Electronic books and libraries of the future

Abstract

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. Abstract: Since their inception in the early 1980s electronic books have grown substantially in popularity, mainly due to their usefulness in distributing large volumes of interactive multimedia information in the form of text, pictures and sound. This paper describes the basic nature of electronic books and the philosophy underlying their use. A basic taxonomy of electronic books is then presented and a description is given of the various techniques involved intheir design and fabrication. The paper concludes with a description of some application case studies and an outline of some possible future directions of development.

Taking advantage of developments in the world information industry in planning information services and managing information

“…The products of the information industry that are likely to be of most help in this direction are perhaps those that help to reach nonspecialist audiences -especially multimedia (see Cawkell, 1992), and interactive CD-ROM, including the prospect of 'Telemedia books' which (Barker, 1992) use telecommunications to support interactive distributed distance learning activities.…”

“…2. Current promising developments, including: • Software for LAN access to CD-ROM (Ashford, 1993) • CD-ROM 'electronic books' -defined by Barker (1992) as 'information systems that are capable of providing their users with pages of reactive electronic information with which they can interact'. The vast capacity of this medium to store text, sound, static pictures, animation, programs and motion video in digital form, opens up many possibilities for archival, informational and instructional texts.…”

Intelligent approaches to performance support

“…As an alternative publication medium we have been using CD-ROM to produce a series of electronic books for use with performance support systems (Barker 1991;Barker 1992). A range of different types of publication have been produced, containing textual information, multimedia information (text, pictures and sound) and hypermedia material.…”

A model for hypermedia learning environments based on electronic books

“…Since the book metaphor appears to be most suitable for presenting electronic books (Benest and Duric, 1990;Barker, 1992;Catenazzi, and Sommaruga, 1994), some features of electronic-book models must be considered.…”

“…For this reason, it is important to consider models which have been explicitly defined for electronic books. Barker (1992) presents a set of three high-level models, including a conceptual model, a design model, and a fabrication model. The conceptual model, intended for the end-user, is composed of a series of pages of reactive and dynamic information, which support two primary functions: book control and information display.…”