UC Berkeley researchers aim to revolutionize e-books
By Yvonne Ng
UC Berkeley students in the campus’s School of Information are collaborating to enhance the efficiency of e-books in the hopes of revolutionizing the accessibility of information among researchers and the general public.
According to Master of Information Management and Systems (MIMS) student Jacob Hartnell, research on e-books will improve an inefficient system that is “app-based” instead of “Web-based.” He noted that existing e-books viewed on one device are often viewed differently or cannot be viewed at all on another device.
Hartnell and his team aim to harness a web-based platform, using the standardized Web language of HTML5, to create e-books as an alternative to private proprietary formats like Kindle and iBook....
Lisa Jervis, another MIMS student, said she is interested in how the new technology can create a collaborative authoring platform that will make it easier for authors to share and compile information, especially for multidisciplinary work....
Robert Glushko, adjunct professor in the School of Information, said that adapting the e-book for the Web instead of for specific applications would open up a wide array of new features for authors to utilize and make textbooks more interactive. Some of these features would include annotations, endnotes and highlighting....