Multimedia enriched digital books

Abstract

This paper proposes new extensions of the digital book concept together with the required approaches to support their automatic generation. Most best-sellers have often inspired other related products, sometimes in different media. Some of these can be merged into suitable forms to provide consumers with a better view and understanding of the original masterpiece: other texts about the original book, images, audio recordings or even films. Several standards and technologies, such as hypermedia, speech and language processing, and widely accessible PDAs, are nowadays available to make these experiences effective. A prototype of a Multimedia Enriched Digital Book (MEDB) is presented for reading, listening and viewing as well as for a text querying scenario. Within the scope of already available technologies, these are tangible visions for the very next years.