The Design and Implementation of a Script Language and Playback System for Interactive Electronic Book

Generally speaking, Electronic Book can be defined as a multimedia software product synthesizing multimedia such as text, voice, audio effect, image, animation and video into a scenario where interaction can be made with the readers during the acting process. An e-book is composed of 3 parts: (1)programming design; (2)script design; (3)art and audio effect design. Producing an e-book is quite labor-consuming since artists like script writer, art designer, and software programmer have to be taken into consideration. Hence, it is hard to manage the progress in developing an e-book, not to even mention supervising the software quality. For this reason, cultivating a supplementary software tool to help developing multimedia e-book is rather essential. This study has devised an e-book environment, specified an electronic book script language (EBSL)and a windows platform to implement an e-book playback system so that multimedia e-book software product can be made possible. The script language is a scene-based, parallel-executing language that can be applied to write ebook script. In addition, its functions in producing animation effect, controlling synchronization and providing interaction with users are prevailing. The system is designed under the idea of software reuse employing the object-oriented technology. To demonstrate the tangibility and capability, we have implemented a compact ebook based on the script language. Key-Words: Script Language, Interactive Electronic Book, Multimedia Presentation, E-Book, software component