The Fábulas Model for Authoring Web-based Children's eBooks

Nowadays, tablets and smartphones are commonly used by children for both entertainment and education purposes. In special, interactive multimedia eBooks running on those devices allow a richer experience when compared to traditional text-only books, being potentially more engaging and entertaining to readers. However, to explore the most exciting features in these environments, authors are currently left alone in the sense that there is no high level (less technical) support, and these features are usually accessible only through programming or some other technical skill. In this work, we aim at extracting the main features on enhanced children's eBooks and propose a model, named Fábulas - the Portuguese word for fables -that allows authors to create interactive multimedia children's eBooks declaratively. The model was conceived by taking, as a starting point, a systematic analysis of the common concepts, with the focus on identifying and categorizing recurring characteristics and pointing out functional and non-functional requirements that establish a strong orientation towards the set of desirable abstractions of an underlying model. Moreover, the paper presents a case study for the implementation of Fábulas on the Web, and discusses the authoring of a complete interactive story over it.