Slicing Books – The Authors' Perspective

While authors are still struggling to understand how to make best use of the potential offered by hypertext documents, computer science research proceeds to develop the next generation of the digital documents. This next generation will be based on richer semantics, more potential for automation and personalization and will pose new challenges to the authors. This paper aims to give a first impression of these challenges. It is written by the developers of a new digital document type called "Sliced Books" and reports on their experiences during the first trials. The paper will first introduce the Sliced Book technology. Then the process of slicing books is described introducing several approaches how to create a Sliced Book. The fourth chapter contains a description and analysis of the experiences in the creation of Sliced Books gained so far. The final chapter describes a new approach we are currently working on: collaborative slicing.