How to carry over historic books into social networks

Abstract

This paper describes how to make use of e-books that look like printed books in a knowledge network. After an overview of digitalization efforts and current digital library initiatives we introduce quality measures for the digitalization process. After digitalization an Interactive Internet Book (IIB) has to offer a kind of digital binding, annotation efforts and sophisticated ways for user interaction. We claim that the quality and the enhancements of an Interactive Internet Book go far beyond what is traditionally assumed: it is not enough to scan books. The scans have to be of high quality, allow good OCR to permit full text searches; books need not only be "packaged" but also need meta-data and functionalities that one can expect from a computer supported medium that go far beyond what is possible with traditional printed books. Those factors are critical for the use of e-books in social media environments, yet this is often still overlooked. Finally, we describe a working prototype and demonstrate the advantages obtained with a use case.