Bookplex: Enhancing a Digital Book with a Reading Recommender

Allison Woodruff, Rich Gossweiler, James Pitkow, Ed Chi, Stuart Card
BookPlex was a project done at Xerox PARC in the late 1990's-early 2000's. The idea was to scan in every page in a book so that the texture maps of all the pages was preserved, and to use the references in the book as links to other scanned in books and articles. In a sense, the book was a web based on references to references. As the user read articles/chapters in the book, it would recommend other chapters/articles to read based on content similarty. The user interface employed a 3D rendering engine. In addition to a virtual book, the user interface also provided a "ruler" at the top, where each long line was a chapter break and each short line an article. As the user brushed over the ruler, other, related articles would light up. Clicking on the ruler immediately turned the book to that page.

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