Scholarly books are increasingly available in digital form, but the online interfaces for using
these books often allow only for the browsing of PDF files. JSTOR Labs, an experimental
product-development group within the not-for-profit digital library JSTOR, undertook an
ideation and design process to develop new and different ways of showing scholarly books
online, with the goal that this new viewing interface should be relatively simple and inexpensive
to implement for any scholarly book that is already available in PDF form. This paper
documents that design process, including the recommendations of a working group of scholars,
publishers, and librarians convened by JSTOR Labs and the Columbia University Libraries in
October 2016. The prototype monograph viewer developed through this process—called
“Topicgraph”—is described herein and is freely available online at
https://labs.jstor.org/topicgraph.