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Readability of scanned books in digital libraries

Published: 06 April 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Displaying scanned book pages in a web browser is difficult, due to an array of characteristics of the common user's configuration that compound to yield text that is degraded and illegibly small. For books which contain only text, this can often be solved by using OCR or manual transcription to extract and present the text alone, or by magnifying the page and presenting it in a scrolling panel. Books with rich illustrations, especially children's picture books, present a greater challenge because their enjoyment is dependent on reading the text in the context of the full page with its illustrations. We have created two novel prototypes for solving this problem by magnifying just the text, without magnifying the entire page. We present the results of a user study of these techniques. Users found our prototypes to be more effective than the dominant interface type for reading this kind of material and, in some cases, even preferable to the physical book itself.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '08: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2008
    1870 pages
    ISBN:9781605580111
    DOI:10.1145/1357054
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    Published: 06 April 2008

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    Author Tags

    1. digital libraries
    2. document navigation
    3. online document display
    4. readability
    5. scanned books
    6. web browsers

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    • (2015)Reading experiences influencing the acceptance of e-book devicesThe Electronic Library10.1108/EL-05-2012-004533:1(120-135)Online publication date: 2-Feb-2015
    • (2013)Sharing Stories “in the Wild”ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/2491500.249150620:3(1-38)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2013
    • (2011)e-book readability, comprehensibility and satisfactionProceedings of the 5th International Conference on Ubiquitous Information Management and Communication10.1145/1968613.1968660(1-7)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2011
    • (2010)Translation by iterative collaboration between monolingual usersProceedings of Graphics Interface 201010.5555/1839214.1839223(39-46)Online publication date: 31-May-2010
    • (2009)Locating text in scanned booksProceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries10.1145/1555400.1555480(395-396)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2009
    • (2009)Designing the reading experience for scanned multi-lingual picture books on mobile phonesProceedings of the 9th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries10.1145/1555400.1555450(305-308)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2009
    • (2009)Designing intergenerational mobile storytellingProceedings of the 8th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children10.1145/1551788.1551875(325-328)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2009

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