Hybrid books for interactive digital storytelling : connecting story entities and emotions to smart environments

Nowadays, many people use e-books, having high expectations regarding their reading experience. In the case of digital storytelling, enhanced e-books can connect story entities and emotions to real-world elements. In this paper, we present the novel concept of a Hybrid Book, a generic Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) artifact that requires seamless collaboration between content and smart devices. To that end, we extract data from a story and broadcast these data in RDF as Linked Data. Smart devices can then receive and process these data in order to execute corresponding actions. By following open standards, a Hybrid Book can also be seen as an interoperable and sustainable IDN artifact. Furthermore, according to our user-based evaluation, a Hybrid Book makes it possible to provide human sensible feedback while flipping pages, enabling a more enjoyable reading experience. Finally, the participants positive willingness to pay makes it possible to generate more revenue for publishers

EPUB3 for integrated and customizable representation of a scientific publication and its associated resources

Abstract. Scientific publications point to many associated resources, including videos, prototypes, slides, and datasets. However, discover-ing and accessing these resources is not always straightforward: links could be broken, readers may be offline, or the number of associated resources might make it difficult to keep track of the viewing order. In this paper, we explore potential integration of such resources into the digital version of a scientific publication. Specifically, we evaluate the most common scientific publication formats in terms of their capability to implement the desirable attributes of an enhanced publication and to meet the functional goals of an enhanced publication information sys-tem: PDF, HTML, EPUB2, and EPUB3. In addition, we present an EPUB3 version of an exemplary publication in the field of computer science, integrating and interlinking an explanatory video and an inter-active prototype. Finally, we introduce a demonstrator that is capable of outputting customized scientific publications in EPUB3. By making use of EPUB3 to create an integrated and customizable representation of a scientific publication and its associated resources, we believe that we are able to augment the reading experience of scholarly publications, and thus the effectiveness of scientific communication.

Creating discoverable learning content using a user-friendly authoring environment

Abstract. Digital learning content is becoming more and more com-monplace. However, the creation of this learning content is usually done in specialized publishing platforms, that may lock in the content. This prevents the learning content from being discovered automatically, and hinders its uptake. A more general approach for authoring discover-able learning content is needed. We built a user-friendly authoring en-vironment for creating digital publications, enriched with multimedia and interactivity features. This authoring environment outputs the cre-ated content in open formats, independent of any publishing platform. We adjusted our authoring environment to create semantically enriched learning content using the RDFa syntax, without the need for manual intervention. In this paper, we show how well-structured and well-annotated digital learning content can be created and validated using our authoring en-vironment. The result is a discoverable publication in an open format, ready to be distributed as is, or ready to be imported in existing pub-lishing platforms

Towards making EPUB 3-based e-textBooks a first-class mobile learning environment

Students master courses by interacting with a multitude of learning objects. These interactions may include reading documents, watching explanatory videos, taking notes, completing assignments, and experimenting with physical objects. During these interactions, students often have to switch between different learning environments, including Web browsers, video players, textbooks, and workbooks. By integrating these different environments into a unified learning environment, we can save students' time. Moreover, thanks to an increasing adoption of tablets in schools and universities, we also have the opportunity to deploy this unified learning environment on a single mobile device, thus enabling anytime and anywhere learning. We refer to such a learning environment as a 'first-class' mobile learning environment. In this paper, we empirically investigate to what extent an EPUB 3-based e-TextBook can be used to facilitate a 'first-class' mobile learning environment. To that end, we created an EPUB 3-based prototype e-TextBook that has been enhanced in terms of both its presentation and representation, meeting requirements that are typically ascribed by the literature to mobile learning environments. Specifically, we integrated three interactive widgets into our e-TextBook that are able to (1) exchange information with each other (inter-widget communication) and (2) that are able to semi-automatically create new content (that is, that are able to act as semi-automatic content providers): a report maker widget, a sine formula widget, and a corresponding interactive graph maker widget. In addition, we integrated different types of learning objects into our e-TextBook, including multimedia objects, objects with augmented reality features (i.e., digital objects that allow for interaction with physical objects), and objects that offer contextualized content. Both the widgets and the learning objects can be used within a unified learning environment. Furthermore, we semantically annotated the learning content in order to improve its discoverability. We find that our e-TextBook complies with the requirements found in the literature. Moreover, our e-TextBook makes it possible to provide visual feedback on student actions, thus having positive effects on the learning process. In addition, our e-TextBook mitigates distraction by providing a unified mobile learning environment. Furthermore, the use of EPUB 3 allows for interoperable packaging of semantically annotated learning content. Finally, the use of EPUB 3 paves the way for mobile usage of learning content, and thus for anytime and anywhere learning