Personalising Electronic Books

This paper addresses the issue of how hyperdocuments, accessible via electronic books (E-books) which are read using the World Wide Web, can be endowed with features that enable the personalisation of the interaction process that takes place between the reader and the E-book itself. We introduce a novel, abstract approach to modelling the personalisation of hyperdocuments. This approach aims to make available to readers, features that allow them to interact with these documents in a manner much closer to that of owners of paper-based ones. This research is based upon a formal characterisation of personalisable hyperlink-based interaction. This characterisation is unique in formally modelling a rich set of user-initiated personalisation actions that allow users to come closer to satisfying their specific, often dynamic, information retrieval goals.