Enhancing Electronic Books with Spatial Annotation and Social Navigation Support

Recent projects such as Carnegie Mellon Million Books started the process of rapid digitization of traditional books. With other industrial and academic efforts following this lead the main research challenge for both researchers and practitioner is moving from “how we can scan a million books” to “what we can do” with the newly available “million books”. This paper presents a specific approach, which can extend enriching the experience and productivity of users of digital books by giving them a combination of annotation and social navigation support. This approach was implemented evaluated in several classroom studies.