Abstract:
This paper presents a vision for the future of the e-books as part of
the growing collective intelligence. The vision entails further development of
technologies that will facilitate the creation and use of a new generation of
‘smart’ books: e-books that are evolving, highly interactive, customisable,
adaptable, intelligent, and furnished with a rich set of collaborative authoring
and reading support services. The proposed set of tools will be integrated into
an intelligent framework for collaborative book authoring and experiencing
called SmartBook. The paper also discusses the opportunities to use SmartBook
as a vehicle for building professional virtual communities of practice in the
framework of a University 2.0 organization dedicated to industry-university
cooperation.
