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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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.
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