The sBook: towards social and personalized learning experiences

Despite the widespread use of Web 2.0 techniques in our entire surrounding environment, which tend to make it more social, more dynamic and driven by users, some domains have not really changed yet. This is the case for (e-)books which reading remains mainly a solitary activity - or which is done at least without appropriate collaborative tools. However, the benefits of making this activity - and especially active reading - more social and digital are huge - in particular for people having learning reading goals - leading potentially to a wide range of new services: faster access to information, possibility to interact with people sharing similar concerns or able to provide relevant explanations, determining most interesting areas in a book, or even helping users accessing faster the information that will make them progress in their learning curve. Thus, in this position paper, we describe a set of concepts and features about a "sBook", which consists in making e-books more social, more communicative, in order to sustain students in a learning activity, and leverage collective intelligence from social interactions to make students' learning experience more efficient.