such as iPhone, Kindle Fire

and Android tablets (Figure 1).

THE PARSING OF CONTENT INTO
PAGES [...] AID THE READER IN
GENERATING A MENTAL MAP OF
THE KINDS OF CONTENT INCLUDED
FOR EACH RECIPE STACK.

WV

|
DPS HTML
=
KINDLE FIRE IPAD SAMSUNG IPHONE ANDROID
GALAXY PHONE

FIGURE 1. To provide the highest level of interactivity and connectivity
while retaining the most control over the visual structure of the ebook, the
Eat St. Cookbook uses a hybrid approach: it combines native DPS features

with layers of HTML components.

LEARNING FROM THE EAT ST. AUDIENCE

Based on the data provided by Eat St. on their show’s audience we
developed a couple of representative personas, and we designed and
conducted a survey to better understand this audience’s motivations
and expectations, their relationship to cookbooks, their interest in
trying recipes at home and their use of e-readers and tablets. Almost
60% of the 128 Eat St. respondents owned a tablet or e-reader device,
and out of this group, the vast majority had an iPad, followed by Kindle,
Kobo and Nook e-readers. These results were consistent with current
data on market shares for tablets and e-readers in Canada. [1,2] Key
insights gained about this audience included that they are accustomed
to bringing devices into the kitchen to make recipes they find online,
that they value clarity and quality of information, and, surprisingly, that
a significant number of them (32%) had already tried Eat St. recipes at
home. This last fact validates the opportunity space for the cookbook,
demonstrating a pre-existing interest of the audience in making the
recipes at home.

COOKBOOK CONCEPT: VISUAL NARRATIVE

Based on our understanding of the Eat St. audience and taking into
consideration the variety of assets that already existed or could be
developed, the team proposed three possible concept directions: a nar-
rative based on cart locations, another based on recipe categories, anda
final one focused on food cart owners’ stories. After discussion with our
stakeholders, we proceeded with the concept based on location, and
framed the cookbook around a culinary road trip across North America
and Britain as the main metaphor through which to tell a story about
the recipes and food carts. The unique stories behind each vendor were
used as a supporting theme throughout the cookbook.

INTERACTIVITY

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