An e-book building methodology using an extensible personalization structure for operationalizing e-book interface metaphors
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Date
2010
Authors
Hameed, M. Noorul
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Abstract
An electronic book (or e-book) presents traditional book structures/functions in digital
form. In digital form, it is able to include multimedialhypermedia services as well as
other special features. Present e-book frameworks have shortcomings in their
representation format, especially for academic e-publishing. The problems include the ebook
personalization by user, the support for e-book publisher and the file format. Users
may require additional capabilities such as e-book structuring and layout. E-book does
not provide a flexible layout to content developers to come out with an e-book
personalization structure. However, e-book personalization requires a file format for
digital content representation, portability and interoperability. In order to address these
problems, this thesis aims to identify requirements of personalization elements, to
represent e-book personalization, to formalize e-book personalization components, and
to develop e-book packaging control and standards. These are achieved in three phases:
the representation/personalization, builder specification, and e-book practical analysis.
In terms of representation/personalization, this research presents an eXtensible E-book
Personalization (XEBPER) architecture which consists of three structural objects (i.e.
Xl
package, visual, and metaphor), and four functional objects (i.e. media, content control,
device control, and book update). In the next phase, the e-book builder is developed
based on the XEBPER structure. It builds e-book components with generic terms such as
format, library, taxonomy, metaphor, personalization, parser, window, viewer and
operation. Finally, a survey is conducted on 50 students to evaluate the 11 features that
were identified (i.e. package metadata, library catalogue, security, interoperability,
visualization, multimedia characteristics and taxonomy, hypertext, bookmark, search
capability, file attachment, and web search). The evaluation compared XEBPER and
Portable Document Format (PDF) structures and the results indicated that e-book
structures that employ extensible/personalization capabilities resulted in better
performance in terms of features. Therefore, the XEBPER e-book personalization
framework is found to be suitable especially for e-book conceptualization.