ESOTAG: E-book evolution using collaborative social tagging by readers

Abstract

Rapid development of smart devices has lead people to be able to read books through their devices anytime and anywhere. Even though its popularity, e-books have ingrained disadvantages such as: (1) It does not have an expandable scheme that allows readers to add multimedia contents or their emotional expressions to books. (2) It is not easy to add multimedia resources as an author. (3) Due to the variety of resolutions on devices, the current ebook format tends to be uncomfortable for readers. The user constantly has to zoom in by pinching the screen when reading on a small device. (4) It is not easy to navigate contents within an e-book because of the absence of an e-book linking feature. To tackle the above mentioned problems, we design and use an external domain-specific language (DSL) within our research. We propose a collaborative social tagging framework for e-books. The goals of this paper are (1) to define a model of an evolvable social resources taggable book (modeling of collaborative e-book), (2) to make readers read rich content e-book easily regardless of their type of devices as well as screen size. (Responsiveness), and (3) to provide e-book resources with the Representational State Transfer (RESTful) address style by which other systems can identify the self-descriptive resources of an e-books (interoperability). The experimental results show that e-book featured social tagging makes readers more interested in reading e-books rather than plain e-books. Further work includes user experience (UX) improvement, and a visual DSL approach with which the authors could write books easier.